How to Write a Killer Call to Action? (BONUS: Steal these CTAs)

Did you know that a persuasive and well-written Call to Action (CTA) is the gateway to building successful high-converting email marketing campaigns?

Without CTA visitors don’t know what direction to follow in your marketing funnel, and that’s why it should always provokes users towards certain action.

Today you get your hands on the exact step-by-step process of how to create killer CTAs. So if you have an (e-commerce and/or online) business and you struggle with one of the following issues:

• Low conversion rate Landing/Sales Pages
• Low clicks in your email marketing
• Creating killer CTAs that convert

Then buckle up, because I have some juicy stuff for you today.

Rather than the basic ‘Click Here’ and ‘Read More’, you discover the formula to maximize the potential of your future CTAs for your business.?

What is a call to action?

A call to action is specifically designed to tell the viewer to take a specific action. This prompt is typically written as a command or action phrase, such as the usual ‘Sign Up’ or ‘Buy Now’ and it typically takes the form of a button or hyperlink (more about this difference later).

This is what Wikipedia has to say about the definition of Call to Action:

“Call to action (CTA) is a marketing term for any design to prompt an immediate response or encourage an immediate sale.” Wikipedia

But what makes a call to action so incredibly important to any webpage? Well, I’ve already told you that call to action links and buttons act as signposts telling users what they need to do next.?

Without clear CTAs, users may struggle to see the route to buying a product or signing up for a service. But there is more so get ready to get your hands on some juicy stuff…

4 reasons why CTAs are so *** important?

Imagine having the website working as your virtual store to display your business and the people who surf the internet are the walk-in potential clients. Do you want to direct them to the items they should purchase and close the deal as soon as possible??

If the answer is yes, it means that you will need a good Call to action.

1. Be the Guide your Visitors want you to be

With a clear call to action, you reduce the risk of your audience clicking away from your page due to confusion or feeling overwhelmed.

Eliminates decision fatigue: Simple directive statements tell your clients where to go and what to do next, simplifying the user journey.

CTAs will work perfectly as a clear map to tell your prospective client where to look next and what to do after that helps eliminate confusion and destroy decision fatigue.?

Moreover, it helps establish connections between their needs and our availability. Calls to action aren’t just important for business owners – customers want and expect them as well.

2. Expand your customer base and build an empire

Did you know that someone asking to follow you is a form of call to action? By including call to action buttons like “Follow me on Twitter” or as impactful as “Buy Now” serves as leverage for your online business. From this, your audience or database of potential clients will increase.

3. Boost Conversion Rates

Believe it or not, creating a Call to Action improves your conversion rates by tapping into your audience’s curiosity and incentives to expand the number of click-through rates for your website.?

The easier it is for people to follow your CTA, the more leads, customers, and prospects you get. Because a call to action guides your visitors to the easiest route to the next step, eliminating the problem they want to solve.

In case you like numbers, here are 2 call to action statistics that show its huge potential:

• Including one clear CTA in your emails boosts clicks by 371% and sales by 1617%
• The average CTR for all CTAs across every industry turned out to be 4.23%. That’s better than the CTR for Google ads.?

4. Enhance users’ experience

To put it simply, user experience (UX) is all about the overall experience when someone uses your product or website. Well-written call to actions on a website are signs to the users that your website is easy to navigate, well-designed, and trustworthy.

User Experience: “the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.” Oxford Languages

Done correctly, it decreases frustration and increases usability followed by an increase in consumer loyalty. That’s why it aims to provide positive experiences that keep users loyal to the product or brand.?

Additionally, a meaningful user experience allows you to define customer journeys on your website that are most conducive to business success.

How to Use a Call to Action?

A call to action is a marketing tool that drives web traffic to a company’s site. A CTA is meant to:?

