What’s a CTA and how should you use them?

A Call to Action (CTA) is essential to any business as they are prompts for users, your audience and or customers to take the desired action that you specify.

A basic CTA tends to be a button on your website or marketing that helps drive a simple conversion such as ‘get in touch’, ‘subscribe here’. There are lots of different types of CTA, and where you locate them can depend on the type you use. For example an important CTA such as ‘get in touch’ you want to be easy to find and prominent on your website at all times, therefore locating this in your header or footer. 

You also want to ensure that the language you use for your CTAs is correct for your audience. Often using the word ‘now’ can tend to come across as commanding, intense and slightly desperate (especially when it’s all capitalised). Here are some great examples that you can be inspired by. 

Here are some key CTAs your website should have to ensure you’re getting the results you want.

• Form submissions

Simple forms are easy CTAs that allow you to connect with your audience. You can use forms for such things as newsletter sign-ups, contact pages and lead magnets. Keep the forms short and sweet, only obtaining the information you actually need, and trying not to ask too much from your website users is more likely to guarantee the success of your forms converting.

• Lead Magnet 

A lead magnet is anything you offer to your audience in order to entice them to give you their contact information. Great for B2B’s, you can use this type of CTA on landing pages that use form submissions (so remember the steps above). 

Also, this type of CTA is more likely to convert if you offer your audience something highly valuable to them, think free quotes/consultations and industry reports, and if you’re still stuck here are 12 ideas.

• Social sharing

Social media is a great (free) tool that can enable you to increase the reach of your audience. Therefore by having social sharing CTAs on your website you enable your site users to share your content for you, which can help bring more people to your website. 

This type of CTA is really useful on blog content, as users can quickly share links to your interesting content. Or perhaps after a user has signed up to an event asking them to share on their social channels that they’ve just ‘signed up’ or that they’re attending something, can also help drum up more interest. 

• Learn more 

Enable your audience and customers to find out more about your business, its products and services by using learn more buttons. By sharing snippets of your content you can then use ‘learn more’ buttons to keep your audience on your website and engaged by providing them with more information that they might not have necessarily originally been looking for.

B2B businesses can use this type of CTA to link from their homepages to more specific and detailed service pages.

• Search

A persistent CTA you often find in the headers of websites as they grab the attention of the audience and enable them to make their experience easier and more enjoyable as they can quickly search for whatever it is they’re looking for. 

A search CTA is great for when you have lots of content and want to ensure your website is more likely to convert by giving your audience exactly what they want.

• Purchase 

If you’re an e-commerce business then you’ll want your users to buy directly from your website and a purchase CTA is fundamental to your business. Ensure that your website is driving sales by making it easy for your customers to make the purchase, use quick buttons such as ‘add to basket’ and a prominent ‘checkout’ is key. 

*As Embryo doesn’t have any purchase CTAs the following example is from Dancing Leopard that shows the user a clear button to ‘Add to cart’ then has the customer’s bag displayed as a pop-up on the right allowing them to quickly checkout. 

It’s important to note that there isn’t one size that fits all with CTAs and by having too many you’re more likely to confuse your audience than to get them to convert. Sometimes it’s best to use the K.I.S.S principles (Keep It Simple Stupid).