What Are Calls to Action (CTAs) and Why You Need Them Everywhere on Your Website

First, Connect Emotionally with Your Audience

One of the phrases I repeat over and over again when working with clients is, “you have to connect emotionally with your audience.” Why is this so important? It’s critical because people buy from those they know, like and trust. Think about a time when you landed on someone’s website, read through the first few paragraphs, and thought to yourself, I have a total friend crush on this person. I’m going to bet that made you want to work with them even more.

The more you can connect with your audience before they’ve even reached out to you, the easier it’s going to be to have them book your services. Take three wedding planners for instance. Maybe one loves dogs and has them all over her website in the wedding photos (this would totally sell me by the way), one talks about all about rainbows and how every wedding should be multi-colored, and the third is obsessed with flowers and thinks they’re the most important part of a wedding day. Chances are, one of these characteristics is going to speak to (or totally turn you off) and that’s okay. It saves everyone time to have a website that speaks directly to someone a.k.a. niches down (we’ll get to that in a whole other blog post).

On the flip side, think of three wedding planners who all talk about getting into wedding planning because they love love and want to make your day special. Sure, that’s a great start, but now all you have to compare them on is pricing and packages. So if they’re pretty equal, you’re obviously going to go with the least expensive.

Then, Help Make It Easy for Your Audience to Connect with You

What does connecting emotionally with your audience have to do with calls to action? Glad you asked! Once you’re connecting with people emotionally and drawing them in with your hilarious jokes and undeniable charm, you want to make it as easy as possible for them to connect with you. There’s nothing worse than being on someone’s website and wanting to email them or call them and having no clue where to turn. Or reading someone’s about page and getting to the very bottom of a long scrolling page only to have to scroll all the way back to the top to reach out. So wherever you can on your website, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to reach out to you.

Let’s start at the beginning…

What Is a Call to Action?

A call to action or CTA is a directive or request you’re making of a visitor to your site. So for example, if you’re a wedding planner it might be “book a consultation to see if your wedding date is available” or if you’re a fitness instructor it might be “book a private training session.” The call to action is a word or phrase that tells your audience exactly what action you’d like them to take on your website.

Of course, it can be super simple, “book now” or “contact me,” but you can also get really creative and specific so it’s tailored to the tone of your website and business. The more direct you can be, the easier it will be for people to know what you want them to do.

Where Should My Calls to Action Lead?

It’s best to have one or two main goals for your entire site. Think through all your pages and decide on what action you’d like every visitor to take. Think through what would be your ultimate end-goal and you’d jump for joy if every visitor to your website took this particular action.

For example, if you’re a service-based business, you may want someone to book a free consultation to learn more about your services. If this is the case, you might lead people to a calendar link or contact page. If you have an online store then most of your calls to action should lead people to different products or to overall store link. If you’re a fitness instructor you might want people to book classes directly on your website so you might lead them to a class schedule. Whatever your primary goal is should take up most of your CTAs.

If you have a secondary goal, like growing your newsletter subscribers for example, you can have a few of your CTAs lead to this, but most of them should lead to your primary goal. If there’s a way to dedicate a section on your home page or in your footer to this secondary goal, that’s a better way to go so that way the rest of your CTAs can lead people to your primary goal.

How Many Calls to Action Should I Have?

Calls to action on a website usually are in the form of a button. Each of these call to action buttons can use different language, but 90% of them should point toward your main goal. Let’s go back to the service-based business example. If your goal is to have people book a free consultation with you on your contact page, each button can have different wording and still all lead to the contact page. So for example, you could have “book a free consultation,” “contact me,” “reach out now,” “learn more about my services,” and “reserve your spot in my calendar.”

Today with at least half of people visiting your site from a mobile device, you what to ensure at least every other section of every page has a call to action at the end. Remember, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to accomplish your main goal. If someone’s on a tiny mobile device, you don’t want to risk losing them because they have to scroll all the way back up to your main navigation.

Start thinking about the one action you want your audience to take, get creative with different ways to phrase your ask and start converting website visitors to clients!