A Call to Action Button is a directive that is used to provoke immediate response from your target market and mostly starts with a verb.

Great! You have developed a compelling website, have something to offer for your target market and have predefined standards of procedures to be followed. You have completed half of your work by making yourself present online through website but, your job does not end here. The rest of the half will also be done by you and equally important for your website. You have to attract customers for your website and increase the awareness among them in order to meet your business goals. One of the best ways to provoke your audience is to make use of Call to Action Buttons on your website.

Smart use of CTA button urges your audience to do, what you want them to do. If you want your audience to read, visit, buy, interact, like or spread good words about you, so it is essential for your business to place CTA button(s) on your website.

Call to Action buttons are used with different texts that is completely dependent upon what response you want to elicit. For example download button, free trial, sign up, shop online etc.

Following are some basic reasons of why you need to have CTA

Lead Generation

The primary purpose of CTA is to attract prospect customers and turn them into leads.  The text of button should be attractive and likely be starting with a verb. The button should have best color contrast that visually appeals your audience. Following image is an example:

Social Media

This type of CTA is used for social media sharing which is the best way to connect your customers with you through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. These buttons are placed on your blog or at the homepage of website because when your visitor lands on the website, they are most likely to land on your homepage first.

Event Marketing

CTAs are also used to make your audience aware with your upcoming events and in online promotion of event which is the major part of event marketing. It can help you in increasing number of leads and participants of events. As more people visit your website, more they will know about your event that will result in increase of awareness within less time.

 Sense of Urgency

CTAs are also used to promote those offers that you want your customers to avail for limited time. This creates sense of urgency in your target market that you are offering for a short period and have limited of supply.

Characteristics of a Call to Action button

Following are the characteristics associated with Call to Action buttons. When going to place Call to action button, you need to make sure these features are present.

• CTA should be attractive enough to appeal your audience
• Selection of words should be appropriate
• Should be Instruction oriented
• Excellent use of color, graphics and contrast
• Location on the website landing page
• Simple and clear text
• It meets the requirement for which it was designed

Having understood the need of CTAs for your website, it must have cleared some points in your mind about why CTAs are important and how they can help in increasing your customer. This is not mandatory that you can only have one call to action button; you can have more than one button on the other page of your website. Remember change is very important for CTAs, whenever there is a change in your offer or target market, you should update your CTAs accordingly. You can go for different shapes of button not necessarily be square or rectangle it can be round, oval, arrow, animated etc. to attract instant attention. It should be of appropriate size so that it can be seen from a certain distance.