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How to Get Better Results With Your Call-to-Action Buttons

By   Date  January 31, 2014

To have good conversion rates you need three things: traffic, something good to offer, and powerful call-to-action buttons. The latter are often overlooked – businesses and organizations seldom pay much attention to them. But if they are not enticing they can discourage an otherwise interested customer, and the result will be a lost sale. Here’s how you can improve your call-to-action buttons.

Make Them Big

For call-to-action buttons to stand out they need to be visible. The easier way to make them visible is to make them big. Notice how on many e-commerce sites the Buy / Add to Cart buttons are 50% or bigger than newsletter subscription / social media buttons?

Correlate the size of the buttons on your site to their importance, to offer people a visual cue and encourage them to click or touch the important buttons. Don’t overdo it though – the buttons must fit your web design style and blend in with it. You don’t want them to look out of place, like Godzilla in Lilliput.

Make Them Bright

People are more likely to notice and click red, orange, yellow, and pink buttons. But what you must also consider is the background color, as well as the other tones used by your site. Humans get excited when they see bright colors set against a soft or dark background – much like bees, which are likely to alight on the flower that has the greatest contrast with the background.

This is not to say your buy, follow, or subscribe buttons should all be red – after all, Amazon buttons are yellow and they get pressed a lot – only that the contrast matters, hence the reason many business sites have either white or black backgrounds and bright call-to-action buttons.

Enhance Them With Powerful Calls-to-Action

It would be perverse to say that it’s wrong to use simple labels like Subscribe or Buy Now for your call- to-action buttons. However, since web users are already used to these buttons, they have developed a tolerance to them, and their eyes are more likely to glide past them.

Longer, more creative calls to action can arrest the eye and make the visitor read the text right away. The style of your site, its overall look and feel, its tone, and of course the screen space available must all be taken into account when deciding whether to use longer, creative calls to action or simple plain ones.

Related Post: When it comes to your customers, popularity matters. Here’s how to win the game.

Make Them Stand Out

Size, color / contrast with the background, and label are only three factors that can make your buttons stand out. Placement is also important. For example, a call-to-action button placed after a series of powerful facts or statements is far more compelling than one just tossed at the bottom of the page.

Also crucial is that they look like clickable buttons so that people will know what they are – this is achieved by painting them bright, adding whitespace around them, enhancing them with a 3D effect, and providing feedback on hover (like change of color or enlargement). HubSpot has more to say on this.

Don’t Clutter Them

Visitors to your site are more likely to make a choice if they have fewer options to choose from. There’s no consensus on the maximum number of buttons you should have on your page, but 3 seems a sensible number when they refer to different versions of the same service, e.g. different plans / packages like Basic, Standard, or Premium. Keep in mind though that the same Buy Now or Add to Cart button can repeat itself many times in a product gallery listing items in the same category.

The non-clutter approach should apply to your social media linking / sharing / following buttons as well. Keep only the essentials, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and those on which you have a profile – don’t just add all buttons available (there are scores), or you’ll veritably discombobulate people.

Armed with these tactics, you can create a call-to-action that is inviting and effective, building better conversion rates for your startup, nonprofit, or small business!

Image Credit: [Flickr/Estimmel]

With 2,010 comments | Categories: Featured , Internet Marketing , Social Good Marketing , Social Media

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