5 Interactive Calls to Action That Prospects Can’t Resist

Are your marketing efforts falling a bit flat? Are open rates, click-through rates, and lead flow less than stellar? If you were 100% honest, would you click on your brand’s latest “download our new white paper” call to action?

For many marketers, the challenge isn’t just creating content – it’s making it remarkable. Prospects crave something different. You can pique their interest and curiosity with more compelling calls to action that offer something unique or unusual. Following up a unique CTA with an unusual piece of content is even more powerful.

Consider giving your marketing a boost with five unusual calls to action (and the follow-on content) that work:

1. Assess

The theory of narrative psychology tells us people love to be the star of their own story. That’s why personality tests (like the ones found in magazines and on BuzzFeed) are so powerful – they give us a chance to categorize ourselves and share that snippet of who we are with the world. As humans, we respond to the “assess” call to action.

This fact carries over into B2B marketing – assessments tap into our human desire to validate our hypotheses and conclusions. It’s hard to resist clicking on a two-minute assessment that will provide us with a few key insights that we can use to make a decision or at least take the next step.

Plus, because we expect that taking an assessment is less time consuming than reading white papers, assessments are more likely to grab our attention, and get clicks. According to the 2014 Demand Gen Report:

• 95% of respondents agree or strongly agree that they prefer shorter formats for their content consumption.
• 20% used assessments to research B2B purchase decisions in the past year.

In addition to their short-form appeal, the entertainment value that comes from assessment content is a large part of what makes them so effective: In our button-pushing, instant-gratification world, the give-and-take and immediate feedback that follows an assess call to action fits us perfectly.

All of this suggests that rather than hitting your prospects over the head with a meaty white paper out of the gate, it might be more effective to warm them up with a smaller, more consumable piece of content and a more compelling call to action than “download” – something that provides a few nuggets of information and an indication that there is more to learn, while establishing your credibility by demonstrating your subject-matter expertise.

Need some inspiration? Here is one we love:

The Find Your Frame quiz from Zenni Optical has been taken almost 600,000 times.

2. Test

This is not a test as in “A/B testing” (which is important, too) but as in “Test your knowledge,” “Test your skills,” and “Test your readiness.”

Like assess formats, test calls to action tap into our desire to see how much we know or how much we need to learn. We use this data to make and justify our decisions and to guide us toward areas where we want or need to learn more. This is particularly helpful when we (or our prospects) are not sure we are ready to dive in – or even what we might be diving into.

For prospects at the discovery or consideration stage, for example, it might be impossible to get them to commit to downloading and reading a white paper. Still, that person is looking for something – an information gap waits to be filled – and a test can be the right mix of information and efficiency.  Emails and landing pages that call on prospects to “test” instead of “download” offer a more personalized call to action because they promise an individual result.

As a marketer, tests and assessments also are opportunities to develop and play with brand personality. Marketers can showcase their brand and expertise through unique graphics and language, creating a memorable experience and setting the stage for future outreach.

Funifi used an entertaining parenting quiz to grow its audience, adding 2,700 emails to itssubscriber database in 72 hours.

3. Benchmark

How do we compare to a standard, end goal, the rest of the world, or at least our peers? It’s generally really helpful – or at least entertaining – to know this, which is why so many of us are eager to see just how we size up.

It might be personal: “How does your leadership style compare?” Or, it might be company-specific: “How does your manufacturing process compare?” The goal in benchmarking is to see how we are doing – so that we can either feel good about our path or learn where we are falling behind.

TIP: Any “poor” results should be unveiled definitively but delicately … the goal is to encourage action, not offend your prospects by telling them they are utter failures.

Prospects are almost unanimous in their desire for better benchmarking data. The Demand Gen Report reports 97% of respondents agree that B2B marketers could improve the quality of their content by providing more benchmarking data.

When it comes to combining benchmarking with interactive content, marketers can offer a series of questions or go for a more visual format like an interactive infographic. The benefit of an interactive infographic is that it takes one of the most powerful forms of content marketing and supercharges it with a benchmarking call to action, as well as adding the attraction of interactive content – a true triple play.  Benchmarking content might make sense at the top of the funnel, but it also can be used further down at the consideration or intent stage, when prospects are looking to hone in on specifics.

You can see the benchmark format in this Marketing Grader, which assesses visitors’ websites along multiple dimensions and offers suggestions for improvement. The grader is a way for HubSpot to offer useful information while advertising some of the features of the HubSpot inbound-marketing platform.

4. Calculate

Calculators have come a long way in the last few years. No longer reserved for the few who have the budget and resources to develop one, calculators are being used increasingly by B2B marketers to make the case for their products.

