37 Proven Ways To Create The Strongest Call To Action Copy (Part 1 of 2)

Every landing page offers a choice: read the call to action copy and act, or to leave it alone.

If a person clicks, they begin the conversion process.

If they don’t click, nothing happens. They eventually leave your page, possibly never to return.

This makes your call-to-action button one of the most important components of your landing page. Possibly the most important component. 

With that in mind, we’ve got a step-by-step guide to help you optimize every aspect of your call-to-action button: copy, color, shape, size, and location. We’ve also included some testing tips to help ensure your button gets the clicks it deserves.

After all, if users don’t follow the call, they don’t convert. So let’s learn how to make that call to action copy as strong as possible.

Optimizing Your Call To Action Copy

Let’s start with copy, because it’s one of the most crucial elements of your CTA button strategy. As ContentVerve explains:

The copy you use in your buttons has major impact on your prospects’ decisions. Button color and design are important visual cues that tell the prospect where to click.

But in the last critical moment, the copy itself is what impacts the prospect’s final decision. In other words your CTA copy answers the question, “Why should I click this button?”

1) As we just quoted above, here’s the most important part of call-to-action button copy: your users need to know why they should click the button.

 2) There are many different ways to tweak this: your users need to know what benefit they’ll receive if they click the button

3) Your users need to know what problem you’ll solve if they click the button, and so on.

But the reason to click has to be absolutely clear.

You Need a Budget makes it obvious: when you click, you’ll get to try YNAB free for 34 days.

4) Your call-to-action button also needs to include actionable language. It is a call to action, after all!

This means verbs. Try now, get your free proposal, learn more, and so on.

Of course, some verbs work better than others.

I interviewed copywriter Barry Feldman of Feldman Creative for Unbounce, and he explained that good CTA button copy uses an action verb followed by a value word:

Feldman recommends starting with an actionable word such as “get,” “learn,” “discover” or “enjoy.” And once you’ve set yourself up to speak to the value of the offer, he recommends following up your action-packed verbs with “the value the clicker shall receive.”

Button copy like “click here” or “download now” doesn’t communicate what you

stand to gain by clicking. “Enjoy a free week—on us!” on the other hand, does.

So tweak those action and value words until they are perfect.

Remember: If your call-to-action button does not effectively communicate what your users will gain, your users will not click. I mean, some of them will probably still click. But you’ll be leaving potential conversions behind.

WordPress does not meet the “effective communication” standard. What piece do you think is missing?

Here’s what I mean by “effective communication:” take a look at that WordPress landing page screenshot above.

What do you think you’ll get if you click that CTA button? It looks pretty obvious; you’ll get WordPress 4.4.1. But here’s the question: is the download free? Or are you going to be taken to a new page where they’ll ask you to input your credit card information?

If your users don’t know, they might not click. This builds up friction, and that’s not good.

5) This means you might want to add a few more words to your CTA button copy.ContentVerve has a case study showing that adding a few clarifying words can significantly increase conversion:

Changing the CTA copy from, “Get Membership” to, “Find Your Gym & Get Membership” increased click through to the payment page by 213.16%.

The words you choose really do make a difference. – image source

6) How many words are too many? CrazyEgg writes that “anything that goes over ten or fifteen words is probably too long.” You’re not composing a Tweet, after all; you’re inspiring people to take action. HubSpot, on the other hand, says “no more than five [words] is ideal.”

7) If you want to add a few extra words to your CTA button, consider adding additional copy underneath or next to the button to communicate that extra information.

LeadPages uses a small line of text under its CTA button to build trust with the user.

Copyblogger calls this type of text a “click trigger,” and cites a case study showing that click triggers can increase conversions:

Simply by adding two click triggers—one an anxiety-reducer about credit cards, the other a key benefit of the solution—FriendBuy now sees 134 signups for every 100 it used to see.

8) It’s also important to know which possessive determiner (my, your(s), his, her) to use. Should you write “Get my free proposal” or “Get your free proposal?” Here’s another case study fromContentVerve:

The only thing we did was to tweak one word in the copy – we changed the possessive determiner “You” to “My”. After running the test for three weeks, the treatment button copy, “Start my free 30 day trial” had increased the click through rate to the payment page by 90%.

I listed “incorrect possessive determiner” as one of the 49 Reasons Users Aren’t Clicking Your Call to Action, but before you start changing all of your determiners from “your” to “my”, take a look at this other post from ContentVerve:

In tests I’ve run, the second person “Your” has consistently outperformed “My”. My hypothesis is that the first person perspective confuses users and produces friction, as the rest of the communication on a website is usually in the second person form.

It gets even better.

In the post, Michael Aagaard (currently Senior Conversion Optimizer at Unbounce) tests “Create My Account” vs. “Create Account and Get Started.” The second option had a 31.03% sales boost.

9) Sometimes the best possessive determiner is no determiner at all.

What does all of this mean? You have to test your copy. No matter what you read about best practices, it all comes down to testing and optimizing until you know that you’ve found the highest-converting CTA button copy possible.

So Many Colors To Choose From…

A lot of people wonder what call-to-action button color converts best, and there has been a lot of internet ink spilled on the numerous possibilities.

The answer? It depends. 

Here’s what you need to know:

10) First, use the psychology of color to choose what you think will be the best CTA button color for your audience. Kissmetrics has a great guide to the psychology of color, so start there.

11) Keep in mind that different groups of people respond best to different colors. Kissmetrics’ data indicates that red-orange attracts impulse shoppers and teal attracts people working from a budget. What are your buyer personas searching for, and what colors attract those types of people? Do your research before you build your CTA button.

12) You also want to think about the color of your brand. As Kissmetrics writes:

Color increases brand recognition by 80%. Brand recognition directly relates to consumer confidence.

Pizza Hut’s brand colors are red and white, just like its call to action buttons.

Peach’s CTA button draws from the darkest shade in the brand’s logo.

13) Once you think you have the perfect color for your CTA button, adjust the rest of your landing page colors to make your CTA stand out. I wrote about this before when I listed 41 Hero Shot Secrets From High Converting Landing Pages:

Should your call to action match the colors in your hero shot? You don’t want your CTA to clash, but you do want it to contrast.

Unbounce’s CTA buttons are orange, the complementary color to its blue background.

14) Unbounce uses complementary colors to make its CTA button stand out. If you don’t remember your elementary school art class very well, complementary colors are opposite each other on the color wheel, and that means they provide a harmonious contrast. If you aren’t up on basic color theory, give the color wheel a look and see if it inspires you.

Of course, you can’t just choose the most psychologically appropriate color for your audience, match it to your branding colors, and then construct a complementary background. (If only it were that simple!) As with all other aspects of CTA button optimization, you have to test it.

15) We’ll look more at testing later in the post, but while I’m on the subject: don’t just test the call-to-action button color. Test the text color too. Before you try every color of the rainbow, however, I’ll give you this caveat, courtesy of Michael Aagaard at Unbounce:

I hypothesized that I could make the button stand out more and increase CTR by changing the font color of a green button from black to yellow.

What a backfire! Changing the font color actually decreased click through by 18.01%.

16) You’ll notice that every screenshot I’ve used in this piece has white CTA button text—except one. Keep that in mind as you design your own CTA.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article...