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A landing page without a powerful Call to Action (CTA) is like a boat without water – it will get you nowhere. CTAs encourage consumer engagement and prompt your customers to take action. Not just any action, but the specific action you want them to take when they land on your website.

Without a clear call to action, your website visitors are left in limbo not knowing what step to take next. Ultimately, this is where many online sites lose their potential customers. Why spend time designing a wonderful, dynamic landing page, without putting the same effort into creating a CTA that will help you gain more customers?

At liveBooks, we not only want to help you create a beautiful online presence but also want to give you tools and tips to help you grow your brand. Read on to learn more about CTA best practices, and how you can create click-worthy CTAs on your liveBooks website.

What Are CTAs?

Marketers strategically place CTAs on a website’s landing pages with the specific purpose of inspiring consumer action. These CTAs may be in the form of a button, phone number, live chat box, or pop up box.

CTA Best Practices

While there’s not a magic formula for creating successful CTAs, there are some best practices you can follow. Here’s a look at the top CTA best practices for marketing your website.

• Colors – Your call to action must attract attention, and the proper use of color can help to accomplish this. You want to select contrasting colors while still ensuring the CTA looks great on your page. In addition, some colors can inspire certain emotions. For example, the best performing colors are green, which inspires growth, and orange, which is associated with confidence.
• Size and Shapes – The size and shape of your CTA button can be a tricky matter. You want the button to be large enough for the user to spot easily, but not so overpowering that it appears sales-y or takes away from the meat of your content. Play around with different shapes, sizes, and graphics until you find one that works well on your page.
• Language – CTAs should be short and to the point. Marketing experts recommend just two to five words so it’s important to make every word count. Always start with an action word like “try,” “download,” or “open.” Studies also suggest that using first-person language can increase your click-through rate (CTR) by as much as 90 percent. For example, instead of saying “Download Your Free E-Book,” say “Download My Free E-Book.”
• Placement – The placement of your CTAs must be purposeful and strategic. When creating a long landing page, one CTA always should go before the fold. Don’t be afraid to place multiple CTAs on longer pages. In fact, the user should never have to backtrack up the page to find the CTA.
• Mobilization – 77 percent of Americans now have smartphones, so it’s imperative to optimize your CTAs for mobile phones as more and more browsing is occurring on mobile devices. Specifically, it’s important to make sure any pop-ups on your website are user-friendly. 
• Value Proposition/Urgency – Consumers are always looking for great deals. Using value proposition language like “free,” “50 percent off” and “discount” can help the consumer see the value in what you are offering. You also want to encourage the user to act quickly. Words like “now,” “today” or “for a limited time” can help create a sense of urgency.
• A/B Testing – It’s crucial to test the effectiveness of your CTAs on a regular basis. A/B testing, with the help of Google Analytics, allows you to test variations of your CTAs to see which one performs better. This type of testing can help you perfect your call to action and improve your CTR rate.

Our user-friendly website building platform makes creating effective CTAs quick and easy. The combination of dozens of templates, hundreds of fonts, stunning photo galleries, easy editing features and enhanced mobile settings give you the power to customize your CTA buttons to meet your unique goals. Start your free website trial now, and see how simple it can be to create your online presence.

Your website content plays one of the most important roles in creating your online presence. It can tell the story of your unique brand, illustrate your service, and drive potential customers to purchase. Once you’ve chosen the perfect website template, the next step is to figure out what types of content your website needs most. From blog posts to logos, there are many kinds of content you’ll need to consider if you want your website to accurately communicate your product, services, and brand. Whether you’re redesigning your website or starting a new website from scratch, gathering and creating your website’s content can quickly become overwhelming. Save valuable time by reading these tips before you start building your website.

How Many Pages Do You Really Need?

Before you start typing, take a step back and think about what pages your website truly needs. Drilling down your sitemap should be the first step of the content creation process. Think about your current website, look at your competitor’s website, and brainstorm what the main goal of your website will be. Is it to sell your product, describe your services, or highlight what makes you special? Once you have the main points you want to get across to your potential customers, creating your website pages will be easier. Don’t waste your time creating content that you’ll never share with your audience.

Can You Utilize Freelance Writers?

More company-specific content such as your mission statement, service descriptions, and company overview should be written in-house. However, think about what content could potentially be outsourced. Maybe you’re writing a blog, or need more general pages on your website. If there’s an opportunity to outsource, identify it and take advantage of freelance writers. Ask your colleagues and friends if they have any suggestions of writers they’ve used in the past, or check out some of the many online tools available for content writing services.

