- What's up? It's Tim here from Exposure
Ninja and in this video, we're gonna look at how to choose the perfect call-to-action
for your website. (cash register ringing)
So first up, what is a call-to-action
and why is it so important? Well, a call-to-action is the thing that you want visitors
to do on your website. For example, when you
go onto an Amazon page, the thing that they want you to do is add that product to your basket. Most websites fall down
with their calls-to-action. They're just not compelling enough, they're not effective
at converting a visitor into a lead or sale, and that's why their digital
marketing under-performs or that's one of the reasons why their digital marketing performs. So your CTA is probably the
single most important element on your entire website. In this video, we're gonna
have a look at some examples and I'm gonna run you through a process that you can use to identify what the perfect CTA is for your market. (intense drum music) (icon beeping) Now, just to give a
bit of context on this, we're gonna look at some example CTAs so I'm gonna give you a
bit more of a background on why this stuff is so important. So let's imagine that a
thousand people visit a website that looks like this. Now, we have no affiliation
to this website. We didn't build it. I can tell you from looking at it that there were probably
multiple decision-makers on the client side and it probably cost a lot more than they expected
and took a lot longer. And I can also tell you that it's probably fairly ineffective at generating leads for the business. But anyway, let's imagine
that a thousand people visit a website like this, what happens? Well, there's gonna be
two groups of people. The first group of
people is a group of 990. So the majority of the
visitors onto this site are gonna be in this big group here and then we've got a
second group of people that is just a tiny little
sliver of 10 people. So this 990 people, as
you might have guessed, is the 99% of visitors
that leave a website without doing anything. So they come on, they have a look around, and then they leave. They don't convert. They don't become a lead. Sorry, this 10 visitors is
the 1% of all these visitors that actually take an action on the page. So this probably feels pretty wasteful because you can imagine
that you're driving a thousand visitors to do something like pay-per-click advertising or SEO or even just meeting people face-to-face. Imagine meeting a thousand
people face-to-face, getting them to go onto your website knowing that you were
gonna convert 1% of them or 10 of them into leads or sales, so it's pretty disastrous. And this probably feels quite wasteful but actually, in fact,
for many businesses, a 1% conversion rate
would be an improvement on what they're getting at the moment. We're regularly sent sites to review that they're getting a 0.5, sometimes less % conversion rate which means that they're
generating less than one lead for every 200 visitors. Now, there's a whole
bunch of different reasons why this might be the case but one of the most important
elements is the call-to-action that's used on the page. Now, here's another example of a page. This time, it's a page
that does perform well. In fact, this is one of the pages on the Exposure Ninja website. If you go on the Exposure Ninja website, you'll see that we've got this request a free marketing review and you'll see it everywhere on the page. That's 'cause it's our
main call-to-action, it's the main thing that we're
driving visitors through to. Now, imagine that a thousand
people visit a page like this. What happens? Well, we've still got
two groups of people. We've still got the largest
group here, the 635 this time. They are the 63.5% that land on the page and don't do anything. But this time, the number of
people who do take the action is right up around 36.5%. So you can imagine, just comparing the two different websites and looking at the relative performance, 36 times more leads with
the same amount of traffic. So that just goes to explain why having a strong
call-to-action on your site is so important. Now, to be clear, a strong call-to-action is only one of the elements that defines your
website's conversion rate but it is a very important one. And also, to be clear, a 36.5% conversion rate
on a page is ridiculous. Right, most sites never
get anywhere near that and we wouldn't expect them to. Usually, when we're working
or building a client site, we're aiming for maybe a
four to 6% conversion rate as a real top performer. The highest conversion rate
we've ever built by the way was 33% for an entire site, not just for a single page
but for the entire site which was, again, absolutely absurd so I'll talk you through how you can improve your
conversion rate as we go forward. But first, let's look
at some of the mistakes that people make with
their calls-to-action. So you saw there the free
website and marketing review. Now, the great thing about
that is we're telling you, this is an incredible review, we're gonna have a look at what you're doing with your website, what you're doing with digital marketing, we're gonna make you a video. This thing is fantastic
and it's completely free. So it has a high perceived
value and low perceived risk because it's free, you're
not risking anything. Now, before we move forward and talk about what makes a perfect call-to-action, I wanna show you some
calls-to-action that underperform. So this first example is what we call a very
low-perceived value call-to-action or an LPVCTA. So here, we've got a paragraph
of text on this website here which is all about, this is
for an architecture practise, and the text says, if you
would like to know more about the architecture
firm and how we can help or find out more about our architecture, interior,
or product services, please contact us via
one of the following. Then we've got an email
address and a phone number. So what's the problem with this? Well, there's absolutely no
