Top 10 Call to Action Examples
The call-to-action (CTA) is a basic element of all marketing efforts because that’s what gets the attention of your audience to take action. There are multiple examples of effective calls-to-action as well as ineffective ones on the internet. But, once you imbibe the good elements, it’s easy to eliminate the odd parts that won’t work at all.
Have you ever wondered why you seem to subscribe to few businesses over others, one thing for sure is that you are interested in the subject but the most important part is, these businesses were successful in grabbing your attention and encashing your interest. They do it very well by tweaking different elements of CTA, color, copy, size, shape, placement. The aim of an ideal call-to-action is to prompt an immediate action from the reader.
What factors fulfill the ‘effectiveness’ of a CTA?
• Offer something valuable to the reader – Free trial of your product
• Instruct the reader on what needs to be done
• Incorporate strong visuals
• Hint for an immediate action
• Make them more visible
• Use unique text copy other than traditional ones
• Should be connected with your goals
Let’s look at 10 call-to-action examples and take some ideas out of them:
1. Keep the CTA simple and to-the-point – Backcountry
Backcountry, an eCommerce site for adventure and specialty outdoor equipment, presents a warm welcome to the new website visitors with this pop-up, that offers a 10% off on their entire first order. A CTA button below with ‘Apply to Cart’ immediately pushes the customers to their carts with a discounted price. That’s pretty encouraging to new visitors. The CTA is right in front of visitors and freezes the background of the web page. Backcountry’s email subscription CTA does not use any text copy but just an image of an email. So, a reader understands what the CTA is all about even before reading the message ‘Stay in the Know. Sign Up for Backcountry news, sales and deals’.
2. Get personal with your customers – Agile CRM
When I come across ‘Click this’, I wouldn’t be as persuaded to click as I would when I see ‘Lizia, click this’. Humans are bound to take actions when they see their name. This is where personalization factor adds to the increase in conversions. Agile CRM, an all-in-one CRM solutions for small businesses, uses personalization in their call-to-action message. ‘Mark, You’ve got a $5 discount’ lets Mark believe that he is a premium customer to the company. This builds up the customer’s trust towards the company. And, ‘Coupon valid till 24 hrs only’ speeds up Mark to take the action.
3. Use the CTA as clickbait – ClassPass
The primary purpose of the CTA is that it should persuade viewers to click on it, so use your CTA as a clickbait just like how ClassPass does. ClassPass is a monthly fitness membership that allows customers to visit the best fitness studio. The CTA does two things – Puts an interesting offer to the visitors (a positive message) and constricts the time period for the offer (not-so-positive message). ClassPass interesting turns the eyes towards the positive message first because of the bigger font size, which convinces people to click ‘Yes, let’s do this!’. Even if customers look at ‘for a limited time only’, it only rushes them to avail the offer because they are already convinced by now.
4. Tell customers why they should click – Emailmonday
The call-to-action should tell customers as to why they should click on it. As simple as that. If there is nothing beneficial to the customers, they would not be excited to go an click the button. What I like about Emailmonday, an independent email marketing consultant, is the shape of the form. Unlike most forms which are either rectangular or square shaped, this form is spherical with the face of the business owner. The copy messages readers the true value of subscription – ‘Subscribe, because the really good email marketing tips are in the newsletter’. ‘You can Unsubscribe anytime, but you won’t even want to’ – that’s the faith you have in yourself.
5. Increase the intriguing factor – SkullCandy
SkullCandy, a leader in consumer electronics, uses an interesting text copy ‘Get the lowdown’ for delivering insider news, event info and deals information. Also, ‘Join’ sounds better than ‘Subscribe’. What’s more interesting on SkullCandy’s website is the ‘Get $10’ CTA at the left bottom, which leads to the below-landing page. It allows new visitors to refer their friends and earn $10, $30, $50 in return.
A bold ‘Get $10’ without any message is intriguing for the visitors to click it. It grabs the attention of the reader because the CTA is highlighted along with the pop-up, dimming out the background.
6. Link your goal to the CTA – Vice
The trend with most of businesses today is they just add their social media buttons at the bottom of the page, which are seldom seen by the readers. But if your goal is to increase the audience on your social media platform, how do you do that? You can turn your heads to Vice. Vice, a leading global youth media company, puts a strong visual and text copy to invite readers to like their Facebook page. The image of puppy loving its father depicts the kind of love Vice has for their audience, and since the majority audience is youth, they connect well with animals. ‘Like us like we like you’ and ‘Like Vice’ has four likes already echoing among readers to ‘like’ their Facebook page, which is their priority at the moment.
7. CTA at right in the center – Prezi
Prezi, a SaaS company which offers cloud-based presentation platform to its customers, puts the CTA ‘Try Prezi Next free’ right in front of your eyeballs which works as an awesome lead magnet. The moment you enter the website, that’s what you see at first look. When you use more than one CTA, it’s good to connect them to the same landing page, so that it impacts on conversion and also does not confuse customers. Here, ‘Get Started’ and ‘Try Prezi Next free’ both land on their pricing web page, which shows comparisons of their different plans.
8. Match up the colors – Magento
Most marketers don’t pay close attention to the choice of colors they use in their calls-to-action, not anymore. Some say green works better than red and vice-versa. Whatever color you use, they should not be too bright but pleasant to the eyes. Magento, a provider of cloud commerce innovation, uses an orange color which matches with their logo. The color scrolls the eyeballs to ‘Sign up for webinar’, ‘Magento’ and ‘see a demo’ which exactly is their aim – to seek attention. Both CTAs are easy to find because of their color and placement. The actions are linked to their goals of – increasing the audience to the webinar and reach their demo target for the month.
9. Show more love – Popsugar
Popsugar is a global media and publishing company which creates content across entertainment, fashion, beauty, fitness, parenting and more, for women. Their call-to-action is full of hearts which relates more to its women audience. And of course, the text copy of this slide-in pop up ‘Get your daily beauty fix’ is what we women need, so send more of that 🙂
10. Tell what your business does – Instacart
When I look at some websites, I don’t understand what their business is all about until I turn few web pages. That involves time and not many visitors would be interested to look up for information, so there you are letting go of potential customers. Instead, try what Instacart does. Instacart, an online grocery delivery business, tells what it does in their CTA in exactly seven words ‘Get your groceries delivered from local stores’. The placement of the CTA is also at the center with a free delivery option for first orders. It has this function of enabling and disabling high contrast, for good visibility.
All the above-mentioned businesses follow the best practices and test and test and test their calls-to-action to generate more revenue. Try and use these ideas in designing your next call-to-action and measure the results. Don’t forget to come back and tell us how it went.