10+ Best Practices and Examples to Optimize Call-to-Action Buttons

on 17 April 2024, by Veronica, in Blog, Guides

by Veronica

Calls to Action (CTAs) are some of the most important website buttons. Creating a compelling CTA seems simple. After all, it’s all about creating buttons that users want to click, right? Despite all of the advice out there, a lot of site owners and marketers still struggle to convert visitors into leads or customers.

Knowing this, how can you create call-to-action buttons that will get you subscribers to your newsletters, orders, or attendees to your events? In this guide, we’ll walk you through 10+ best practices to optimize your CTA buttons. We’ll also show you examples of well-optimized CTAs to drive the message home.

But first things first, what is a CTA button and why is it important?

What is a CTA website button and why is it important?

A call to action is simply a directive that nudges site visitors to complete a specific action on your website. This action could be:

Signing up for a free trial of your service.
Downloading an ebook.
Completing a purchase.
Booking an appointment or requesting a quote.

A CTA is typically a button, but it can also be a hyperlinked text, progress bar, scrolled text, etc.

A CTA has only one role: to help convert site visitors into customers or leads. It provides a clear direction as to what you want a visitor to do once they get to your website. CTAs are especially important in marketing as they help to maximize marketing ROI (return on investment). After spending all that time, effort, and resources in marketing, a CTA enables you to realize the benefits through increased conversions.

By following the best practices to create well-optimized CTA buttons, you increase the conversion rate and reduce the bounce rate on your website. Having said that, here are 10+ best practices and examples for optimizing your CTA buttons to maximize conversions.

Best Practices and Examples on Optimizing Your Call-to-Action Buttons

Are you ready to improve your CTA buttons? Here are 10+ different ways to do it.

#1: Create a short but compelling button copy

You can increase the impact of your CTA buttons by simply choosing your words carefully. Remember that a CTA is a directive, requiring visitors to make a decision. For this reason, the words you include here should compel site visitors to act immediately.

Your choice of words will also determine how long the button copy will be, and the shorter, the better. From your basic SEO knowledge, you know that your blog post titles shouldn’t exceed 60 characters. We recommend the same for your button copy. To achieve this, avoid words that are more than 5 syllables, for instance, ‘Optimization’. Stick to 4 words or less for the best results.

You can find a great example of a short but compelling CTA on Spotify’s landing page. This CTA is short, but personalized to Spotify users, making it relevant to them. A recent study revealed that personalized CTAs convert 42% more visitors compared to generic or vague CTAs. As a result, for the best results, ensure your copy is relevant to the intended users.

#2: Make your CTA buttons clickable

Unlike a conventional sales pitch where you have to be subtle, subtlety doesn’t work with CTAs. You have to make it stand out so that prospects know that it is clickable. If it doesn’t look clickable, you risk losing sales or subscriptions right before prospects convert.

Here’s what you can do to make your CTA buttons clickable:

Contrasting background to text color (for instance, a black background with a white-colored text).
A white space surrounding them.
A distinct button text.

You can also add a hover effect when a user’s mouse points to it. Shopify has a great example of a CTA button that fulfills all of the above criteria.

What’s more, the button retains the brand’s colors so that potential customers don’t get confused or distracted.

#3: Use power words for concise messaging

What exactly do we mean by power words? These are words that stir up emotion in site visitors and increase the likelihood of your buttons getting clicked. According to Buffer, here are some of those words:

New
Now
Free trial
Guaranteed
Create
Discover
Proven
Lifetime
Instantly
Moneyback
Best-selling
Refund

You can use these words to invoke different emotions, for example:

Moneyback guaranteed - is used to alleviate the fear of potential customers not getting their money’s worth after purchasing your service.
Free Trial - appeals to customers on a budget and those who are wary of online solutions that promise more than they can deliver.

When used correctly, these words nudge your prospects to take action. They will click on your CTA and convert.

Buffer uses a set of power words in their CTA to create a sense of urgency and free site visitors from common concerns. These include ‘Now’, ‘Try for free’, ‘Cancel anytime’, and ‘No credit card required’. You can use several of these words together to help convince customers who are still on the fence about converting to do so.

#4: Position your buttons where people click

Button placement greatly influences the click-through rate of your CTA buttons. With that in mind, where should you place your CTA buttons to increase the chances that they will be clicked? To answer this, we need to understand how users read web pages first.

An eye-tracking research by the Nielsen Norman Group reveals that users follow an F-shaped pattern when reading web pages. This behavior is fairly consistent across different web pages and devices.

Source: Nielsen Norman Group

Users tend to read across the entire upper part of the content horizontally. As they move down the page, they will still read the content horizontally but cover a shorter area the further they go.

This means that you can rarely go wrong placing your CTA button anywhere on the top part of your content or on the left. It helps to boost the click-through rate even before you can worry about the button’s appearance and its copy. Here is an example of the same below:

The interesting thing about CTA button positioning is that it is not set in stone. Some brands have realized significant success by placing their CTAs at the bottom of a landing page. To determine which one best suits you, A/B test and select the option with more clicks and conversions.

