The 10 best manufacturing website designs in 2024
Aug 19, 2024
A call-to-action (CTA) is a critical part of driving actions and conversions on your website. They're the visual prompts and pathways that guide visitors through your website and towards a desired outcome like demo requests, purchases, or filling out a contact form – conversions like these are all influenced by the placement, design, wording, and overall quality of your CTAs.
Without strategically crafted CTAs, your website essentially becomes a passive informational piece. Visitors are left to self-navigate and determine their own paths, which can lead to them abandoning their journeys.
CTAs solve this by making the desired action crystal clear. When designed and positioned with purpose, calls-to-action quite literally "call" users to take the right action at the right moment.
On websites, a call-to-action refers to any graphical or text-based element specifically intended to drive visitors to click and transition from their current page to another specific page or a specific action.
Common examples include:
CTAs can vary in their, visual style, and functionality. These variables impact their efficacy for your audience.
CTAs are essential for nudging buyers through key content and pages on your website – from awareness, to consideration, to decision.
Without these navigational signposts, most website visitors would likely leave because they're unsure of what to do or where to go next for the information that supports their journey.
From a conversion standpoint, CTAs make it crystal clear what action you'd like visitors to take and the mutual benefit of doing so.
According to research:
On a typical website, calls to action appear in numerous places, and serve different purposes.
One of the highest-visibility placements is a CTA button fixed in the top navigation menu – usually aligned to the far right. Popular options include:
These persistent CTAs provide continuous exposure and are typically used for bottom-of-funnel conversion goals.
Most website homepage hero sections feature one or more bold call-to-action buttons. These goals are usually similar to your top navigation CTA, so you'll likely see some repetition here.
While the hero area is highly visible for new visitors, it can also be an ineffective CTA placement if visitors aren't primed to take action yet.
Within the body copy of a website page or blog post, CTAs can appear as traditional hyperlink text (e.g. "Read this related content") or visually as stylised links. These are for converting engaged readers as they consume core content.
Website page footers frequently feature CTA banners or buttons offering similar actions as the navigation CTAs. These are intended as a final attempt to convert visitors before they exit the page.
Some websites trigger animated popup CTAs when a visitors completes certain behaviours. This is a last-ditch effort to keep visitors engaged and convert them before they leave.
Let's look at some proven best practices for implementing CTAs effectively:
Across all in-content CTA placements, design, and copy play a significant role in their efficacy. Generic CTAs like "Learn more" can work but tend to underperform compared to compelling copy that highlights benefits, creates urgency or solves a core challenge.
For example, changing a basic "Learn more" button to "Learn how Acme generated 1.5M in revenue" would likely significantly outperform the former.
With CTAs, specificity, clarity, and relevance are key drivers of engagement.
Beyond messaging, visual design elements like contrasting colours, directional cues, white space, and even simple animations can all further increase the ability of CTAs to command attention and influence click behaviour.
For blogs and article pages, the primary goal should be facilitating an uninterrupted reading experience. So, the approach to using CTAs must be more strategic:
The key is using CTAs purposefully in your blog content without overwhelming or interrupting the primary task visitors came to complete.
While essential for improving conversions, CTAs can sometimes have the opposite effect when overused or positioned poorly in areas that disrupt or detract from the user experience, such as:
Too many CTAs, particularly in busy or intrusive placements like these, can overwhelm visitors and "dilute engagement" instead of driving desired actions. Aim to create an uncluttered experience.
When building out the calls-to-action across your website, there are two main approaches: using software/tracking CTAs generated by marketing tools, or coding HTML links. Each has its own advantages and ideal use cases.
Software-generated CTAs are created using marketing automation and analytics platforms like HubSpot, Marketo, ActiveCampaign and others. These CTAs are inserted into your website pages as embedded code.
The primary benefit of this approach is enhanced tracking and data collection capabilities. Software CTAs allow you to easily monitor and record click metrics, conversion rates, audience behaviour flow and more within the marketing tool itself. This integration provides valuable insights for optimisation.
On the other hand, hard-coded HTML CTAs are the traditional, static approach to building website navigation and content links. This includes basic text links, buttons, image links and other HTML elements.
The downside is that HTML CTAs don't integrate with marketing tools, so you lose the ability to capture detailed click data and conversions directly within those platforms. However, you can still measure general traffic flows through Google Analytics.
The ideal solution is to strike a strategic balance – using software CTAs for your highest-stakes conversion points while defaulting to HTML CTAs across most other areas of your website for speed and usability.
CTAs are an important element of any B2B website, but they're only a small part of it. There are lots of components that need to work together to create an effective website that drives conversions and revenue for your business.
Want to know how you can improve the overall effectiveness of your website? Check out the complete guide to effective B2B website design.