With a wide selection of website builders in the market today, it is not difficult for one to find a website building platform. The beauty of such platforms is that you don’t need to be a web designer to know how to build a website.

After you made your choice and picked the right website builder, it might be a matter of hours until your website can go live. Some platforms can automatically generate your new site within minutes!

But these platforms won’t do all the work for you. You may have a beautiful looking functional website; but if the only eyeballs staring at it are yours, then you have a problem on your hands.

You may also have loads of visitors coming to your website, but if you don’t guide them as to what action to take, they will leave; perhaps never to come back. So, what is the solution to this dilemma? The answer is using the right Call to Action (CTA).

Calls to action, or CTA, are all over the internet. Whether it is a display ad, a blog article or a blog post, an effective CTA must contain a visible link inviting visitors to click through. Online content is not just aimed at informing or exciting visitors. You will need to implement a clear Call To Action strategy that invites your visitors to take the action you want them to take.

Below are five tips for using CTAs that have been proven to work:

01. Don’t tell your visitors to “click here”

I know a ‘click here’ link speaks for itself, literally. However, experience has shown that this invitational phrase is ineffective since it does not tell users why they should ‘click here’. In its place, use a CTA that is benefit-driven, and which takes users by the hand and shows them where to go, and why that particular destination is the best based on what they will receive when they get there.

02. Avoid asking visitors to do too many things at the same time

Decide what you want your CTA to achieve and then make it clear what action you want your website visitor to take. If you think additional information is crucial, provide this in the body of your text. Being clear and precise not only benefits users, but it also helps you in measuring the impact of your CTA campaign.

03. Use action words

A number of factors come to play if users are to be convinced to take a certain action. Among these are issues such as how enticing your product or offer is when viewed against the appeal of your website design and textual layout and presentation. Nonetheless, an effective action-based CTA could easily give your web visitors that extra nudge to press the click button or link, to give you a call, or shoot you an email. To get this desired effect, your CTA should start with a verb, which is an action word that explicitly tells them why they should click through.

04. The voice and tone of your text should match

So you think your CTA looks cute, funny and snugly fits into the slot your web builder designed just for that purpose? Well, that’s not what’s most important. Your CTA should tell a similar story, in the same language, as does your text. Not sticking to this unspoken rule will most likely annoy or confuse your visitors. Rather than clicking through, they may actually end up leaving your webpage without doing what you wanted them to. Avoid the temptation to make your CTA outlandish or over-embellished at the expense of the real gist of your website.

05. Don’t oversell

Have you ever met an over-enthusiastic salesman who bent over backward to sell you a product or service, extolling its benefits to the point where you couldn’t stand hearing about it not even one more time? Rather than embrace the product or service, you were most likely put off and became distasteful both towards the person selling and the brand represented by products and services on offer. Sounding and looking desperate dissuade a potential client from purchasing a company’s products.

Your CTA should ‘tell’ and not ‘sell’. This should be reflected in how you craft your CTA campaigns. Besides how you describe your products and services, your primary goal should be to help your visitors make decisions based on the merit of your products. It has been proven that trying too hard to sell a product is counterproductive. The practice of over-selling a product makes people suspicious and wary of the same.

While a “Buy It Now” CTA may work for you, overusing it may have the converse effect. You should instead focus your attention on what value it adds to your users. Use words laden with urgency such as ‘now’, ‘today’, ‘don’t delay’ in your CTA to drive home your message with impact.

Putting it all together

How you apply CTA on your website largely depends on the content of your website and what your objective is. Nonetheless, it’s important to measure the effectiveness of your CTA campaign to establish what’s enticing your visitors to click through, and what they are blind to. This exercise will give you a pretty good idea of what’s working for your brand; and what’s just a waste of your valuable time and resources.