On the ColorMetrix (my other company) website, you will notice that the primary call to action is our phone number. We’ve placed that at the top of the right-hand sidebar, which is an area that is commonly considered the best place for a call to action to be. ColorMetrix is an established business and oftentimes people visit the site to find out how to contact us. This contact point could be calling for technical support or to place an order. Either way, the fewer clicks they need to make to figure out how to reach us by phone is better. It’s also about knowing your audience.
What is a call to action?
In ColorMetrix’s case they are more likely to call rather than email or any other method. By contrast, on this site, you will find we’ve populated that same space with a way to sign up for our newsletter. We are a new business looking to grow our audience and find new customers for our social media engagement strategies consulting practice as well as public speaking opportunities.
The key with utilizing this important space is to understand the goal of your business. If you consider a conversation with someone who picked up the phone for pre-sale support to be valuable, then put a phone number there. It could also be an order now or sign up for a free trial button like we’ve done on the ProofPass.com site.
On page calls to action
The other place I see people frequently forgetting to put their calls to action is on product pages. Many small businesses have relatively static sites (a mistake we’ll discuss in a future post here). While your potential clients can find your site and the page for the product, it doesn’t serve your business well if they don’t immediately have a way to contact you.
There are a couple of ways to address this issue. One is to simply insert text at the end of the page asking them to call, email or utilize your contact form to reach you. Obviously, you’d want the links to email and the contact form to make reaching you even easier. You can also utilize plugins that automatically add this text to each and every page for you.
Another option is to include contact information in the footer of your site. We’ve done this on the ColorMetrix site. This is a quick and easy way to improve conversion rates on a site that has been built over time before the importance of calls to action were really understood.
The long and short of it
You expend a great deal of time, energy and money getting people to visit your website. The last five percent of that strategy is getting them to commit to an action or conversion. Try and make that as easy as possible without being gaudy or flashy about it. Put the appropriate call to action in the right place and your visitors will find it if you’ve done everything else correctly.