Across industries, buyers are hungry for calculators that help them consider and justify purchases. According to the Demand Gen Report in 2015, nearly 25% of those surveyed said they had used ROI calculators to research B2B purchase decisions in the past year – more importantly, 40% of respondents ranked calculators as a 4 or 5 (out of 5) in terms of the value they provide during the purchase process. Thinking about building a calculator? Consider one that calculates:

• Cost of customer churn

• Cost of server downtime

• Cost of product returns

• ROI on your trade-show investment

As marketers, providing prospects with an easy way to calculate the ROI they would receive by purchasing your product is high value and high impact.

Solar Simplified’s ROI calculator shows buyers how much they could save on their power bill by switching to solar. Not everyone speaks wattage, so having an “I don’t know” option for a few different inputs is smart. If the visitor selects that option, the calculator will suggest a number based on the numbers already provided.

5. Watch … and respond

Everyone loves a good movie, and marketing videos are no different. Think of the allure of Super Bowl commercials. Marketers across industries use videos to identify, educate, entertain, and engage prospects and move them through the funnel. However, as great as these videos are at generating views and shares, they suffer from the same challenge as static white papers. It’s hard to gauge your prospect’s real engagement:

• Did they even watch the video or was it playing in the background?

• Was the mute button on or off?

• Did a co-worker interrupt, but the prospect didn’t bother to pause the video?

Marketers need a way to combine the power of video with the engagement and tracking. Enter the interactive video. It melds two of the most effective content types – the video and the quiz (or survey, calculator, configurator, assessment, etc.) – into one super-charged content experience. Take your awesome video content and layer in a series of questions. Allow the prospects to pause and respond at any point, giving you valuable insight into their viewing and buying journey, while your prospects collect their personalized results.

Check out Symantec’s interactive video on end-point protection. It marries cool animation, a few quick questions, and a lead-gen form in 1:37. (Note: Symantec uses SnapApp for this.)

Try an unusual CTA today

We’re almost three-fourths of the way through 2015. Are you achieving the marketing goals you boldly outlined in January? Can you do better? Interactive content might be just what you need to give your marketing a mid-year boost.

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How to Craft an Effective Call to Action

Anyone running an online business is familiar with the classic Call to Action (CTA). Often filled with active verbs enticing us to “Buy Now,” “Download Our Whitepaper,” or “Sign up for Our Newsletter,” CTAs are a critical part of any online marketing strategy.

However, as your site grows and you have more content to promote, it’s easy to abuse the call to action. We’ve all seen this turn ugly—the cluttered marketing sites with twenty different calls to action clamoring for your attention as soon as you hit the page. Multiple brightly colored buttons each begging you to “Click Here” aren’t doing the site or the business any favors. These sites are like pushy used car salesmen whose eagerness and enthusiasm comes off as desperate and spammy.

Conversely, a strategically-placed CTA will attract interest and yield a radically higher conversion rate, giving visitors just the right prompt at just the right moment. If a site with multiple calls to action is the pushy used car salesman, a site with a strategic CTA is the seasoned sales professional, who builds a relationship and rapport with the consumer before moving to close the deal.

Consider Context

Call to action text is one of the most often tested ingredients of a landing page, and for good reason. Upgrading a vague, generic CTA to one that communicates value and prompts action can yield huge increases in conversion rates, so optimizing your CTA textis well worth the time and energy. But even a perfectly-worded call to action can be improved by considering it within the broader context of a website’s design.

A great sales pitch isn’t made by the closing line—it’s everything that leads up to the ask. The same is true of the call to action on your website. Even if you nail the verbiage on the button itself, if the aesthetics and content of a landing page aren’t designed to support and lead into the CTA, the conversion rate will suffer. A great call to action will fit seamlessly within the flow of a landing page so that when a visitor reads (or scans) the page, the CTA provides a clear and compelling next step.

A common practice is to ensure that the call to action is placed “above the fold,” and there is certainly still value in showing important information near the top of the page. However, studies have shown that when the CTA is placed precisely at the point where the visitor has the information they need to make their decision, rather than placed above the fold, ityields a higher conversion rate. So rather than arbitrarily forcing a CTA higher on the page, look at the page from a visitor’s perspective, and see where the call to action best fits in the overall flow of the content and design. Finding the right position for the CTA requires an understanding of the visitor’s expectations and an anticipation of their state of mind.

