When you’re running an e-commerce brand, your website really has one central purpose: Yes, you want to bring new clients into your sales funnel and provide them with the education they need to make informed purchasing decisions, but at the end of the day your goal is to close the sale. You want people to click on a button in your online store and purchase one of the items you’re selling—period. You want your website to be an around-the-clock sales machine.
That’s what makes it so essential to have a good, strong call to action in place. All business websites need CTAs, which guide your leads through the sales funnel and increase the likelihood of them taking the desired action. For e-commerce sites, though, the CTA should be especially pointed and impactful: Click this button to buy our product NOW!
5 Tips for Killer CTAs
But of course, there are good CTAs and bad ones—and a feeble or unpersuasive CTA will hobble your sales and render your website impotent. So how do you ensure that your e-commerce site is working with high-impact CTAs? Consider these tips:
Make it stand out! The whole point of the call to action is to grab your reader’s attention and make it clear what step you want the reader to take next—so you can’t afford to have a CTA that blends in with the rest of the page, or that gets buried under the rest of your content. While it is possible to be too over-the-top, you do want to use larger fonts, bolds, italics, bright colors, compelling graphics, and/or attention-grabbing verbiage to draw the reader’s attention. The language of the CTA should spell out, in no uncertain terms, what you want the reader to do next.
Keep it short. Your readers want to see what you want them to do, and don’t necessarily want to wade through ten paragraphs of text to get to the point. Do you want them to click a button and buy your product? Tell them so—in a sentence or two at the very most.
Offer specifics and convey value. Just because you keep it short, that doesn’t mean you cannot offer some specifics. Adding specific offers and numbers is especially effective. Try something like: Save 30% by ordering NOW! Or, Claim your free gift card; buy today!
Place your CTAs strategically. You should have one on every page of the website—but beyond that, your placement may vary. Generally it is best to have a CTA visible on the page without the reader having to scroll—placing it either above the fold or in a sidebar can work well. Also, there’s no law against having multiple CTAs on one page, especially if the page is longer or more content-heavy.
Don’t forget to say thanks. The CTA/order page should ultimately take the reader to a Thank You page, which is an essential way for building brand loyalty. Never forget it!
For help crafting killer CTAs, of course, the Grammar Chic team is always on hand. Give us a call today at 803-831-7444, or visit www.grammarchic.net.
Amanda E. Clark founded Grammar Chic in 2008. She is a graduate of Eastern Michigan University and holds degrees in Journalism, Political Science, and English. She launched Grammar Chic after freelancing for several years while simultaneously leading marketing and advertising initiatives for several Fortune 500 companies.