As marketers, we have lots of goals every day. But if we distil them all down, they’re all there in pursuit of just one single goal. Clicks on a CTA.
We put a lot of effort into making sure we include CTAs where we think they should be; but how much do we really know about them?
The most clickable CTAs share many characteristics, but I’m going to talk about just 3 of them today.
We click when something is RELEVANT, URGENT and ENTICING
Who here hates Buzzfeed? Upworthy? Uproxx? Upvote? Up by PIXAR?
These sites get a bad rap because of their click-baity, low-brow headlines. Keep these sites in the back of your mind because we’re coming back to them later.
And a second thing to remember through this is that we don’t always know WHY something is wrong or doesn’t work…but we know WHEN something is wrong or doesn’t work.
RELEVANT means that the CTA fits with the content on the page.
Which is a great point about marketing: sometimes it’s important to give visitors what they expect, not necessarily what you feel they need.
If you were looking for directions to Atlanta airport and every site just wanted to tell you that it’s the busiest in the world – but didn’t give you directions – the site would be pretty useless to you.
RELEVANT also means that the CTA is going to help you solve a problem that you have, and that you wanted to solve by browsing to the page you ended up on. If your CTA solves a different problem, it belongs on a different page.
If your page is all about pet habitats, you probably don’t want a CTA that looks like a clown asking visitors if they want to download your ebook about web design.
Your CTA should set your site visitor’s brain thinking that they have to click the button RIGHT NOW.
Things that commonly make people click RIGHT NOW are indications that there is some kind of scarcity – that the offer won’t be available tomorrow because it’s an LTO or because there are limited quantities available.
You’ve all heard of FOMO to explain why we’re all connected to social media at all times.
Well, FOMO is a big motivator for all kinds of clicking behavior.
BUT… if you indicate that your CTA is for a limited time or number of people who engage with it…it has to be limited. If you go to Amazon and the shoes you want to buy always say “Only 2 pairs left” for a month, how much are you going to believe that?
ENTICING. Or, to use another word: CURIOUS.
This week I learned that Mexican places with those steaming fajita plates throw water on them to make them sizzle and release the aromas into the air when the server walks the plate through the restaurant.
Because what do you do when you smell that? That’s right, you look for it on the menu because it smells freaking delicious.
That’s what enticement is. It’s the thing that interrupts your thoughts and makes you look in its direction, like Ryan Gosling.
ENTICEMENT is the obvious upside. It’s the no-brainer reason for clicking. It’s the benefit that you don’t need to explain.
It’s the thing, deep down, that will satisfy our curiosity.
Some of you might know about NEUROLINGUSTIC PROGRAMMING. What it is, basically, is figuring out how our brain responds to words as a result of how we’re hard-wired to respond to them.
For marketers, this really means: what words are able to interrupt my audience and inspire a sense of urgency and enticement.
Or, put even simpler: what words make your brain go DAWWWWW
We all respond to words like SALE, and the word FREE is capable of conversions all by itself.
The color and placement of CTA buttons register in our brains in ways that we’re programmed to respond to.
Look at the difference between “DOWNLOAD MY EBOOK” and “DOWNLOAD MY FREE EBOOK.”
Aside from adding RELEVANT information, it increases the button’s ENTICEMENT value.
ASK: What other words/phrases are we hard-wired to respond to?
DANGER
ENDS SOON
And these shortcuts are important because attention is a finite thing. We can’t give all things all of our attention at the same time, so CTAs need to take enough of our attention to make us DO SOMETHING that might not have been on our radar a minute ago.
In this way, we’re all like the dog from UP!
So…back to Buzzfeed.
You’re probably thinking that a lot of what’s on Buzzfeed really isn’t relevant. And no, it’s not relevant to most of what we do at work. But it IS relevant to goofing off, taking a break, cleansing our mental palate between tasks. And it’s super good at it.
It’s really good at it because Buzzfeed and Upworthy A/B test everything. They write 25 headlines – CALLS TO ACTION -- for each piece, toss them around the office to see which is the most clickable, then A/B test the best ones. JUST BECAUSE THEY WANT US TO CLICK THEIR STUFF.
The pieces might look like they don’t have much thought behind them because they’re usually not high-brow stuff. But they have more research put into them than most newspaper articles, just to get you to their site.
And it works.
SO if you don’t remember anything else, remember that the reason we click on just about anything is because it’s RELEVANT to us, it inspires a sense of URGENCY and it’s presented in an ENTICING way.
The other two parts we could talk about are EXCLUSIVE and OBVIOUS.
