How to improve a call to action

Posted by Lesley Hays

From the weekly Success Insights series: Lessons from our Client Success Programs

Sometimes you just know that an element of your web strategy should be working better than it is. But if you think the conversion on something should be higher, don’t be afraid to try and try again with new ideas!

In our case, one of our clients has a main call to action form that’s converting a lot lower than it should and it’s taking a lot of experimentation to improve it. There aren’t a lot of parts to the call to action, so it’s hard to know what to experiment with, but we base our decisions on a few key questions.

Questions to ask yourself to improve a Call to Action

• Is it in the right spot? Is it positioned to be displayed to the user at the moment when they most want to take that action?
• Does the user understand exactly what this is about / what they can do?
• Is it written in the user’s language? Are any words or phrases around the call to action off-putting or miscommunicating something?
• Can we make the action have fewer steps? (eg. Put the whole form into the call to action area, not as a separate page.)
• Can we make the action quicker to complete? (eg. Make the form shorter.)
• Does the call to action stand out enough? What might be distracting the user from it?

Have you ever seen huge improvements by changing one tiny thing? Share your experience!