1. Build up a customer base: By directing people to their website, companies build brand awareness and get more people to learn about their company and products. For example, traffic that's guided from social media messaging to the website through a compelling CTA.
2. Make a sale: Remember the ‘Buy Now’ button? A CTA is a critical part of the sales funnel. While your body copy is creating awareness and interest in your brand and products, you are actually guiding your audience step by step to a sale. Your Call to Action is the trigger to the sale – the more effective your CTA is, the higher the conversion rates and the number of visitors that take action
3. Lead Generation: Companies use CTAs to identify their target audience and generate leads—people who have a general interest in what a company is offering and are likely to become future customers. A company will create an email list from this group to continue to market to them directly.?
4. Navigation through your website: A CTA makes it easy for someone to get to your website. With the click of a link, a customer can be at your virtual doorstep, where they can easily make a purchase. Between you and me, there is no worse feeling than being lost.

7 Tips on How to Write a Killer Call To Action

Writing a call to action can be as simple as writing ‘buy now’. But in order to write a killer call to action that converts, you must arm yourself with a toolkit that gives you access to unlimited power.

So if you want to get access to this superpower? Use the following 7 tips on how to create a killer call to action.

P.S. At the end of this post I’ve added a bonus, but there is a catch. In order to get the most out of the bonus, make sure you read the tips first.

1. Personalization

If you manage to capture the attention of your audience, then you have a limited time to utilize this opportunity. That’s why you have only one intensely short moment to convert this attention into a specific action.?

A Personalized call to action is the perfect tool for this occasion. In fact, personalized CTAs drive emotions make emails look natural perform 202% better than non-personalized CTAs.?

Unlike basic CTAs, personalized CTAs are tailored as per individual persona/ behavior. Personalization is one of the quickest ways to trigger emotions, and emotions ultimately drive people to make purchases. Outbound sales emails will look more attractive and natural once you take care of personalization.?

Feel free to compare the examples below:

2. Use Powerwords to evoke emotions

What if I told you that power words are like a “cheat code” for boosting conversion rates? If you want to be able to elicit a strong response from your audience as a result of their enthusiasm. Then you should use power words in your CTA right now!

Let’s work with a simple example, instead of the dry and boring ‘buy now’, use ‘Skyrocket Your X With 10% Off’. In this case, skyrocket is an example of a power word that evokes emotion.

If you only sprinkle in a single one into your CTA you will be able to boost your conversion rate. And on the other hand, you transform your dry and lifeless call to action into a masterpiece that evokes strong emotions and catches attention instantly.?

“Fun fact: Did you know that power words can boost your conversion with 12.7%?” - OptinMonster

Other examples of power words include “limited time,” “exclusive,” “proven,”, “amazing”, and “free.” So start to excite your audience with these words by making your CTA pop, and give it a little extra kick.

3. Create Urgency and Scarcity for immediate action

These are actually one of my favorite tactics when it comes to a successful CTA. This is the art of persuasion through some intriguing psychological triggers:

• FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) – FOMO is an extremely effective motivator because it makes people think they might lose out on an amazing opportunity that might not come around again. This can be the final push to get them over the edge.
• Scarcity – Supply and demand is a classic way to peak demand in your customers. What do you feel if you see a product you really need online, but there are only 2 left??

Even though this concept sounds almost too simple, there is a catch. Because you probably get these types of emails all the time, I know I sure do. Think of messaging like: “Shop today! The sale ends on Monday,”

The key to success is believability, and this is where giving a reason why is incredibly important. But more about that later (Number 5)

4. Use specificity and numbers as your superpower

If you want to discover the secret sauce to creating Call to Actions that creates curiosity and builds trust, then you should consider using specificity.?

Consumers respond well to seeing numbers such as pricing, discounts, promotions, incentives, etc. It helps us to determine whether or not it’s worth splurging on items we desperately want, but probably aren’t essential to everyday life. So when the opportunity arises, why not appeal to your target audience that way?

But why don’t we bring this one step further, instead of just implementing numbers in your cat (10% discount, 5% off)? Use Tatum numbers like 16% or 5.5%, the reason for doing this is that these types of numbers create attention because they are odd.

5. Always give a reason why

Whether you give a discount, use FOMO to create urgency, or ask your audience to take specific action. Give them a reason why, because this boosts the chance they will do it.?

