How do you convince visitors that of the millions of websites out there that yours is going to be the one to solve their problems?
Impossible you say? No way! You can influence visitors to act by having attention grabbing calls to action. Calls to action, or the chunks of website text prompting visitors to act, can be mastered. Just follow our 5-step checklist and you’ll be on your way to conquering calls to action in no time.
Get Your Visitors Moving With Color
Getting visitors to act in a world of distractions is hard, especially for new websites. How do you show a population of mult-taskers that they need to put down their phones and pay attention?
If simply asking visitors to respond to your calls-to-action isn’t working, try using color to get them to act.
Red
Thanks to stop signs, emergency sirens, and fire extinguishers we have been conditioned to associate red with stop, look, and pay attention. On top of identifying importance and immediacy, red is used to signify passion, action and power.
7 Tips To Increase List Sign-Ups
Email marketing is still one of the most powerful forms of advertising and also one of the most cost effective. However, to put together your own email campaigns, you must improve your ability to increase sign ups to your opt-in email list.
With these seven tips, you can start building a super-sized email marketing list of ideal prospects in no time at all.
1. Make it Visible
Make your email list visible. Place your sign up form above page break so they do not have to scroll down to find it. Prospects are extremely unlikely search for it on their own so make sure it stands out.
2. Keep It Simple
While detailed information may help you build targeted marketing campaigns it can also drastically reduce the number of sign ups. Keep it simple and limit the number of required fields. Most successful email marketing lists are built from email addresses alone.
3. Refer A Friend
Referrals are one of the most powerful and effective forms of marketing. Suggest that your contacts and visitors subscribe their friends and businesses partners so that they can share the benefits of your newsletters, tips, and products or services too. This can turn one lead into a hundred.
4. Be Compelling
Giving the option to sign up to receive newsletters or emails from you is not enough. You must compel them to action! Convey the immediate benefits of joining your email list. Use free reports and guides to relay the real tangible value they gain by subscribing to your emails.
5. Contests & Drawings
Motivate your traffic to sign up by running contests and holding drawings for prizes. Make giveaways and rewards relevant to your industry. Mortgage companies could offer to give away a free month’s mortgage payment, food and drink sites can give away samples, and so on.
6. Sense Of Loss
Most people naturally move away from pain and towards pleasure. They want relief so communicate to them, the pain or displeasure they are experiencing and how signing up for your list will offer relief and the solutions they seek.
7. Expand
Aside from subscription forms on your website, post links to sign up forms to your blog and social media assets [Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.]. You can even use add links to your signatures in forums and discussion boards, along with your emails to invite other contacts to sign up.
Your Turn
Harness the power of these email marketing tips for building bigger opt-in lists and take your business to the next level. Remember that email campaigns are not only great for acquiring new clients but are also ideal for up-selling and dramatically increasing customer sales.
What Is ROI?
Confession time. I’ve been involved with marketing, mainly social media marketing for a few years now, but it wasn’t until just recently that I learned the meaning of ROI. Coming from my experience as a journalism intern at Intel [the home of thousands of acronyms] I’m not going to say that I’m embarrassed by this confession. The truth is, there are so many terms out there that are used freely only to be tossed aside and forgotten down the road, why SHOULD I be embarrassed. You can’t know everything.
So in celebration of honesty, the acquisition of knowledge, and to help others like me out there [who had NO clue what ROI meant], let me break it down for you.
ROI stands for Return on Investment. It is a basic business principle and in the World Wide Web it is usually applied to marketing efforts. It is not a precise measurement but can be used to figure out if an ad campaign was effective. And despite how imprecise the term is it’s still often expressed as a percentage.
- For example if you purchase $70 worth of keywords to place in an ad on Google and it brings you $700 worth of business then you are seeing 90% ROI. But don’t get your hopes up – a 90% ROI is rare. Doing well normally means a 30% ROI.
Marketers use this principle to compare and contrast campaigns. It is a basically a way of seeing if the returns measure up to the costs, or if the actions brought about the desired results. Being aware of the ROI on every one of your decisions can help you be a better decision maker in your business in general.
Your Turn
What was a business or marketing term you learned recently? Was it ROI or something else? Share by posting the term and its definition below.
Use Color to Affect User Behavior
One of the hottest topics of discussion in web design lately is how colors can affect the behavior of users visiting a site. Think about it – when you see an icon that says “Click Here” what color is it? I’m going to guess it isn’t gray. While you create your online business presence you’ll want to consider what colors make your visitors click or look away.
Research has shown that the more vivid the color of a link is, the more likely they are to click on it. Bright colors are more likely to be noticed while greyer or mid-toned links are likely to be ignored. Let’s go back to that “Click Here” icon I asked you about earlier. It was yellow, wasn’t it? Or red? Or orange? Our willingness to click a link seems to be related to our natural curiosity about bright colors.
Use color so it feels less like filling out a form.
Make the colors of your registration page brighter than the rest of your pages.
Keep In Mind: People like links that are complimentary or in the same pallet as the background color of the page and seem to dislike links that are too contrasting (stand out too much from the background).
Use only a few colors and keep them consistent.
Consistency of color on your site overall is more professional looking.
Professionalism makes a site seem more credible and trustworthy. Besides, visitors also seem to linger longer on sites that tend to have some consistency in design.
Strange But True: People tend to visit websites with darker backgrounds at night and ones with lighter backgrounds during the day.
Combine this information with what you already know about your customers and you might be able to improve click-through rates, conversions and sales.
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