Include Calls To Action In Your Text

When you’re writing text for your website, keep in mind that you’re guiding your visitor through the site, and towards a specific end action that you’d like them to take – whether that’s contacting you, signing up for a newsletter, learning more, or buying something. To make sure that the visitor does that, it’s important to tell them what you’d like them to do at the end of each page. Otherwise, they’ll just wander aimlessly through your site, and they may or may not take action.

These suggestions are called “Calls to Action”, and they increase the effectiveness of your website by telling people what you’d like them to do. They usually look a bit like this:

• Click here to learn more
  
• Buy this product now
  
• Contact me to learn more about this service
  
• Subscribe to my newsletter to get the free report
  
• Sign up for the teleclass today
  
• Listen to this audio recording to hear how
  
• Watch this video for more information
  
• Visit my article library to find out more
  

If you read carefully, you’ll see that there are actually a couple of different kinds of calls to action: plain calls to action that tell the user what to do and how to do it (Buy this product now) and benefit-oriented calls to action that tell the user what to do, how to do it and why they should (Subscribe to my newsletter to get the free report). Benefit-oriented calls to action are usually a bit more difficult to write, but they’re more effective because people understand what they’ll get by doing the action.

And, the more specific you can make your call to action, the better. Some calls to action – like a newsletter subscription offer – are often made even more effective by placing the call to action inside a graphical call-out box with some additional text. Adding images or photos can make your call to action more effective as well. Here’s an example:

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Comments

[Maree Harris]

This is very helpful summary for me as I sharpen up my website copy. It's simple yet often forgotten as we go about building our website content. Of course, one of our biggest challenges is conversion rates and hopefully this will help. I have copied this to use while I am re-creating my website content and also bookmarked your site, Thank you.