Online marketing

Engaging your customers: calls to action

Once you have established your online presence, a ‘call to action’ is an invitation to your customer, supporter or donor to take the next step and respond. They are important tools in your online activities and marketing. It is an important tool in your online activities and marketing. In the online world you are not able to see your customer, read their expression, engage in light conversation or use the many other ways that you physically engage with a person.

Building calls to action into your website can improve your client engagement and give you useful feedback and data that may help you to improve your business. Use active language wherever you can. Some of the simplest forms of calls to action are links that will bring the reader further into your website and your content such as ‘read more…’ and ‘contact us now!’

Other simple calls to action are ‘sign up’ (to a newsletter or a membership) and ‘download now’ (for a brochure, policy statement, whitepaper or case study). You might also use ‘register’, ‘donate’, ‘view’ and ‘buy’ to list a few further options.

There is an enormous amount of information available online and people’s attention spans are short. As with all content on your website, you need to decide what you want to achieve, before you create your calls to action.

To maximise the effect of your calls to action, it is useful to clearly explain the benefit for the user in responding to it. Ensure that the landing page (the page linked to the call to action) is strong and engaging.

You may find your calls to action are most effective when they are clear and distinctive, but it is best not to overdo them. Crowding your website with calls to action may confuse the user, or dilute their impact. You might consider trying to have at least one, but no more than three,  calls to action (excluding navigation links) on each web page.

It is important to take into account privacy and security considerations whenever your call to action involves collecting information from customers, supporters or donors.

Online transactions

If your website includes an e-commerce facility, your options for a call to action increase.

Instead of just presenting your products, services or offerings to people visiting your website, you can entice them to act to make a purchase or a donation. Providing attractive offers or an appealing value proposition is important, but you must also make it easy and intuitive to start and complete the transaction. See the e-commerce: getting started section of this website for more information.

Often e-commerce websites that merchandise or sell products include the ability to enlarge a picture of the product. This, too, could have a ‘buy’ button next to it.

You can include calls to action at different levels of the engagement process. For example, if you are selling or merchandising and a customer selects a product, you can offer a range of relevant add-on products or services.

Your calls to action can often benefit from the creation of urgency, such as setting a closing date on an offer, or from an incentive, such as a give-away. Or you can combine the two – for example, by offering a discount if an order is placed before a certain date.

Other important calls to action

Not all sophisticated calls to action are about financial transactions: if you are aiming to leverage social media it is important to include calls to action that:

• encourage users to register and login so that you can start to get to know who your visitors are
• encourage users to contribute profiles or content.

To maximise the benefits of interactive and social media, it is best practice to make it easy and intuitive for your visitors to engage with you in this way.  An experienced web designer can be useful in providing professional advice on how to best approach this for your needs.