Calls to Action: Combat Distractions, Coach Conversions

The web can be an overwhelming and distracting place. I strongly suspect I’m not the only one who’s been in the middle of a task, only to be sidetracked by the YouTube video of the cute kitten, checking my Twitter feed, sending an email, reading the Ask.Enquiro blog, and… wait, what was I doing?

To help combat these distractions, you need a call to action. Ultimately, you want visitors to your site to download that whitepaper, sign up for that webinar, or contact you for a trial. Everything on your site (or at least on a specific page) should be coaching people to take that action.

Not having a call to action is confusing

I was just looking at the Forrester Groundswell Awards. One of Enquiro’s clients, Kinaxis, is in contention for an award and I wanted to vote for them (Enquiro helped them win a B2B social media award earlier this year, too).

However, I got to the voting page, read through the description, and then didn’t know how to vote. There was no indication on the page that voting was possible – the only action I could take was, seemingly, to write a review about the award submission.

I was confused.

Then, through serendipitous clicking (not something you want your potential customers to be doing, really), I discovered that I could click on the stars to give the submission a “rating”, which I presume counts as a vote. I didn’t have to write a review, although the proximity of the “Add a Review” button to the rating made me think I did.

What could they do better?

There are, in my mind, a couple of quick fixes that could help Forrester convince visitors to vote for award submissions:

The moral of the story

If you have a desired action you want someone to take on your site, follow my ACTION principles:

• Active – use active words that will get the visitor to do something. “Get your free trial”, “Download the whitepaper”, “Sign up here”.
• Consistent – use the same call to action with the same formatting in the same location on every page it’s applicable. Web users love predictability.
• Tough to Resist – make them an offer they can’t refuse. If you’re asking for them to fill out 17 form fields of information, you better be giving them something awesome.
• Immediate – create urgency. “Get yours before it’s gone”, “Sign up today and get a free widget”,”Vote now before the polls close”.
• Obvious – make it stand out. Web users don’t read, they scan, so burying it in text isn’t going to work.
• Noticeable – if you have a scrolling page, you generally want to make sure that your call to action can be seen no matter where the visitor is on the page. If you have to repeat it a couple of times, that’s ok.

Do your calls to action follow the ACTION principles?