Writing calls to action

Name the outcome, not the mechanism

Submit, click here and learn more all describe the action rather than the result. The reader has to guess what follows, and a guess at an unknown outcome is exactly what stops somebody acting.

Get a price, book a visit, see what it costs, ask a question about your job. Each of those names what the reader ends up with, which is the information they were missing.

Read it as a sentence starting with I want to. I want to submit is nonsense; I want to get a price for my job is the reason somebody came to the page.

Remove the risk in the wording

Most hesitation is about commitment rather than interest. A reader is willing to ask and unwilling to start something, and the wording usually fails to distinguish between those two.

Say what it does not commit them to. Ask for a price, with no obligation, or get a call back, no charge for the first conversation, both remove the objection that was actually stopping them.

Be accurate about it. If the first conversation is chargeable, saying so plainly loses fewer people than the discovery does. Our page on honest claims covers the principle.

One action per page

A page offering three equal actions asks the reader to choose, and choosing is work. Decide what you want from this page and make everything else visibly secondary.

Repeat the same one rather than adding variety. The same action offered near the top, in the middle and at the foot converts better than three different ones competing.

Secondary routes still belong on the page, quietly. Somebody not ready for the main action should have somewhere to go rather than leaving entirely.

What a good call to action does

The list below is what separates wording that gets followed from wording that gets read past. None of it is about the button and all of it is about the sentence.

• Names what the reader gets, not what they do
• Says what it does not commit them to
• Appears more than once on a long page
• Sits where the decision naturally happens
• Is the same action each time it appears
• Reads sensibly out of context, for screen readers
• Is followed by an acknowledgment that matches it

Placement beats emphasis

An action placed where the reader has just been convinced works better than a larger one placed where they have not. That is why the foot of a good explanation converts so well.

Put one near the top for the reader who arrived already decided, and one after the proof for the reader who needed convincing. Those are two different people on the same page.

A button that follows the reader down the screen is usually irritating rather than helpful on a small business site, and on a phone it takes space the content needed.

Wording for screen readers and links

A link labelled click here tells somebody moving between links on a page absolutely nothing. Our page on link wording covers why that matters beyond politeness.

Write the action so it makes sense read aloud on its own. Get a price for your job does; here does not, and the first costs nothing extra to write.

The same wording then works as the visible text, the accessible name, and the phrase an answer engine reads, which is three benefits from one decision.

Test it against reality

The measure is enquiries rather than clicks. A call to action producing more clicks and fewer enquiries has moved people who were not ready, which costs you time rather than gaining anything.

Change one thing at a time and give it long enough to mean something. Small-site volumes rarely support formal testing, so treat a difference of a few enquiries as noise rather than a result.

And ask the people who did get in touch what nearly stopped them. That answer is more useful than any measurement available to a business of this size.