A practical checklist for calls to action
Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Run through this the next time calls to action comes up.
Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
The checklist
- One clear next step beats several options
- Say what happens after the click
- Reduce the sense of risk near the button
- Someone is named as the owner
- There is a date to review it again
What it costs to ignore
One clear next step beats several options. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.
How to tell if yours is fine
Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about calls to action before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- One clear next step beats several options — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.