Calls to Action: Getting a Customer Past the Homepage

There are hundreds of ways to get customers to your site, from excellent SEO to interactive social marketing. The next step to get your conversion rates up is to show your customers exactly what they can do on your site straight from the homepage.

The most effective way to lead a customer deeper into your site is by using calls to action. There are quite a few ways to work calls to action into your site, from prominent buttons to subtle embedded links within the copy text.

Calls to Action

Calls to action are short phrases written to sound like a personal request made to the customer. They should be short and sweet, and easily found and read when scanning a page. A call to action should lead a customer to a page where they can either commit an action (often filling out a form) or access important information.

Some of the common calls to action we use on our auto sites include:

• Find a Car
• Book a Service
• Apply for Financing
• Get a Quote
• Appraise Your Trade-In
• Request More Information
• Book a Test Drive

Sliders are a highly graphical call to action.

Sliders

They’re big, bold and in-your-facesliders are here to stay. Modern sliders take advantage of fast loading speeds and large screen real-estate by providing an animated rotation of images or text. They are often used to display photos of the product, but since the slider is often the first thing a customer will see on the site, it’s the ideal place for a call to action. A slider can contain multiple calls to action, each slide displaying a different prompt.

Call to action buttons should stand out – there’s no such thing as too big or too bold!

Call to Action Buttons

It can be easy to get lost on a homepage because it is usually one of the most text-rich pages on an entire site. If a customer can’t easily get to what they want, or simply don’t know where to go next, there’s a good chance they’ll simply leave.

One of the ways of preventing this is by providing prominent call to action buttons. These buttons should stand out highly from the copy text, the main menu, and any imagery on the site. A large site might have 4-5 call to action buttons, but the best option is to draw the customer’s focus to a single, featured call to action.

With and without a call to action.

View More Buttons

If you’re supplying teaser information about a product or an article, show the user that they can actually click the image to get to the full item by adding a “view more” call-to-action button to the teaser.

Call to action links are simple way to interconnect the pages of your site.

Embedded Links

A subtle way to allow a user to navigate your site is by providing them with simple links embedded within the copy text. If the user comes across one on a topic they are interested in, it saves them the step of having to search for the page in the main navigation.

Simple, Prominent & Compelling

Keeping things simple with your calls to action is the easiest way to catch your customer’s attention, especially on a large or crowded site. Use a lot of whitespace around buttons, large, simplified text for your copy and make sure your calls never get overwhelmed by the rest of the content on your site. Once you’ve set up your calls to action, make sure to start tracking them in Google Analytics to see just how effective they can be!

Victoria Gramlich