perceived value in doing that. If you would like to know
more about the company. Right, well, what's your website for? Your website's there to
tell us about the business and about the work that you do so the next step should
be attractive, right? What we're expecting people
to do here is to say, oh yeah, this business
is qualified for us. I've seen enough that I really,
really wanna work with them and we're not actually
going out to them at all. We're just saying, we're
just gonna sit here, if you like what you see or you wanna find out a bit more about us, come and talk to us. Right, it's a very,
very low perceived value so a CTA like this, we'd expect to be converting less than 1%. They've also put it at
the bottom of the page which is like a criminal offence in the world of conversion
rate optimization. Talking of putting things
at the bottom of the page, that's exactly where most people
put their calls-to-action. So here we've got an entire page about this particular service and I've expanded this so
you can see the full page. Usually, you don't see this section above the fold without scrolling and of course, where have
they put their call-to-action? They've put it right at the bottom there. So it says, "Whether you're a startup "or an established business, "we can support you with the very best. Blah, blah, blah. "To find out how to cut costs "and future-proof your IT systems, "call us on or email that." Right, completely useless from a conversion rate
perspective, an absolute disaster because they've put it at
the bottom of the page, no perceived value. Remember that every
single page on your site has one clear goal and that goal is to generate a lead or a sale. So why would we put that call-to-action at the bottom of the page where people are not gonna find it? Before we move on to talk
about some good CTAs, I just wanna take you through
the kind of components of a good CTA. So first up, we've spoken a
little bit about these already but the first up is that we have to have a high perceived value. So what does that mean? It means if I would put
my details into your site, I know I'm gonna get something good, I know I'm gonna get
something that helps me and is it attractive. The higher the perceived value, for example, the free
website and marketing view is absolutely killer so people
are really keen to get it. If we just said, hey, we do
digital marketing, inquire. We'd have very low perceived value 'cause what am I gonna get? Well, I've got no idea. Probably someone's gonna pitch me. That's the expectation
and that's the perception. So the first component is
a high perceived value. The higher perceived value, the more your conversion rate will go up. The second component
is low perceived risk. Okay. And this is a kind of,
it's a balancing act. So if we said we're gonna give you this amazing website review, all you need to do is get
everyone in your business to come to our offices and sit down for a three-hour meeting, we'd get zero conversions because the perceived risk of that not being good is so high. I've gotta put so much
work in to get that thing. Now, that's an extreme example but a kind of related
trap that people fall into is they'll offer
something on their website like a free consultation and then they'll require all
of these fields on the form that takes half an hour to go through. I actually was reviewing
a site the other day where the business was requesting the location postcode for an event. So imagine that I'm on my phone, I found someone who can manage my event, and I'm filling out the form and then one of the required fields is the venue's postcode. Well, I don't have that so I've
got to then go and find it. I've got to dig it out, copy and paste it on my phone
which is a freaking nightmare, and then I've gotta put it in this form. Well, why not just put venue, and then let people fill in
whatever information they have in the top of their heads? They might not even have a venue in place. That doesn't mean they're
not a qualified lead. So you've gotta think
about the perceived risk. Now, other things that you can do to lower the perceived risk would be using things like testimonials and case studies for the thing itself. You'll notice if you
go on our review page, you'll see testimonials for
the review, for the CTA, so people saying this
review is incredible, this review is completely, we've implemented the stuff and we transformed our business with it. So we're not giving testimonials
just for Exposure Ninja, we're saying that this review is so good, here's people who are writing about it. So if your business
offers a free consultation or something along those lines, that's something that you can do. Wow, this free consultation
was incredible, no one tried to pitch me,
it's just really useful, that type of thing raises
the perceived value and lowers the perceived risk and that's kind of a balancing act. So the lower the perceived risk, the higher the perceived value, the better your conversion
rate's gonna be. The third mistake is that the CTA is buried at the bottom of the page. (marker tapping) If you look at an Amazon
product page for example, let's imagine that that
is an Amazon product page, where do they put the Buy button? So you've got the product here, you've got a bit of text about it here, you got a bit more text,
you've got reviews. Where do they put the Buy button? They put it exactly where
you're expecting to see it. They put it there. There's a big fat button
on a different colour and they put it on the
right-hand side of the page, exactly where you're expecting to see it. On mobile, where are they putting it? Got a bit of info about the product and then you've got that
Buy button nice and high. What they're not doing is saying, right, because a typical responsive layout might look at all of this stuff first and then would look at this stuff later so what they're not doing is they haven't got the
