Paper to Pixel

Who is in charge of how your visitor completes the objective you set for him on your site? You? Or do you leave that to the visitor himself to figure out?

Let’s face it, every website owner has an objective they want their visitors to complete. There’s no mystery there. You for instance may want your visitors to visit your portfolio and then get in touch. Another company may want their visitors to see some testimonials and make appointment. Or make appointment straight away. There could be millions of objectives but the important part is, every website has one. No matter how big or small.

So why not help your visitors and guide them to complete those?
You can achieve that and drastically improve the site’s performance by including a call to action. Thanks to it your visitors will know what is the next step you want them to take. They will not always follow it but at least there will be an option for them to choose.

A lack of it though can create a different situation altogether. You rely on the visitor to choose their next move then. And imagine that you have 20 different options in your navigation, what are the chances that your visitor will go for the one you would like him to?

A call to action is not difficult to implement but here are few things you should think of when working on it:

1. What is your objective for the site?
Without knowing it it’s almost impossible to create a call to action. What objective do you want your users to complete on the site? Contact you? View your portfolio? Register for a promotion? Try a demo of your system? Try to imagine what would it be, it will form the main part of your call to action.

2. What are benefits for the visitor to follow your call to action
Before you create your call to action you need to make sure that there are some benefits for the user to follow it. Why would he do so otherwise?

A good idea is to place your call to action beside a list of benefits of using your company. Especially if it asks the visitor to get in touch with you.

3. Construct it offering an alternative solution
Do not push the visitor in one direction only, offer him an alternative route. Instead of saying “call us now” make your call to action to state “call us now or browse through our work”. This way your visitor should not feel forced to do one thing only, rather offered two paths to choose from.

The main thing here is to mark graphically which path is more important to you.

Remember The Milk offers an alternative but main option is made prominent.

4. Use active urgent language
A call to action should clearly tell users what you want them to do. It should include active words such as:

• Call
• Try
• Register
• Sign up
• Subscribe

and so on. The idea is to encourage the user to take the action.

Long sentences might work well too, example:

Overcome Fear of Public Speaking

Campaign Monitor uses active language for both call to action and it’s alternative.

5. Make it stand out
A call to action simply won’t work if it won’t stand out on a page. Make it prominent, make it big (well, not always but in most cases this works best). Use contrast to differentiate it from the rest of page elements. Use white space for the same purpose.

Wufoo uses strong color contrast to make call to action stand out.

6. Do not restrict it to a home page alone
A common belief is that it should reside on home page only but in reality you should have it on every page. The simplest reason for that is that you do not know which page the user has landed on when they entered your site. He may have simply googled a specific term and landed on one of the inner pages of your site.

Basecamp features this call to action at the bottom of every page

7. Test, test, test
Last but not least, you should always test your call to action before launching it on your site. Not only test whether all links work but even most importantly test whether it’s message is clear, it’s position right and will your potential visitors understand and act on it.