Your digital marketing strategy has one ultimate particular goal: to invite your potential customers to enter your sales funnel. To do this, you call them to take a specific action. A Call to Action (CTA) serves as your direct invitation to them. Of course, it does not say ‘yoohoo, come buy our stuff!’ The journey from web visitor to paying customer is more complicated. And you want a CTA for each step of that journey. A CTA can be in an email or on your website.
We use CTAs offline as well, but we don’t always think of them as CTAs. When someone offers you those free samples of tasty treats in the grocery store, that’s a CTA. When the clerk in the shoe store asks if you’d like to see those in your size, that’s also a CTA. Notice that both of those examples involve offering something, not asking for someone to buy something.
The key to an effective and successful call to action is to offer your visitor something rather than ask them to do something. Remember, you are just inviting them to take one step further into your sales funnel. You are building a relationship. This is about someone getting to know your brand and your product or service. A hard sell approach can backfire.
You can offer your web visitors a downloadable ebook, a spot at a webinar or some similar opportunity for them to learn more about whatever problem your brand solves. Whatever you offer must give your visitor something of value. Remember, first they want to learn about how to solve their problem, and then they want to learn if your brand is the right choice for them.
So your CTA offer should be something that educates them about the issue at hand. A hotel, for example, might offer an ebook on wedding planning. A gym might offer a webinar on exercises to help people who have been sedentary gently start to get more fit.
Your online call to action should also be visually compelling. Make it very clear and simple. Let your visitor know exactly what to expect when they click that CTA and make the CTA button very obvious. That click should take them to a dedicated landing page where they will provide some basic contact details so you can provide whatever you’ve offered. And that should be the beginning of their journey through the sales funnel from visitor to customer.
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By Irene Hislop
By Jeff Sheridan