Monthly Archives :

March 2019

CTA , Digital Marketing , Email Campaigns
870 640 Ryan Gravatt

No Clear CTA? How to Make a Strong, Clear Call to Action

Your Website needs to have a clear, strong call to action. Inviting people into an engagement step with you is the most necessary part of marketing. And the most important part of digital marketing is having a clear call to action on your Website.

 

What’s a call to action? It’s the words or phrase that call people to take a step into engagement with your product or brand. If you’re an author, Buy the Book is the perfect call to action on your Website.

 

What should your call to action be? If you’re asking this question, that probably means you don’t have a call to action on your Website or you’re unsure whether you have a clear call to action. That’s okay. Lots of companies and people launch Websites without a clear strong call to action. And it’s never too late to fix this.

 

Your best call to action is going to be whatever helps get you into a one-to-one relationship with a customer or potential customer. Every industry has different standards and different ways to build a relationship. On an e-commerce Website with one product, the call to action is Buy. If you’re an e-commerce Website with multiple products, the call to action is Shop. For example, https://www.easton.com/, uses Shop because they have multiple products and many different types of shoppers coming to their site.

 

A word of caution about constructing your strong clear call to action: Think of your customer journey and how they decide to buy your product or hire you. The Call to Actions I provided above are simple and easy to visualize, but think about a more complicated purchase, like a car. Look at Mercedes Benz of Austin, https://www.mercedesbenzofaustin.com/. Their calls to action are smaller and more subtle. They also have several, which is okay for their purposes because a car is a major purchase. People do a lot of research before they even step into a dealership. You will not see a Buy the Car call to action on the homepage of a good auto dealer Website because that just won’t work. It could even backfire and scare customers away. Instead, you’ll see Call Us or Chat With Us, and you’ll see more simple ways for people to start their shopping journey, like looking up cars by make, model and year. They are letting people immerse themselves in the site to help them convince themselves whether to buy a car eventually. Even the virtual car dealership Carvana, https://www.carvana.com/, stays away from aggressive calls to action – and it spends $4.26 million annually on advertising that tells people to shop and buy their car online.

 

The point of talking about car dealerships, and those trying to disrupt them, is all of them have studied their customers. They know how their customers are shopping and buying products and services. Do you? Think about what your customers did before they hired you or bought your product. Then what did they do? And then what? How much information did they have before you closed the deal?

 

Start with this thinking and make your strong, clear call to action match what gets your customers to buy from you. You’ll increase your success. I promise.

Digital Email Marketing
596 500 Ryan Gravatt

Four Ways to Clarify Your Website

If you have a legacy site, you might be thinking of rebuilding or redesigning it.

 

Before you get too far into an expensive process, you may be able to keep what you have and improve the results you’re getting from it.

 

Start by asking yourself these key questions:

 

 

  • Who is your audience?
  • What do you need them to do?
  • Are they doing it?

 

 

You’ll find the answers to these questions by studying your Website traffic. Google Analytics is a good starting point for this task.

 

But if you don’t know how to find these answers, you might need to do that first before you do anything else. Make an appointment with a Raconteur expert, and we will help you get going on the right path.

 

If you can answer some of these key questions but you see the need to clarify your site, keep reading.

 

Have a clear call to action

What’s the one thing you need visitors to do on your site? (Hint: it’s the thing that makes you profitable and reach your goals.) Put a clear call to action to lead people to that thing. Put it at the top of your site and make it clearly marked.

 

Make a great first impression

Look at your site with new eyes, like someone seeing it for the first time. Look for 10 seconds or if you can read Google Analytics, find out how long first time visitors stay before they Bounce. What’s your impression? Are you clear or confused? If you’re clear, great! But if you’re not sure whether a first time visitor understands your mission, then let’s fix that.

 

Bring your audience into this process

This is a great place to start if you don’t know what to do or you suspect everything is awesome! Your audience is telling you all kinds of things by what they do – or don’t do –  on your site. Let’s test some messages, pictures or buttons. Implement some good A/B multivariate tools to find out how well your messages work.

 

What traffic is working best for you?

Going back to Google Analytics, look at the Source/Medium report. Your website should be getting traffic from all kinds of sources like email, social media and referral. You can dive into each Source or Medium to find specific data on traffic performance. If you don’t have goals established, look for Bounce and Time on Site data. A low Bounce rate and a long time on site means visitors from these sources really dig you. The opposite means you need to clarify those landing pages or entrance pages.

 

But if you still don’t know how to find these answers, or you’d like help improving your website’s performance, make an appointment with a Raconteur expert, and we will help you get going on the right path.