Understand Your Audience

So how do we understand our websites’ visitors? A/B testing and analytics give us valuable data about where visitors are clicking and which content is converting at a higher rate, but they don’t tell us about our visitors’ needs and motivations. The needs and motivations of our visitors are qualitative, as opposed to quantitative data such as analytics and A/B testing. The only way to get this qualitative data is to talk with your visitors. Spend time building a relationship with your audience and talking with them about why they do what they do.

Here are some ways to gain a deeper understanding of your audience:

1. Talk face-to-face. Emails, phone calls, and Google Hangouts can provide a backup option when it’s not feasible to meet with members of your audience in person, but there’s just no substitute to sitting down and talking in person. Being physically present helps nurture the relationship and will create a sense of trust and openness that you won’t get from a phone call. This feeling of openness will allow your customer to speak more freely, and you will gain a better understanding as a result.
2. Have a conversation, not an interview. Rather than grilling your audience trying to extract information from them, have a genuine conversation with them. Allow them to tell you about the problems they’re trying to overcome, struggles with their job, and the motivations behind why they do what they do.
3. Watch your audience use your product—even if that product is a blog. Ask them to go through some of their common tasks and talk about what they’re doing while they do it. Ask why they do things the way they do. The great thing about observing is that you can spot telling behaviors that your audience may not even be consciously aware of—things they wouldn’t be able to tell you themselves.

Use this new understanding of your visitors to optimize your content and call to action for what motivates them. Instead of focusing on a list of features, speak to how you’re going to solve their problems and meet their needs. When visitors understand the larger value of your solution and how it fits with their specific needs, they’re ready to take the next step. That’s when they should see your clear, compelling call to action.

A Truly Great Call to Action

A great call to action is more than just the words within the button. It’s knowing your audience well enough to know where the CTA should be on the page—the right moment when they’re ready for that prompt to take the next step.

To get to this level of meaningful understanding, you need more than just A/B testing and analytics data. Take the time to talk and listen to your audience, and you’ll be more fully equipped to create content—and a call to action—that resonates with their needs.

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3 Steps to Improving Your Lead Generation Landing Pages

Less is more when it comes to effective lead generation pages. Here are three steps to increase conversions from your landing pages.

Online lead generation is one of those things that is easy to do poorly and more complicated to do well. Sure, if you have a very compelling product or service offering and a highly motivated visitor base, collecting leads online is simple (at least, in theory). But most lead generation sites operate in a competitive environment in which website visitors have a lot of choice and probably a healthy dose of skepticism. Nobody wants to be spammed or badgered by relentless sales calls after filling out a form, and this concern makes many people think twice before giving out their contact information to a company they don't know.

With rising concerns about privacy coupled with an ever-increasing competitive environment, the deck is stacked against any company trying to collect valid, qualified leads online. If you're feeling defeated, try these three simple steps for improving the effectiveness of your lead generation landing pages.

Focus on Your Call-to-Action (CTA)

There are three common CTA-related problems that affect lead capture pages: lack of a CTA, unclear CTAs due to lack of visual prioritization, and the main CTA not getting enough attention because of competing CTAs or visual clutter.

Use these tips to overcome these problems and increase the chances of your visitor responding to your call to action:

• Use a simple page layout that places visual importance on the call to action. There should not be any competing graphics on the page unless they directly support your call to action. For example, if your call to action offers an e-book, you could have a picture of the e-book near the form to draw attention toward the call to action.
• Match the headline of the lead capture page to the call to action, creating a one-two messaging punch that leaves no doubt in the visitor's mind as to what the page is offering.
• Remove unnecessary page distractions including the navigation. The worst thing for a call to action is to have to compete with multiple other link options elsewhere on the page. Consider making your CTA the only actionable element on the page.

Affordable-Home-Insurance.org’s CTA button stands out from the rest of the page, and immediately grabs the visitor’s attention.

Remember that pictures of human faces will get attention, but that this could easily work against your call to action. If you must use a picture of a person, be sure the person's eyes are gazing toward your call to action. If the person in the photo is gazing straight out at the visitor, or off the page, the photo will cause a strong visual distraction away from your CTA.

MR Insurance Consultants' photo of a woman gazing toward the form directs the visitor's attention to the CTA area.

Reduce the Amount of Text on the Page

Very few people actually read on the Web. Most people want to arrive at a page and with a quick glimpse be able to tell whether the page is relevant to their needs. So instead of presenting a lot of text in paragraph form (which can be a visual turn-off), rewrite your content using:

• Bullet points
• Bite-size sub-headings that categorize the content
• Clickable areas like buttons and links that users can use to drilldown for deeper information

Cut back on the text by getting rid half of what you originally had and removing adjectives that can’t be substantiated factually. Most readers will disregard those words anyway.

