Most businesses put a lot of thought into how they describe themselves online, and very little into what they’d like visitors to actually do once they’ve read it. It’s often the reason a perfectly good website brings in far fewer enquiries than it should.
When we start working with a business on a new website, a lot of the early conversations tend to be about what the site should say. How the business describes itself, which services go where, how the team comes across and whether the tone feels right are all things people care about a great deal, and quite rightly so.
What comes up far less often is what a person visiting the site should do once they’ve read it all. It’s usually assumed that if the content is good enough, people will naturally find their way to the contact page, and so the end of most pages gets a “get in touch” button and not much else. The thinking, more or less, is that the content has done the hard work and anyone who’s interested will be keen to fill in the form.
In our experience, that’s not really how it goes. People read the page, maybe find it interesting, and then leave without doing anything, not because they weren’t interested but because there was no clear way to take the next step, or it wasn’t clear what the next step should be.
Make it easy and obvious
It’s easy to forget that the people visiting your website don’t know your business the way you do. You know exactly what happens after someone gets in touch, who they’ll speak to, how long it takes and what it might cost. To a visitor, almost all of that is unknown, and a button that just says “contact us” doesn’t really tell them enough. It can feel so general that people simply scroll straight past it.
People are often less worried about finding the perfect option than they are about making the wrong choice, and on a website that means the hesitation before clicking a button is often less about whether someone likes what you do and more about whether getting in touch feels like a risk. Will they be pushed into a sales call, will they be chased for weeks afterwards, or will they have to explain everything from scratch to someone who isn’t really listening?
When those questions go unanswered, doing nothing feels like the safest option, and doing nothing is exactly what most visitors do.
People have less patience than they used to
Most of us have got used to finding answers almost instantly, whether that’s checking a price, booking an appointment or getting a delivery update, and that expectation comes with us when we visit a business website. People are often comparing a few options at once, sometimes in several tabs, and if it isn’t obvious what to do next on your site, it’s very easy for them to click back and try someone else who makes it simpler.
That impatience also means people are less willing to send a message and wait to find out the basics. If the only way to learn what something costs or how you work is to get in touch and hope for a reply, a lot of visitors would rather keep looking.
It’s also worth remembering that only a small number of the people visiting your website will be ready to buy that day, while most are still somewhere earlier on, interested but not quite there. We touched on this in our post about why ad spend is wasted without conversion rate optimisation, and it applies just as much to visitors who find you through search, social media or a recommendation. If the only option on the page is a sales conversation, the website is really only built for the few people who were ready to have one that day.
Everyone else needs something they can do there and then. That might be seeing a rough guide to pricing, downloading something useful, booking a short call at a time that suits them or signing up to hear from you occasionally. None of these replace the enquiry, but they give people who aren’t ready yet a way to stay connected, rather than leaving and quite possibly never coming back.
A good call to action tells people what happens next
The most useful calls to action we see tend to be quite specific. Instead of “contact us”, they say something like “book a 20-minute call to talk through your project” or “get a quote within two working days”, which tells the visitor what they’re doing, how long it’ll take and what they’ll get out of it.
It can also help to take some of the worry away right next to the button itself. A short line saying there’s no obligation, that they’ll hear back from a named person, or that you’ll only use their email to reply to them can help someone feel much more comfortable about clicking. These small reassurances often do more than they look like they would, because they deal with the concerns holding people back rather than trying to convince them of something they already believe.
The wording matters too. Buttons written from the visitor’s point of view, such as “show me pricing” or “send me the guide”, tend to feel more natural than ones written from the business’s side, and they make it clear what’s in it for the person clicking.
Every page needs a next step
Calls to action are often only thought about on the homepage and the contact page, but a lot of visitors arrive on a service page, a case study or a blog post first, sometimes from a search engine and sometimes from a link someone has shared. If those pages end with nothing more than a footer, there’s nowhere obvious for anyone to go.
It’s worth looking at each of your main pages and asking what someone reading it is likely to want to do next. A person reading a case study might want to see similar work or find out whether you could do something similar for them, while someone reading a blog post might be much earlier on and happier to sign up for more of the same. The next step doesn’t have to be the same everywhere, and it usually works better when it isn’t.
It also helps to be fairly selective. A page with five different buttons all asking for attention can be just as confusing as a page with none, so it’s often worth deciding on one main action and perhaps a gentler alternative for people who aren’t ready, and letting everything else take a back seat.
Making sure people can actually use it
A call to action is only useful if people can see it and use it. Around one in four people in the UK has a disability, and buttons that blend into the background, links that only say “click here”, or forms that can’t be completed using a keyboard can make it much harder for them to take that next step. Clear labels, good colour contrast and forms that work properly with assistive technology aren’t just accessibility requirements, they also make the next step easier for everyone.
On a phone, it’s worth checking that the main action is easy to reach without too much scrolling and that buttons are big enough to tap comfortably. Most visits now happen on mobile, and a call to action that works nicely on a desktop screen can end up buried or awkward to use on a smaller one.
It’s usually a small change with a big effect
Most businesses put a lot of care into how they describe themselves, and that care isn’t wasted, but it’s worth giving at least some of the same attention to what you’d like people to do once they’ve read it, because that’s often what decides whether a visitor becomes an enquiry or simply moves on.
If your website is getting visitors but not many of them are getting in touch, it might be worth having a fresh pair of eyes look at how each page guides people towards the next step. Have a chat with us about user experience and we can help you work out where people are hesitating and what might help them along.
