Generating leads or sales from your website? The first thing you need is an effective Call To Action (CTA).
Formulating a magic bullet CTA can be a challenge, especially when you have so many valuable features. The sales challenge, as always, is to turn features into benefits. Thanks to conversion expert Joanna Wiebe, here are some tricks to improve your success.
If you have a truly unique value proposition, say so. If the average viewer doesn’t know who you are, so say your name in the headline. If you can solve a problem, make the promise to solve it. And if there is a pain that you can eliminate or an objection that you can answer, be specific with proof. There’s nothing better than hearing your customers talk about pains, needs and expectations. They know why they buy, often better than you.
- Be specific…aim your message at those most likely to buy now
- Be succinct
- Focus on the ONE thing prospects want
- Confirm the expectation of your visitor
Joanna offers five cookbook formulas to cover almost all marketing situations.
1. All gain—When your prospects have a clear pain that you can relieve
Get The(fresh but relevant adjective) Power Of(what your product does) Without(pain)”
The Astonishing Power of Eye Tracking Technology…Without the High Costs
2. Promise-based SEO—A highly desirable outcome with an SEO boost
(Adjective) & (Adjective) (what you are/SEO keyword phrase) That Will (desirable promise of results)
Clean & Modern iPhone App Design Templates That Will Set You Apart In The App Store
3. Explicit promise— When you customers will believe a promise from you
We Promise: (highly desirable results)
We Promise Just One Thing: Get More Clients from Social Media
4. Comparison — When your customers are using or considering a competitor
(Known competitor) (does this undesirable thing), And (your brand name) (does this highly desirable or impressive thing)
Google Analytics Tells You What Happened, KISSMetrics Tells You Who Did It
5. The value prop — Something that’s both unique and highly desirable
The Only (SEO keyword phrase) Made Exclusively To (highly desirable outcome or benefit)
The Only Web Copywriting Guides Made Exclusively To Improve Your Sales
Incidentally, like most direct-marketing copywriters, she recommends bold centered headline, capitalizing each word, avoiding periods, and breaking up long headlines with ellipses or em-dashes.
Once you have written a test set of headlines, it’s time to test.
There are a variety of tools out there for conducting and monitoring A/B tests. One of the best tools is Google’s free Content Experiments, a part of Google Analytics in the Content section.
- Test Early and Test Often. You should run tests as early as possible when considering a new promotional technique or when launching a new product. You want your site optimized as soon as possible, so you aren’t losing sales. And then keep testing.
- Test Only A Few Elements. Limit the variables or you won’t know what worked. Start with headlines — they do the most work and create the strongest effects.
- Run Tests on New Visitors Only. Don’t use your existing customers as guinea pigs for changes to your website. Their preconceptions can skew your results and cause inaccuracies.
- Listen to the Results. Resist the temptation to listen to your instincts if the empirical data is telling you different. You’re running controlled tests for reason. If in doubt, re-test.
- Allow the Test to Run for Sufficient Time. Stopping the test early just means there’s more room for error. The same can be said for letting it run too long. Try for a time period of a few days to a couple of weeks, depending on your site traffic (you want a minimum of a few hundred test results before drawing any conclusions, and preferably a few thousand).
Listen to your customers, formulate a short, sweet and resonant set of calls to action and test, test, test.
