How to get calls to action right
There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. The short answer to calls to action is that it is mostly a sequence of small decisions, not one big one.
Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.
Why this earns attention
One clear next step beats several options. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
The steps
- Establish what you have today before changing anything
- Say what happens after the click
- Reduce the sense of risk near the button
- Write down the decision so the next person does not re-litigate it
Reduce the sense of risk near the button. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Making it stick
How to tell if yours is fine
Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Three things worth confirming about calls to action before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Reduce the sense of risk near the button — 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.