How to Amplify Your Profits with Calls to Action

Your calls to action (CTA) are the superpowers that make marketing magic happen. If you add them to your Facebook posts, your click-through rate will rise by 285%. You can push that number up to 371% if you use them in your marketing emails. That number will account for a sales increase of 1617%–a percentage that’s well worth your attention. CTAs aren’t all made alike, though. Like any tools, you must wield them well to earn soaring profits. Wield them badly, and you’ll lag behind.

Understanding Calls to Action

Calls to action are the sales pitches of the digital marketing world. They existed long before people started adding modems to their households. At their most rudimentary level, they’re merely words that drive some form of action, whether that means a click, a purchase, or a registration. Effective CTAs mention a problem, suggest a solution, then prompt an action, so they’re usually linked to a relevant landing page.

People are more likely to convert when prompted, but CTAs are also a valuable way to encourage users to engage with your website. You can certainly build them around your sales proposition, but they’ll be far more effective if they cover each phase of your marketing funnel.

CTAs and the Marketing Funnel

CTAs are only as useful as the strategy that underlies them. If they’re to have any power, they must be optimised to both your Google and human audience. You can’t have a strategy without a marketing funnel that defines the steps preceding a purchase. This key sales model dictates which CTAs you need along the way. There are five broad stages:

• Product or brand awareness
• Consideration
• A conversion or sale
• A commitment to brand loyalty
• Advocacy or word of mouth advertising

Your CTAs must represent the correct marketing funnel stage for the content they appear in. Think of them as the road signs that lead your audience to its ultimate destination.

CTA Optimisation

Marketing is woven into the human psyche, which is highly responsive to detail. CTAs phrased in the first person, for example, can increase click-through rates by 90%. Vivid colouring can boost them by 21 to 32%. CTA buttons improve those rates even more, as does personalised, targeted phrasing. Your CTAs need to be visible, clickable, and customised. They should also create a sense of urgency through time-related language. The words “now” and “today” are more potent than you think. Fear of missing out (FOMO) marketing appeals to hesitant clients through the illusion of scarcity. Dwindling supplies have come with increased demand ever since the first TV advert aired in 1941, and that law is still available for you to leverage today.

The Power of Personalisation

eBay was one of the first businesses to tailor its campaign to each individual buyer. It still uses automation to inform inbound calls to action. This way, the e-commerce titan has been able to craft CTAs that are unique to every client. Automation is no longer a premium option that only the biggest brands can afford. Its superpowers are available to every marketer who wants to harness them. Even the smallest businesses have the capacity to run multifunctional campaigns across several channels. You should thus be using CTAs in emails, adverts, blogs, feedback requests, and landing pages. They should be adapted for special events and holidays. An effective CTA should

• Convey a sense or urgency
• Arouse curiosity
• Use compelling verbs
• Include first person pronouns
• Be placed on a clickable, touch-friendly button
• Use artificial intelligence to automatically optimise themselves.

Modern marketing doesn’t exist in stasis. Like all of your other campaign elements, your CTAs should be tested for efficacy until you arrive at their sweet spot.

Calls to action might seem like humble marketing tools, but they have incredible profit potential if you use them well. If you don’t ask, you don’t receive—and no industry benefits from that fact more than marketing. With precise, elegantly-strategised CTAs, you’ll soon be reaping the returns.