If a call to action button persuades more people to act, every click and every pound spent upstream looks more valuable.
We spend most of our online marketing time worrying about ‘the top of the funnel’. The ads and the SEO can be all-consuming. But things can fall apart at the bottom, where we’re converting interest into action. A weak call-to-action can quietly waste almost everything we do before it.
The obvious description of the lead generation process is a chain. The links are the traffic source, the landing page and the enquiry mechanism. Each depends on the next one. The ultimate (or penultimate) link is the call to action, and like all the links, if it snaps, the rest of the chain doesn’t matter. One dull website button at that stage can kill everything.
What we need to look for is anything that makes clicking feel like a risk or a chore. Work backwards from the enquiry form (or other final step), improving each stage with that perspective in mind.
Improvements can include a clearer verb, a line of reassurance or a smaller sense of commitment. That tiny rectangle of text on a button is so important. If that button persuades more people to act, every click and every pound spent upstream looks more valuable.
I’ll talk about this more over the next few articles.