Attracting people to your WordPress website is critically important, but converting them into subscribers and customers is undoubtedly the ultimate goal of your business.

Clearly, no one would convert without some persuasion, so every website out there uses calls to action (CTAs) to convince the visitors to take the desired action.

A CTA could be a line of text, a button, or image, as long as it prompts to take a specific action on your website immediately.

For example, a CTA can prompt them to download a report, subscribe to a newsletter, register for an event, start a trial, or buy a product or service. It goes without saying that CTAs are vital for you to grow your online audience and followership, so doing your best to create a compelling CTA is a must for online businesses.

What can You Achieve with a CTA?

As it was mentioned in the introduction, CTAs can take different forms. They define the goals and determine the calls to action for readers. For example, a text-based CTA at the end of an article on a blog can prompt the readers to leave comments while a button-based CTA on a landing page of a website can encourage visitors to sign up for a free trial of a product.

Also, CTAs are an essential element of product pages that encourage you to buy them. Best Buy’s Add to Cart is a perfect example of a button-based CTA (Save for Later and Build a Bundle are also CTAs) on a product page.

Evidently, a CTA can have a wide variety of goals and be a part of a digital marketing strategy that facilitates achieving its objectives. As you can see from the above image, it’s ideal for getting a visitor from a product page to a checkout page, which is an essential requirement for conversion.

To ensure that CTAs on your WordPress website are properly prepared to help you achieve your goals, you need to consider the following.

How to Create a Perfect CTA for Your WordPress Website

1. Choose an Action-Packed Text

Whether you’re creating a text-based or a button-based CTA, it should have striking, action-oriented text to be as compelling as possible to visitors of your website. According to the latest marketing trends, words such as “enter” and “submit” are outdated, therefore should not be used for CTAs.

Some of the most effective verbs that you should consider include:

• Discover
• Join
• Apply
• Reserve
• Request
• Begin
• Learn
• Do

These verbs are considered better for driving action because they imply it as well as a benefit to the user. For example, you can use the word “Begin” to describe what happens after a visitor clicks on it as well as the benefit that he or she will receive, e.g. “Begin a Free Trial.”

Here’s an example of a CTA with an action-packed text that clearly describes what will happen after a visitor clicks on it.

2. Create a Sense of Urgency or Scarcity

This is a popular tactic that many WordPress-based online stores use to get visitors to convert as quickly as possible and increase sales (in fact, chances are you’ve seen how Amazon does that many times). To maximize the chance that your visitors click on the CTA, consider including the following phrases:

• 24 Hours Only
• Last Chance
• Only X Days Left
• Ending Soon.

They emphasize the fact that your store has a limited supply of a specific product or that a sale is ending soon. If a visitor is interested in making a purchase, chances are that these phrases will compel them to do so and avoid missing out on a good deal.

Also, you can add some text below or above the CTA to reinforce it and encourage the viewer to click. Here’s an example from Constant Contact.

The phrase “First Month FREE” below the CTA delivers that additional encouragement many people need to make a purchase.

3. Make CTAs Stand Out from the Rest of Your Website

“To make sure that your CTAs grab the attention of your website’s visitors, they need to stand out from the rest of the buttons and other design elements,” explains Matt Powell, a web designer. “Since encouraging them to take a specific action could be the ultimate goal on the page, you have to make your CTAs prominent.”

For example, you can use colors that are in high contrast to other colors used on the page and other UI elements. To see an example, take a look at the image of a product page above. The main CTA there has a vivid yellow color that makes it the most prominent UI element on the page; other CTAs cannot compete with it.

While many brands use green and orange colors to make their CTA eye-catching but not too distracting, the ultimate choice for you will depend on many factors, including the colors of your brand’s logo and results of A/B testing.

The image below, for example, shows a great example of CTA – Add to Cart – that stands out from the rest of the website and uses the color of the brand, a well-known Italian coffee producer Illy.

4. Place CTAs Strategically

The position of CTAs on your WordPress website is an important consideration because the visitors need to be presented with them at the right time and place. Here are some recommendations:

• Place CTA buttons near informative parts of a web page to create a notion that clicking on it is the next logical step
• Employ several CTAs to break up a long web page and remind visitors of the next sections as they scroll
• Consider the AIDA principle before placing any CTA into your website. AIDA stands for Attention – Interest – Desire – Action and requires you to grab the attention of the visitors, make them interested in knowing more, describe benefits to them to make them want the product/service, and then present them with a CTA.
• If your CTA requires a heavy commitment from the visitors, avoid placing it at the beginning of the page (above the fold) because, chances are they will want to read all information before making a decision that can have an appreciable impact on their life.

5. Use Negative Space Effectively

Another way to make sure that your CTAs stand out from the surrounding content is to use negative space around them. This means incorporating blank space between the content and the CTA button to make the latter more distinct, and thus attract more attention.

For example, here’s how a software company Indoorway does it.

Why it’s good:

• There’s enough space around the button so the visitor won’t feel that the site is cluttered
• The CTA is at the center of the page so the attention of the visitor will be focused on it
• The use of different colors ensures that the button stands out.

6. Change the Determiner

Many companies prefer to use words like “you” and “your” for CTAs. While they seem like a reasonable choice in most situations, one good way to make a CTA more actionable is to change them to “me” and “my.”

Let’s take a look at an example from OKDork.

By using “Spice me up” for a CTA text, the designer makes visitors perceive the offer in a different way, which could be more compelling. For example, the site doesn’t imply that the offer and the content the visitor is about to unlock is theirs.

Here’s how a well-known digital marketer and influencer Neil Patel uses this principle to attract new participants to his SEO webinar on his site’s landing page. It’s very action-oriented, describes the benefits to the customer, and speaks from their perspective.

Here’s another example of a CTA with “my” instead of “your.”

One more way to make CTA on your WordPress website more actionable is to use the “I” principle. It uses a similar idea than the one in the previous section and states that a CTA should speak from the perspective of the customer by using “I” determiner.

Here’s an example of a CTA using this principle.

Instead of a typical text like “Claim Your Consultation,” this CTA speaks to the customer from their perspective and appeals to them directly.

You can also apply these principles to your CTAs and get something like this:

• Sign me up
• Secure my reservation
• Reserve my seat
• Get my eBook
• Get my free copy of the report
• Grow my business.

So, to sum up, by choosing language that speaks from the perspective of the viewers, you can make your offers more appealing to them.

7.Use a Plugin to Create CTAs

Fortunately, there are a number of WordPress plugins that you can use to create both simple and advanced CTAs for your website, including the following.

• Hello Bar:

  

  A very popular, simple, and unobtrusive toolbar that you can add to the top of your website to collect data such as email from the visitors. It’s free and allows you to build your list of subscribers easily without undermining user experience on your WordPress website.

• Popup Builder:

  

  Another free option that allows creating popup windows with notification messages or subscriber forms to collect data and setting trigger positions in specific places on a page. Popup Plugin supports a well-known email marketing tool MailChimp, which makes it really great for audience building.

• WordPress Calls to Action:

  

  Use this plugin to create CTAs, monitor conversion rates, and test performance of different versions. Thanks to a built-in Visual Editor, you can make and preview changes to CTAs as you work, which makes split testing easy. A library of pre-developed versions and a custom builder for new ones are available for inspiration and creative work.

Over to You

A well-designed and written CTA shown to a visitor at the right time can help you to achieve a massive increase in the number of subscribers and conversions. While the tips given above can greatly help you to achieve new heights, the ultimate success depends on testing different versions of CTAs – their colors, copies, placement, and style – and defining the best-performing one.