How To Dramatically Improve Your Website's Conversion Rate

You may have heard the term before, but you might not be aware of what it means, especially what it means in terms of you and your business.

It will have the greatest impact on website conversions, yet it is the one thing that most website owners neglect when designing their website.

The "call to action"

All good websites have at least one (usually several) calls to action, and they generally prosper because of them.

In short, a call to action is something that asks website visitors to do something. It's your job as a website owner to make the process of ordering a product, requesting more information or signing up for a free report as easy as possible, and providing a call to action is the most important part of that process.

Let's suppose, for example, that you have a weekly newsletter that you send out by email to your database. You want to get more subscribers to this list so you include a box on the home page of your website asking people to fill in their details and click 'Subscribe' to start receiving the newsletter.

At the bottom of this box there will probably be a big button bearing the word 'Subscribe!' in big letters, with an arrow pointing to it. It may sound like you are holding the hands of your website visitors and leading them to take a specific action, and in reality you are, but this call to action makes it clear what they need to do to receive some kind of benefit, in this case a free newsletter.

But there is more to the call to action than directing people to press a button or click their mouse. You can also make it more enticing and add a certain urgency to the task you are encouraging them to perform.

Think about all the things you have ever ordered online. Did you ever order something because they told you it was in short supply, or that the price would go up in the next couple of hours if you didn't order straightaway?

In this sense, a call to action can instill a sense of urgency in your customer. It's worth spending some time figuring out how you can put a call to action to the best use on your own site, as it has the ability to make a real difference to your profits in both the short and the long term.