Creating A Compelling Call to Action

Updated March 4, 2025

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Pique Interest for Clicks

Every page on your website, or post on your blog, should have a call to action. Ideally, it’s a compelling invitation to do something that piques your visitor’s interests and feeds your business’ sales funnel. It could be signing up for a newsletter, downloading a whitepaper or simply visiting another page. If you want to improve the number of clicks your CTAs get, it’s important to keep them fresh. So let’s look at 5 ways to improve your call to actions and get more action on your website.

5 Ways To Create a Compelling Call to Action

• Be honest – Getting a click on a CTA is good, as it will allow you to record some information about your lead. But don’t do it at the expense of a good relationship. Be honest about what will happen if someone clicks. Will they have more forms to fill in? Will they have to wait for an email? Make sure they know what’s coming next. This is especially important given legislation like the Can-Spam laws, and the recent GDPR legislation from Europe. We have seen many mistakes made trying to ‘get a conversion.’ If it’s confusing, you’ll need to untangle why the visitor didn’t turn into a prospect or customer. Never resort to gimmicks or trickery in order to gain contact information. More often than not, they won’t convert and they leave with a bad impression. It’s just not worth the hit on your brand’s reputation.
• Simplify the signup process – If your CTA requires customers providing their information, then make the process as painless as possible. Could they log in with Facebook? Do you really need their zip code? Do you have to know if they’re a Libra? Try and streamline any contact forms and you’ll see more conversions. KISS – Keep it simple (for) stupid (visitors).
• Make it urgent – Make your leads feel like they should click NOW not later. Getting someone to take an action is key. To add a time element to urge them to hit your “submit” button. However, related to the point above, only do this when it fits the situation. You don’t want to be like the furniture store that has a ‘Liquidation Sale!’ every holiday weekend…
• Use buttons – If you have the option of choosing a button or a hyperlink, always choose the button. Very simply, the button stands out more, especially if it uses a complementary color to your website’s design. When you’re skimming a web page it’s easy to miss a hyperlink, but a lot more difficult to gloss over a button. Your CTA should stand out and be painfully obvious that this is the next step the visitor should take.
• A&B test (And never stop) – A/B testing is integral to creating good calls to action. It’s hard to get it right first time, so keep on trying new things. Test different color buttons, in different locations, with different text. Then, once you’ve hit something that works, leave it for a while and start testing again. Keep things fresh and see how your readers react and interact. You might try heatmap software to record visitor behavior; it will provide insight as to what hot’s and not on a page.

Do you have any more tips on how to optimize your call to action? Anything we missed? We’d love to hear what you have to say on how to create the best calls to action!