How to turn visitors into customers: The importance of calls to action

Do you have a great website that’s simply not creating as many conversions as you initially hoped? The error may be in the simple details.

Make sure you’re providing clear and obvious calls to action so that your visitors know what to do. Here are seven ways to get visitors to engage with your website.

1. Remember the basics: It may sound simple, but consider whether all of the important information is easily accessible. Is your phone number above the fold (top half of your website, without needing to scroll down the page)? Can visitors enquire via email if they prefer? Is there an FAQ's (Frequently Asked Questions) to answer their questions, so they are more likelier to take action?
2. Prioritise placement: What do you want your visitors to do when they land on your website? It might be joining your email list, asking for a quote or sharing your content. Make sure the required action is clear and obvious to visitors in the form of links and buttons, both in the text and on the page. If you have more than one call to action on each page, ensure the level of importance is clear to visitors. 
3. Offer alternatives: Visitors might not want to pick up the phone or come into your business to talk to you, so give them another option to find out more information such as ‘request a quote’, ‘chat online’ or ‘enquire now’.
4. Put your calls to action in your content text as well. Strategically placed in the middle, or clearly at the end to guide them in what the next step is. 
5. Make them stand out, with boldness, or different colours, or a button within a different shape eg. Oval if everything else in the design is square/straight.
6. Quick and easy: Potential customers don’t have time to waste, so make your navigation clean and clear. Stick to simple language to label links, buttons and pages. Consider the wants and needs of your customers and write the content from their perspective. Your website should be easy to use – that is the most important feature of a navigable site.
7. A/B Test: An excellent way to evaluate your website is to test different versions against one another. Send half of your traffic to version A, while the other half to version B. Which one performs better in terms of traffic, lead captures, clickthroughs and sign-ups?

Optimising your website is an ongoing process. What’s good for business now may be different in two years’ time. Business owners should be constantly evaluating their website’s success, but enhancing a website doesn’t always mean massive changes. Sometimes a change in placement, call to action or navigation can be the difference between good and great.