product picture here, all of this info, all of the reviews, and then way down there
they're putting the Buy button. So they keep the Buy button
close to the top of the page on desktop and mobile and
that's really important. So don't bury your call-to-action
at the bottom of the page. It's a recipe for disaster. And the fourth mistake that people make, and we'll come back to
this in just a minute, is that it doesn't relate
to the sales process. Their call-to-action doesn't
relate to the sales process so it would be something like
subscribe to our newsletter which has low perceived
value, high perceived risks 'cause I'm just gonna get spammed. Even if you have your newsletter signup prominent on the site, you're still probably not gonna get a very high conversion rate and it has no relation
to your sales process meaning your sales team can't
then phone someone up and say, hey, I noticed that you
subscribe to our newsletter. That shows that you're
interested in our business. Those leads are essentially useless. You've gotta do so much work to build that relationship
with people first. So let's have a look at
some different flavours of the same sort of CTAs. So here, we're gonna look at some different solicitors firm CTAs, call-to-action is in the right place, it's over here, exactly
where we'd expect it. The label says, how can we
help, make an inquiry now. So if we think about perceived value, make an inquiry, not massively
high perceived value, low perceived risk. We're asked to put our name, phone number, email address, and
message, best time to call so it's slightly upping
the perceived risk. I know that someone's gonna phone call me. Now, I might make that a bit optional because if I don't wanna take a call or I'm busy during the day
and I can't take calls, I might be put off by that. So we've slightly increased
the perceived risk but usually, having a
call-to-action like this is gonna get you a conversion
rate of between two to 3%. Depending on the traffic
source, obviously, depending on the market, depending how good-looking
your website is. Now, here's an example. This is in construction. The CTA there is request a quote, fill in your phone number for
a free, no-obligation quote. You can also send us a message
through the contact form. Now, what they're doing there is because they want this
site to look all minimal because they've had some
amazing creative agency that doesn't understand
conversion rate at all design this site, is they're forcing people
to go to the contact page. They haven't even given a link to it so I'm now forced to do the work to go and inquire about
them to get a quote. So doing that type of thing typically get you a conversion
rate between zero and 1%. Now, here's one of our clients. This is a fantastic page,
performs really well. I'm not gonna tell you
the exact conversion rate 'cause obviously, it's a
client and it's confidential but what I will do is
I'll say that usually, when you have this type
of layout on a page with qualified traffic, you're usually looking at between
10 to 15% conversion rate. So we find out if you had PPI. Is that high perceived value? Yes, it is. Low perceived risk? Fairly low perceived risk. I mean, we're asking for
a whole bunch of info but because the perceived
value is so high, that lowers the risk. The other thing that they've done to lower the perceived risk is they've got all these
testimonials about the business nice and prominent here and
they've also got some reasons why you should choose them. So that's a really good page and that's a good kind of model to take. Notice that the layout of that page is pretty much the same
as an Amazon product page. You've got information about the product, some kind of key stuff there, you've even got an image on that site, and then you've got the call-to-action box exactly where you would expect to see it. So that's some good CTA. How do you go about
designing your own CTA? Well, let me show you. What we're gonna do first
is you're gonna design what your customer
journey looks like, okay? So we've got this line. (techno music) Now, this side of the line
is where your customer is now and your customer typically
has some sort of issue which makes them sad. They have some pain or they
need some kind of solution. So for Exposure Ninja, for example, our clients don't have enough volume of leads and sales through their website, they need help with that stuff so that's where their pain comes from. Now, on the other side of
the line is their end result, their desired outcome. Okay, so in Exposure Ninja's
case, we've got a website, good volume of leads
and sales coming through nice and consistent and we can scale it up and down as we need. So that's the kind of journey
that they need to go on. Now, the goal of your call-to-action is to get them along this journey. Now, you're not gonna
take them all the way in your website CTA. So for example, in Exposure Ninja, we would never say fill
in your details here and we'll do all of your
digital marketing for you at absolutely no charge or obligation. That call-to-action would be getting them all the way over here but obviously, it wouldn't even be a business. So what we do instead is we say, okay, first thing that we need to do is we need to identify what the
issues are with your website and with your digital marketing currently so if we do that, that gets us
to about here on the journey 'cause once we've then found those issues, we can begin to fix them
and we can move ahead. So that's what the call-to-action does, it gets them part of the
way along that journey. Now, let's say for example
that you're a solicitor's firm and you wanna improve the
performance of your website. Well, where are your people now? Your target audience might be, let's say that they need
to make a will, right? So here they are, no will in place, at the moment they're
thinking all of their money is gonna go to the government
as soon as they die, they're very, very sad about this whereas where they wanna get to, they wanna know that
