The Original Conversion Copywriter, Joanna Wiebe
Shows You How to Get More Clicks on Your Calls to Action

This video is brought to you by Copy Hackers

You should follow Copy Hackers on Twitter

[Tweet “hi @copyhackers i just watched your free vid on calls to action – loved it!”]

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, there. Joanna here from Copy Hackers. Today we are talking about one of my favorite topics ever and that is buttons, or calls to action. Buttons on your site are hugely important for conversion. You’re going to convert online and I don’t mean by calling in after looking at something online but to complete a conversion online, you really can’t do that without clicking at least one button and in most cases a series of buttons.

NOTE: If you’re just joining this free optimization bootcamp today, click here to start from the beginning

There a lot of opportunities to optimize your converted file just by customizing those buttons. There are truly like hundreds, I know it sounds dramatic but there are a lot of ways that you can go about optimizing your buttons.

Today we’re going to talk about five of those ways and while everything in this course, in this video series is based on proven results and a lot of A/B tests, we are going to look specifically at five A/B test that we ran on buttons in particular and focus on trying to make those sorts of changes, changes that are really likely to move the needle for you on your site. Let’s look at five really awesome opportunities for you to optimize your buttons today and also if you choose to setup a split test.

Here is the first way that you can optimize your button today. Use a high-contrast color. Let me explain what that is and what we did. For Acuity Scheduling, we were working on their plans and pricing page and their brand colors were really kind of black, gray and green. The three buttons across the control were all black. That was really good in keeping with the brand colors but unfortunately it’s not that great for conversion simply because it’s a little harder to figure out which one you should choose when everything looks the same.We did what we always do with the plans and pricing page or catalog and that is we chose the product that we most wanted to sell. That’s the one that we wanted to focus people’s attention on. It will probably come as no surprise to you that we chose the middle of the road option. It’s usually the one that’s the best for a lot of people and it’s really the easy one to optimize for because of the way our brains work in deciding to choose the less extreme option that we’re offered.

We did two things, knowing that we wanted to change the button colors, something that was high-contrast and that was we tested a green button which was in keeping with the brand colors for Acuity. Now we tested an orange button which was complete different from anything that their brand had going on and looked very different on the page.

Now button-color test may seem like kind of a joke, right? Who does a button-color test? The reason that people push against them is because a color isn’t necessarily persuasive. When we’re testing we’re usually trying to get to a point of better understanding what we can do to persuade our users or visitors down the road, not to step this time. A color isn’t necessarily persuasive but what it is, what it can be it is can help people pay attention to things. It really speaks more to our lizard brain, the really reactive part of us. That lizard brain likes bright shiny objects and it’s likely to respond well to things that grab attention. It wants to make rapid decisions.

Great. That understood, we ran the test A/B/C. The green button brought in a significant increase of 81%. The orange button also brought in a significant increase and that was at 95%. Both of them created a good lift for Acuity. They could create a good lift for you as well but what we can see here is that the higher the contrast of the color, the more noticeable your button is, the more likely it is strangely enough to be clicked.

The second way: make one call to action most prominent. We talked a lot about having one goal for a page. That really comes through again and again in the test that we ran. We’re really seeing a constant validation that that’s really a good approach and a better proven practice. People need to know what they should be clicking and what they should be considering clicking.

It’s also important to make sure that we use buttons in such a way that match user expectations that are set all over the web as it is. Going against expectations or doing things differently, you should always do it in a really strategic way rather than just as a guess. If we’ve been trained to use the web in a certain way, it’s probably not a good idea to veer too much from that norm.

In this test the control was veering from the norm a bit. It used the three buttons in the Here section of the home page. The tested variation, we ran against that, replaced those three buttons with one primary button and really then took everything else that was in this strange little button-looking containers and we turned that into regular matching, like a headlines subhead. That’s all that changed on this page is that area where we really tried to make it clear that there’s one button to click, not three buttons to click. Nothing else changed outside of that space. The simplified Here section with that one primary clear and unmissable call to action increased registrations by 45%. Make one call to action the most prominent in that page.

Three, use click triggers. Now if you did the Reasons to Believe exercise already, great. You already have some click triggers to work with. If you didn’t, maybe watch that after you watch this. Click triggers are those small but relevant messages you put next to buttons to help knock down a few more bricks from this wall that people build up in resistance to doing what we want them to do to converting. People are naturally suspicious about giving you their money or signing up for your stuff. We have to do what it takes to knock little bricks down in that wall piece by piece, one by one.

A click trigger has to make sense for the button at the time that it is being presented to somebody, so at the right point in the user experience. A button with a click trigger on the home page is probably going to be a different button with a different click trigger when you’re going into a cart or when you’re completing a sign-up. To get people to move from one informational page to another informational page will require different sorts of points than getting someone to move from information to payment.

