A great call-to-action (CTA) is intended for getting the relevant visitors to click on them and help you increase sales, subscriptions, signups, etc. The placement, design, color, text, and effects used in your CTAs have a major effect on how often they will be clicked.

You have great calls to action in place when:

• You have calls to action that you DESIGN to your site and purpose. The CTAs should be placed as naturally in context of the page as possible. Colors should not hurt the viewer’s eyes, but the contrast should make them visible enough. Your buttons should be attractive and interesting – with color and shape.
• They help your visitors NAVIGATE to the most important sections or pages. Visitors are able to use CTA buttons to quickly reach the most relevant content on your website.
• You have used the TRIAL-AND-ERROR approach to determine what CTAs your visitors are most likely to click through. You will need to then emulate those to create similarly effective CTAs.

It is not too difficult to create effective CTAs. All that’s required is to place them strategically, with full understanding of why you need them and how visitors can best use them.

Create Context-Specific Calls to Action
Create calls to action that are specific to the pages on your website. For instance, on your home, you want to encourage your visitors to visit pages that educate them more about your industry or your authority in it.

As and when you add new content, you will need to create new and relevant CTAs for those new pages. Use calls to action on every new page with new content to keep things rolling.

Use Words that Provoke Action
Starting all calls to action with a verb is a clichéd strategy that, however, still works. Overall, your CTAs should take the traffic around your site.

Clear, unambiguous, assertive calls to action draw visitors by letting them know both expected action and subsequent result, for example, “Download _______ free!”

Use CTAs on every page, consistently
As noted before, calls to action are also a navigation feature. All new and/or important pages on your site should have relevant calls to action. When visitors click CTAs, they provide you information you can use to keep the sales team on its toes. Without a suitable call to action on a page, you are leaving probable scope for engagement on the table. Visitor may leave your site too, for lack of ‘things to do’ in your site. Calls to action keep visitors clicking as long as quality content is made available after every click.

You cannot be too careful in planning the placement of your calls to action, but you will do well to research and think out the best places for your CTAs. Well-placed calls to action will also enhance visitors’ experience as they can significantly cut down on the time to relevant content.