#5: Use the right button and font color

Color matters because it helps to make your button stand out. For CTAs, you don’t necessarily need to study and understand the psychology of colors but find a way to make your button stand out. For instance, a black button on a white background.

You can also choose to incorporate the psychology of colors in your buttons. This comprises understanding what the colors mean. Here, there is a lot of buzz surrounding a red-colored button background because it symbolizes dominance and danger. It could as easily win over customers as it can rub them up the wrong way.

This is why several landing pages are adopting the orange color for their CTA buttons. Whatever color you decide to choose, ensure it stays on-brand.

#6: Create a sense of urgency

Today, users are extremely busy, and if you can save their time, they’ll appreciate it. This is why creating a sense of urgency in your CTA can massively improve your conversions. Urgency is a sales technique well utilized by major ecommerce brands like Amazon to encourage customers to act fast.

For instance here, Amazon employs the ‘Limited time deal’ badge to nudge customers to jump on the offer before it expires.

Using timing words like ‘Now’, ‘Today’, etc., can have a similar effect on your site visitors. These words can rush people into action, which is exactly what you need to get more conversions.

Brizy uses the urgency timing word ‘Now’ in its CTA. This works well because the CTA’s copy communicates urgency as well, so the word ‘Now’ compliments it.

We’re halfway through our list and before we continue, let’s first address the elephant in the room: How can you create compelling CTA buttons for your website and landing pages?

Leverage Brizy’s Optimized CTA Template Blocks

Are you struggling to craft good call-to-action buttons from scratch? You don’t have to go through this thanks to the Brizy Website Builder for Agencies and SaaS. It comes with up to 50 CTA templates optimized for different website niches. Whether you have a music site, an events landing page, or a travel website, there’s something for everyone.

All you have to do is import one that suits your website and customize its appearance to fit your brand. That said, we can now get back to our list.

#7: Include an arrow icon

Visual elements attract site visitors to click on your CTA buttons. Case in point, a case study by Helzberg Diamonds revealed that there was a 26% increase in clicks with CTAs that had an arrow at the end of the button.

This shows that, in as much as users like visually striking elements, they still prefer simplicity and direction, which an arrow provides.

GoDaddy uses arrows at the end of its buttons to great effect. When a user hovers over them, an arrow appears instantly that urges them to click.

#8: Add the product image above your ‘Add to Cart’ CTA

Placing a product image above the ‘Add to Cart’ button is a standard practice in ecommerce, especially when you’re selling physical products. But, what if you deal in virtual products like audio files or ebooks? Should you just add a description followed by an ‘Add to Cart’ button below it? No, users will likely get confused as they won’t know what they’ll be adding to their cart at a glance.

Regardless of the type of product you’re selling, place the product image right above the button. It eliminates uncertainty, showing potential buyers a visual representation of what they’ve set out to buy.

#9: Optimize for all devices

According to a recent study, as of 2024, the percentage of website traffic coming from mobile devices sits at 60.67%. In other words, more than half of your users will access your site via mobile phones. So why is this important?

To cater to a majority of your users’ preferences, you must ensure your CTA buttons are optimized for mobile devices. This entails:

Spacing out the button properly. The CTA button shouldn’t be too close to other elements since a user’s thumb is generally larger than a mouse pointer.
Give button text an appropriate font size to make it easily readable.
In some cases, you might need to reduce text

Mobile users expect a smooth, frustration-free experience. By making your CTA mobile-friendly you’ll greatly improve the chances that they will convert.

Brizy’s CTA is a great example of a mobile-optimized CTA button. The text is easily readable and there is ample whitespace surrounding the button to make it easily clickable.

#10: Always use active voice

Writing CTA button copy in active voice is a standard practice. Otherwise, they would sound very weak. Here is an example:

Active voice - Download our Free E-book.
Passive voice - Be Presented with Our Free E-book.

There is a strong reason why you will probably never encounter a CTA written in passive voice. In the example above, using passive voice doesn’t explicitly tell the user what to do. It focuses on the user receiving the book rather than taking the initiative to download it. This is less effective in prompting the users to click.

Site owners will typically use active voice for their CTA button copy as you see for IconicWP above.

#11: Make your CTA look like an actual button

Sometimes designers can use buttons that don’t really look like buttons. Alternatively, they might also use links, photos, or words without borders as CTAs. Take a look at the example below.

Source: Instapage

Does the CTA on the bottom right look definitively like a button? No, it doesn’t, and if an element doesn’t look clickable, it reduces the chances that it will be clicked.

To avoid this, ensure your buttons are designed to look like actual buttons. This includes a border surrounding the piece of text, whitespace, and a distinct background color that makes it stand out.

To Summarize

CTA buttons play a vital role in helping your site visitors to convert. This is why, as a site owner or admin, you must do everything you can to optimize these website buttons. In this article, we’ve covered 10+ different ways to do so. By applying the strategies in this guide, you can optimize your CTA buttons and make them work for you to maximize conversions.

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