A really good click trigger is a risk-reducing message. We’re not actually talking about the test that I ran where we used risk reducing messages. We’ve run those tests before. We’re not going to talk with that one today but I do want to point it out. A risk reducer is something that speaks to what’s going to happen next. Before I click a button, I’m wondering what’s on the other side of that button.

It’s our job as the people who are creating those buttons and those experiences to reduce that risk for people. Tell them what’s on the other side. It doesn’t have to be in the button. It can be below the button again as the click trigger. You would say if someone’s objection to clicking or something that they fear is that they’re signing up to get information from you, “Oh, man. Someone is going to call me.”  Then you might want to put as a click trigger, “No sales agent will call you.”

Risk reducers are really good as click triggers but for this test we”re going to talk about FriendBuy, a test we ran here. This is the beginning of account creation. If you have a space where people are creating an account of any kind whether for SaaS or if they’re setting up an account just for your e-commerce site to get in your cart and be able to sing back in down the road, here are the click triggers that we used.

On one variation we used a testimonial from an authority. On the other we used two bullets. The one bullet told people that no credit card was required and again and again we see this working well. If you have a SAS solution and there is no credit card required, I truly, strongly recommend that you either just make that change and add that click trigger to your button or run that test as soon as possible to see if that click trigger will work for you.

The other bullet here was reminding visitors of the value of the service. Now the winning variation was the one that used the two bullets that got a 33.8% lift in sign-ups. Pretty good if you can get 34% more people to move through to the next point of account creation then again as I said earlier, it’s a matter of simply optimizing each button as people move through your panel.

I also want to point out here that although the testimonial one did not beat the two bullets and it didn’t make a significance it was trending well above the control, still below the bullets but well above the control throughout the test. A testimonial could work as a bit click trigger on yours and it’s definitely worth testing.

The fourth way is to repeat buttons at the bottom of the page. It seems obvious, I know but what we really want to do is we always want to reduce friction and that means understanding what friction points exist on our site. Friction is what keeps people from completing a task on your site. For buttons, friction is often making the button too small to easily click on or making it gray so it looks disabled or making people have to scroll to get to it.

In this case for Schedulicity, we identified potential friction as people having to scroll to reach the button. The button appears first in the control at the top of the page above the fold and then there were again below it. Admittedly, it’s not a very long page but there is persuasive content below that call to action and below the fold. If someone reads through that content, finds themselves persuaded and then wants to sign up, should they have to scroll back up to the top to get to it. Now, I’m not suggesting you pepper your page with all sorts of calls to action but when it makes sense to and usually at he bottom of the page you may want to add another call to action and it should be the same call to action that’s the primary call to action for that page. Again, sticking to one page goal per page.

The winning treatment here repeated the called action exactly as it was above where it had a click trigger with it, repeated that down to the bottom of the page just above the footer. That brought in a 24% lift in account starts. We also added a testimonial to this so that might be something else if you can amplify or boost your called action a the bottom of that page.

Now you think that adding a button is no big deal, right? People can scroll back up, it’s easy. If they want to do it they can but optimizing your site when you’re talking about really squeezing every conversion out of your site. We’re talking about doing these little things that will bring in incremental growth across the board all the time where you’ll keep growing. A 24% lift in account starts is nothing to sneeze at. It’s a very easy change that you can make to your page today.

The fifth and final one that we’re going to talk about here is to use visuals like arrows and outlines to draw the eye to your button. In this case for Gumballs.com, we tested a handful of variations on the checkout page. The winning treatment used a combination of the following three things to get a 20% lift in paid conversions. So 20% more people chose to hand over the credit card details than in the control situation. Pretty big deal when were talking about real money on the table.

Three things we added were a first-person button, that was the Copy turned into first-person language, a colorful box around the button which was done to particularly draw the eye away from the coupon code which is written in red over to the side and other distractions. We wanted to focus people on the thing that they need to focus one. We added a testimonial click triggers just below it. This is important to mention. We replaced the language estimate shipping with fast, affordable shipping.

With those changes not only did they result in 20% more paid conversions, more sales which is let’s remember not just a one-time win but an ongoing win now going forward. We also saw an significant increase in revenue.

Here are again five ways you can optimize your buttons. One, use a high-contrast color on the button you most want people to click. Two, make one called to action most prominent. Three, use click triggers and test to find the right click triggers for you at the right points in the conversion panel. Four, repeat buttons at the bottom of the page above the footer. Five, use visuals to draw the eye away from distractions and toward the button.

Okay, your assignment for today. Now, because buttons are so huge for conversion I want to start you a bit and they’re also very easy to optimize when you know what to do or you have a really good hunch hypothesis as to why you might want to make a change to a button. Because of those reasons I’m going to ask you to start yourself a bit and fill up your full 50 minutes with a couple of optimization tasks. Here you go.