Digital Marketing is the forefront of the modern business world. Knowledge of companies and consumer experiences all come together on the internet to surf through the faces and representations of businesses, both large and small. So what can you do to create an effective experience on your website to ensure return visits and generate business?
Engagement is key.
Getting the compliance and interaction with your website is the basic guidelines to taking an online presence and making it worth your time and money.
Here are my basic tips that lead the website user to your call to action:
1. Positioning and Timing
There is a small window of opportunity for a user to become fully engaged in your site from the second it loads and they begin reading and processing. This is why placement of your ads and calls to action, or CTAs, is the key. Having a request near a similar form of content is less likely to confuse the visitor. For example, don’t have a jump to one service you offer in the middle of talking about a completely different service. Keeping the tunnel of conversion from user to consumer is a very narrow and tight knit one, meaning that simple hiccups and confusion as to what a user should do and where their clicks will take them can commonly result in shying away from your website.
See these important tips on how to monetize a website.
Another fact of the matter is that time is money, so urgency is key. Your calls to action cannot be passive with ‘suggestion’. The user should feel the NEED to click as soon as possible and follow the route to where it is they must go. If they want information, they MUST click here. Creating offers and information to be ‘limited’ or ‘for a short time only’ will imply that the action must be made now so as to not lose out on opportunity. The biggest friend of the urgency required to make effective CTAs is the word ‘NOW’.
2. Best of the Benefits
Having traffic to your website is great, and engagement is even better. However, the less incentive there is to interact with your site and follow the path to consumerism then the less business you will see. That is why it is important to find the two most valuable assets to the campaign you’re running or action you’re requesting, ones that the customer will find intriguing or relieving, and hinge on those to boost your CTA effectiveness.
Two things to consider when developing these CTA benefits is your users budget and their availability. A big selling point is cheap, and if you can advertise the word “Free” then you will definitely get some eyes (and clicks) your way. Also find a way to work in a time-frame, using terms like “… takes just 2 minutes”. Users are more likely to turn into consumers when they feel like they are definitely gaining more than they are losing. Whether it’s a purchase or a membership, knowing what benefits will come from their experience is one of the best calls to action a business website can make.
3. Request, Revisit, and Respond
Return users and consumers are what keep a business running. Your web page has the opportunity to be the hub of not just your company’s voice, but theirs as well. This is why setting up your web page with a request for users to leave comments and feedback can definitely be a positive CTA for your business. Forums for topic discussion, posts about consumer feedback, and even a comment and complaint section, can all be great call to action qualities that set your web page apart from those who just retain the power to post. Be sure to promote tabs and clickable icons that ask to “hear from you!”. You can even take this opportunity to link your twitter or facebook page so that it is even easier for a user to reach out and feel appreciated via their voice. When a user feels comfortable complying with a request like this, they will feel more comfortable to comply with other actions on your site, thus turning them into leads and eventually consumers.
4. Don’t Let Your Web Design Hamper Your CTA
Some people try creating a business using a free WordPress theme, which can sometimes work if you customize the hell out it, but waste loads of time just getting it right. Others use premium WordPress themes which have been designed with conversions in mind, but you would never know the effectiveness until actually testing the site’s usability.
Zane Schwarzlose is a search engine specialist at Fahrenheit Marketing, an Austin Web design firm, who thinks that measuring the effectiveness of CTAs is critical to determining a web site’s usability. This is probably a rare trait, a webdesign company who actually cares about your call to action results. Anyway what I really want to say is that web design does matter if you want to lead your website users to your call to action, as too often it get’s lost amongst a sea of overly ambitious designing.