Throughout the course of any marketing campaign, it is necessary to count conversions as a metric that will determine your overall success. What is the ultimate metric of your overall success?
It’s not rankings.
It’s not how many links you got.
It’s not how much traffic you got.
It’s how many people bought the product or signed up for the service from your website. That’s what impacts your bottom line: how much money has the website generated during the course of the campaign.
This is Your Call to Action
So how do you begin to look at optimizing your conversion strategy? First off, it is important to consider the call to action. A solid call to action will help convert more than a haphazard call to action will. What should your call to action contain? What should your call to action communicate?
Your call to action should contain a way for the client to contact you. This is how you initially establish a relationship with them through your website.
All the content, graphics, and web development in the world is all for naught without a functional call to action. Whether it’s a phone number or a contact form, it’s important that both are functional, that they work, and that they communicate the right things.
What are the right things?
If it’s a phone number you are using to get clients to contact you, you should communicate what they will receive when they call. Will they receive the product or service? Will they receive support advice for the website? Will they receive a consultation? Will they receive advice on travel?
This is called a value proposition: What clients will receive by taking action on the phone number that’s on your website. Depending on where your phone number is located, the value proposition will probably be short and sweet ““ like Free tickets, or call for a free sales consultation.
Whatever the end result of clients calling you, you will need to communicate this up front.
If your call to action is a contact form, you want to communicate clearly what they have to input in order to receive the intended prize for their efforts: your superb quality product or service.
Potential clients want to feel that they have security and that they trust you when they submit your information. If you’re in the internet service industry, you may want to explain that their information will be completely confidential, and won’t be sold to third party lists. You may want to include a timeline for a response ““ such as “We will get back to you within 24 hours from the submission of this form”.
A value proposition should also be include on the contact form area as well ““ such as “FREE Sales consultation if you submit this form” or something along those lines. It should be something that you can offer that is FREE that you can give to clients after they submit the form. It all depends on your industry and your business what that something is.
Also, a word on creating the call to action form ““ also include the fields that are required in an easily readable way. This can be a highly contrasting asterisk against a dark background. Now, the client will actually be able to understand what information they need to submit up front in order to send the form successfully.
Now, Keep That Action Coming!
Once you have setup the call to action form, you can then setup your next page ““ a confirmation page. This will help communicate to potential clients that the call to action was completed successfully. Here, you may want to detail additional offers that your company might have ““ such as promotional items like free coupons, for example. It’s another way to get potential clients interested in your business and wanting to contact you.
There are other ways to devise call to actions. For promotional offers, you can setup a badge on your site that calls people to click on it to click to the next page, which will then have those promotional offers and perhaps an additional call to action for them to contact you. Using your imagination, you will be able to setup calls to action that are completely unique for your business.
Setting up the appropriate call to action is crucial. It is a necessary component of any website that will need serious consideration and analysis to ensure that it will work for your industry. Also, if you already have a website and are working to improve your existing call to action, using A/B testing is a great way to test variations of calls to action. This way, you can drill down to what is really going to be effective for your industry and increase your business’ bottom line.
An appropriate call to action is worth putting the time into, because it is so crucial to allowing clients to complete their purchase through your website. It can make a world of difference in your final conversions.