everything's taken care of, that their little darlings
are gonna be safe forever and they're gonna enjoy all of the money and all that type of stuff. So what's the process that
that person needs to go on? Well, the first thing they need to do is they probably need to take an inventory of what they've actually
got in their lives and then they need to look at
how much a will is gonna cost and all that type of stuff. So what we might do is you might have a free
consultation here which looks at what does your will
actually need to look like, what sort of provisions do you
need to make for the future, and how much is all this gonna cost. So we might label this as
whatever kind of consultation, the free will consultation and then we'd say to people,
during this consultation, we're gonna find out
what it's gonna involve, we're gonna get your price for your will, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we're offering something which is gonna take them
closer to their goals. It's not gonna take them all away but it's gonna take them closer. Now, this does a few things. Firstly, it gives that
potential customer confidence that you're good at doing
what you say you're gonna do because look, you've already moved them part of the way along the line. You haven't moved them all the way but you've moved them part
of the way along the line which shows that you can actually help. So as Frank Kern says, show people that you can actually
help by actually helping. The other thing it does is it
starts the sales conversation. So whereas a free newsletter, where does the free
newsletter sit on this line? Well, it sits absolutely nowhere because it's completely
unrelated to the sales process, whereas some kind of free consultation actually begins that person going through the process
of buying from you. So questions to ask when you're designing your call-to-action. First question is at the
point of making the inquiry, what does your customer actually want at the point of making that inquiry? So they're landing on your website, they need whatever it
is that you're offering, but they're not gonna
go for it straight away, what do they really need? What's the blockage that's stopping them from moving forward
with you at that point? Usually, it's something like I don't know if this
business has the expertise, it might be that they
don't know the price, it might be that they don't
know if they're qualified. There's loads of potential reasons where they might not
get in contact with you so what your CTA needs to do
is answer these questions, answer whatever question is in their head. So for example, if people don't
know if they're qualified, PPI is a great one. Lots of people don't know if they had PPI so they can't start a PPI claim 'cause they just don't
know if they're relevant so what you do is you'd say,
we find out if you have PPI. Now, let us say that you're a
personal trainer for example. What's the blockage that's
stopping a lot of people working with a personal trainer? Well, they don't know the price. Now, of course, price is only one element of the whole sales process
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but it is an important one for people so what you can do is you
can say fill in details here to get a free consultation and price because you know that that price thing, that's what they're thinking. With digital marketing
agencies like Exposure Ninja, expertise is a big thing. What do we need to do to people? Well, we need to show them
that we know our stuff and the free review is
a great way to do that because we can then
demonstrate our expertise, show them all the stuff
that they could be doing with their website, and then they say great,
okay, this looks really good, and then they can make a
decision to move forward. So those are the elements, that's how you design your perfect CTA. Start off by drawing
where your customer is now and where they need to be, figure out what you can
give them along the way, and then figure out what their objections from doing business with
you right now are gonna be and make sure that those are answered by your call-to-action. I hope that helps. If you've got any questions,
drop them in the comments and if you've got a killer
CTA on your website, leave a link to your site because
we'd love to check it out. If you want some help with
your digital marketing, for example, you wanna generate more leads or sales through your website, you wanna increase your traffic, or you wanna increase the profitability of ad campaigns that you're running, then you can request the
world-famous free marketing review from Exposure Ninja. If you go to www.ExposureNinja.com, then you can request this review. It's completely no charge
and it's absolutely sick! (marker tapping) So what will happen in this review is we'll ask you a bunch
of questions on that page. If you go to ExposureNinja.com and then click the big green button, you'll get a questionnaire where we ask you a
whole bunch of questions about your business, about
your marketing goals, and all that type of stuff. That just allows us to tailor your review more precisely to your goals. So what we'll do is we'll
take a look at your website, we'll have a look at what
you're doing currently with your digital marketing, we'll have a look at where you're ranking, any ads that you've been running, we'll take a look at your
social media as well, and then we'll put together
a prioritised action plan that you can follow to get to your goals whatever you've told
us that your goals are. We'll record this as a 15-minute video which we'll email over to you
and it's completely awesome. It's totally free, there's no obligation to use our services, although I have to warn you, it is a very compelling first
step on the sales journey so if you've request your review, there is a good chance that
you're gonna become a client. But don't let that put you off. Go and check it out and I look
forward to seeing you soon.