What Kind of Images Should You Use?

Images can make or break your online presence, and are the backbone of nearly every website design. Having high-quality images is key to making your website look professional, trustworthy, and can help demonstrate your services effectively to your website visitors. On the other hand, low-quality, or poorly-sized images can negatively impact how visitors view your company, and can considerably lower your conversion rates by causing longer page loading times. Make sure you have enough high-quality images for your website by hiring a professional photographer, or by using stock images. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words!

Website Content Best Practices:

To make your website as user-friendly as possible, there are certain website content best practices to keep in mind. These tips will not only help your website load faster through optimal image sizing, but will also help you layout your content in the most appealing way for website visitors. To make your website as efficient as possible, make sure your content follows these guidelines.

Logo and Graphic, and Icons

Your logo represents your brand and is one of the first impressions you leave with your customers, while icons play a large role in how easily customers navigate your website and understand your services. Follow these guidelines to make sure your logo and icons look crisp and clean on your site, no matter what type of device users are viewing your website on.

• File Type: A PNG file is best for these types of images. It allows you to have your logo set on a transparent background and provides you with a high quality, professional looking graphic.

• Size: Size your logo and icons 3 times larger than what you’d like them to be on the site. This will ensure that they look crisp and clean on retina screens. For example, if your logo is going to be around 250 pixels in width on your site, you’d want to make the logo 750 pixels wide.

Images

As mentioned before, purposeful images can enhance a customer’s experience and help incorporate your branding throughout your site. Follow these best practices to make sure your images look great and don’t slow down your page load times.

• File Type: Always use JPG files for images. PNG files can be very large and don’t necessarily make your image look better. It’s always best to only use PNG files for graphics like logos, icons, or type.

• Size: A good rule of thumb is to keep your image file size under 300KB. For large, full screen images like headers stick between 1600px and 2000px in width. Smaller images like thumbnails don’t need to be any larger than 900px in width.

Content

Always write your website content for actual users, rather than for search engines. While you may be tempted to “keyword stuff” your website in hopes of improving your ranking in search engines, having low-quality content on your website will only hurt your web presence in the long run. As a best practice, make sure the content you’re writing for your website visitors is useful. As a starting point, think of common questions you get about your business and develop articles that answer those questions.

We’ve changed our online habits these past years. The internet is right in our pocket, so we expect our mobiles to give us the information we ask for ASAP. Yet we have reached the point where we abandon our half-filled carts, read only the news titles and go through only half of those 25 pictures of cats doing crazy acrobatics. The culprit in most cases is the slow loading time for pages we’re visiting.

More »

If you haven’t already, ensuring your website is easy and engaging to use on a wide variety of mobile devices should be one of your top priorities to do before the end of 2018. With over half of all internet searches and surveys showing that nearly 60% of users won’t recommend a business with a poorly-designed mobile site, any business that doesn’t have a mobile-friendly website will lose out in profits — big time.

What is mobile responsiveness?

Mobile responsive websites are ones that easily adapt to mobile devices (such as cell phones, tablets, and smaller mobile laptops). This means that they automatically detect which size screen the device has, and adjusts sizing of images, text, buttons, links, and more so that anyone on any device can have a great experience on the website.

How to Know If Your Website is Mobile Responsive

If you aren’t sure how to tell if your website is ready for all those mobile visitors, head on over to our other blog post to find out!

What if my website isn’t mobile responsive?

There are several key issues that would directly affect your business if your website isn’t already mobile-friendly.

1. Depletion of brand. Anyone who visits your website (whether they already know about your business or not) and doesn’t have a good experience while there on a mobile device will be a lot less likely to hire you, purchase from you, or refer you to others they know. This affects how they will see your brand from this point forward, and can have lingering long-term effects.
2. Poor customer retention. Many of the most successful businesses of any kind these days are utilizing their website to retain happy customers. If they can’t use your website to find information, get answers to questions, and more while on-the-go, they may switch to another company whose website is more mobile-friendly.
3. Loss of profits. Your bottom line depends on it! No matter where your website visitors come from (directly typing in the URL, linking to it from social media, or finding you in a Google search), if they are visiting on mobile and don’t purchase from you because of a negative experience, you lose money.

Design a Mobile Friendly Website Today!

liveBooks offers mobile-responsive, customizable website templates for creative professionals and businesses worldwide.

The best part? Our website designs are ready for search engines and look great on any mobile device!

We’ve also got a top-notch support team who’s here to help you every step of the way. Start for free here.