In other words, what’s in it for them? Will it help them do their jobs better, lose weight, or save money? This will tie in heavily with your value proposition, or unique selling point(USP).?

Your USP is arguably one of the most important pieces of acquiring new leads, so creating a nice USP/CTA mash-up is a great way to increase clicks. For example:

• Instead of ‘Call Now’ -> ‘Call Now to Schedule Your Free 1-1 Session!’ Not only have you stated the action you want the user to take (call today), but you have also provided them with a reason why they should take that action (a free 1-1 session).

Bonus Tip: If you ever give a discount or say there is a limited stock. Explain why you’re doing this, the reason can be as simple as Valentines' Day or your own birthday. Just by doing this, you will make your promotion more believable.

6. A/B test your CTAs

Every audience responds differently to various calls to action. There is no guarantee that one call to action will outperform another. That’s why it is important to test your Call to Action and A/B testing is a great way to do it.?

That’s because this process will eliminate any guesswork and give you data-backed information that helps you optimize for CTA’s with the highest conversion.

“A/B testing (also known as split testing or bucket testing) is a methodology for comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better.” - Optimizely

Now simply translated, A/B testing is experimenting with two or more variations of a piece of work to determine which variation performs better. Examples are subject lines, emails, and part of pages.?

The aim is to determine what works the best and that piece will be distributed to the rest of the audience. The overall success of a call to action can be measured via a conversion rate formula that calculates the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions, or times the CTA was seen.

7. KISS Principle – Keep It Stupid Short

In this post, you’ll get your hands on multiple tips and ideas to create CTAs that are compelling, persuasive, and convertible. But the biggest mistake you can make after this article is overcomplicating the process.?

That’s why the #1 thing you should remember is to follow the KISS principle (Keep it stupid Simple).

“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains” - Steve Jobs

Yes, I changed it for the sake of this article to ‘Keep It Stupid Short’.?

Rule of thumb: Make sure your CTA is short enough to fit into button format. So stick to five words or less.

BONUS: Steal these CTAs (16 CTAs you can start using today)

A call to action can refer to any ask or request that you make of a user on the site, so a CTA can take many forms depending on the context. A call to action can be a closing statement in a blog post, a line in an email, or a CTA button on a website.

Disclaimer: The Call to Action below can be used on most occasions. You can use them, but for better results try to test out what works best for you by combining these examples with the tips shared with you in this post.

Call to action on Website

If you sell a product or service, then the call to action you can start using today are:

• Get started
• Sign up
• Start My Free Trial
• Contact Sales

If you have a blog, use these Call to Actions on your website blog…

• Read more articles
• Sign up for our newsletter
• Share on your social media

Call to actions for Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn Posts.

Did you know that over 4.9 billion people use social media over a variety of platforms? There are countless opportunities to use a CTA...

For example, in your bio, in your posts, or in your stories.

Despite the fact that call to actions are incredibly important on social media. If you don’t know where to start, writing call to actions for your LinkedIn, Instagram, or every other social media platform can be pretty difficult.

For this exact reason, check out these examples of great social media CTAs.

• Like, tag, and follow to win
• Sign up for our newsletter
• Read more on our blog
• Click the link in bio to read more

Call to actions for Ecommerce.

Whereas on an e-commerce site, the CTAs may be more commercially focused:

• Add to cart
• Checkout
• Buy now
• Add to wishlist
• Save Now

In each case, the CTAs on the page tell the user what action to take next to continue interacting with the site and moving further down the conversion funnel.?

Remember: In order for you to get the most out of your CTAs: use the tips in this article to make them unstoppable.

Call to action conclusion – How to Skyrocket your marketing?

There are countless tips available for creating effective CTAs. The best call to action content often comes from A/B testing various designs and words. Every business is different, and so is each audience.?

But the moment you’ve cracked the code for your business, your call to actions will skyrocket your conversions and clicks through the roof.

For more relevant articles about how you can use writing to improve your marketing efforts, check out my blog.