Shorten the Form (or at Least Make It Appear Short)

The first question to ask when creating a form is this: What is the minimum amount of information I need from this visitor in order to know if he/she is an appropriate lead? If you are enticing the form-fill by offering some sort of asset (e.g. a whitepaper or buying guide), the amount of information you ask from the customer should be commensurate to what you’re giving them. Most people will not think it’s worth providing a lot of personal information just to get a whitepaper, but on the other hand if you are offering them home mortgage rates or quotes on health insurance, they will understand the need to provide pretty specific information.

U-HAUL and PODS are both in the moving and storage business, yet the former asks for very little information. U-HAUL’s form looks easier and less invasive by asking only for essential information.

In most cases, if the form is shorter, then the conversion rate is higher. But this isn't always true. If you have enough traffic, you should carefully test the addition of any field before making permanent changes to your form. If adding a field is costing you conversions, you'll need to decide if the trade-off is acceptable to your company. You may be surprised to find that the sales team that simply couldn't survive without certain information will back off from their position when they start getting more leads into their pipeline.

A good rule of thumb when designing your form is to imagine talking to the prospective customer in real life. In the real world, you wouldn’t be comfortable asking for too much information too early in the conversation, so follow that same etiquette online.

If a lot of information is necessary, experiment with staging the form in different ways. Consider dividing the form into separate screens or a lightbox pop-over sequence (e.g. one screen for contact information, another screen for personal information, and so on).

Boring and Short Work in Lead Gen

All these tips follow a single critical theme: less is more. Optimize your lead capture page by simplifying the page headline and text, clarifying and streamlining the call to action (and form), and reducing visual distractions. Remove extraneous words and graphics and focus on what's important - the offer, and the form. It may sound boring, but when it comes to lead capture forms, it works.

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4 Tips For Creating An Effective Call To Action

If you work in marketing or digital operations, the call to action (CTA) is something of a rock star. We test it. We revere it. We understand that a small lift in click-throughs for it can mean significant gains for the business. 

And yet a quick Google search for CTA will pull up results for the Chicago Transit Authority, the California Teacher’s Association, the Cherenkov Telescope Array, and a slew of other results, while our little rock star—the call to action—is nowhere to be found on page 1.

The reality of the call to action is that while there’s now more attention paid to it compared to, say, 10 years ago, we could still be thinking about it and optimizing it quite a bit more.

Below are four tips to help you go beyond just testing your CTA button color:

1. Contrast

The first lever that you can turn when testing versions of your CTA is contrast. Note that we’re not specifically talking about colors. Colors are absolutely a factor, but even if red tests better than green, that doesn’t mean red converts better in a general sense. Red may have more contrast against the colors used in your theme.

It’s important to have mostly a color-neutral presentation—benign and boring works quite well for most sites, and you’ll have more leeway to make the CTA more distinctive when using a “bland” page.

2. Choices

The second lever almost does not need to get mentioned: for your CTAs to be found, you need to limit choices. Limit the potential actions of your visitors. One is ideal, and two potential actions can be forgiven if you absolutely need the second choice.

Any more than that and you’re just confusing your visitor. Remember: if you prioritize everything, you prioritize nothing.

3. Affordance

Contrast and choices (or the lack thereof) will help visitors spot buttons. Visual affordance tells visitors what they can do with those buttons.

For the latter, you have several options available:

• Shape: rounded objects call a little more attention and convey a little more interactivity
• Size: greater sizes typically help give buttons more attention and hierarchical “weight”
• Position: negative space around buttons help visitors understand that the area can be interacted with

For your CTAs to work, two things need to happen. First, visitors need to be able to spot them without any effort. Second, visitors must instantly know what they do—affordance, limited choices, and contrast are required, but they are the bare minimum. You need more.

4. Intent

Don’t underestimate the importance of matching intent. This sounds complicated (and it often is) but there are simple things you can start with. At a bare essentials level, that means making sure your calls to action are indeed actions. For instance, there’s a difference between “Free Trial” to “Try it Free.”

You might be surprised at the difference in click-through rates between the passive versus the more action-oriented one.

If you want to dive deeper, you can go through the usual tools you have for crafting emotional messaging. In an example case for the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, just changing the form CTA from “Submit” to “Support Haiti” increased dollars donated per visitor by 15.75%.

Yes, emotions matter a lot in conversion.

Making it Count

Optimizing web sites often call for tests on the CTAs, and that’s absolutely required. But once you know that you need to test, and once you actually have the tools required to test, there’s still the matter of knowing exactly which levers you are turning for your tests.

With contrast, choices, affordance, and intent, you have a complete set of tools to test to make your CTA count.

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