70% of Small Businesses Are Failing Because of This Call-to-Action Web Design Mistake!

• 53% of the top Fortune 500 companies don’t feature a clear Call to Action button on their homepage.
• 70% of small and medium business websites include no clear Call to Action for anything other than contact forms.
• A good Call to Action button must be visible, straightforward, and compelling, in terms of the visual user experience.

Okay, so you’re a business and you have a site to help you sell, either B2B, B2C, or on both markets. All the elements of that website, from the visual user experience design to the copywriting and web design Singapore, create your conversion funnel.

A successful user experience uses micro-conversions to graduate users from uninterested visitors to subscribers, (repeat) buyers, and the most loyal ones to voluntary brand ambassadors.

The essential feature of this funnel is smooth, easy, and quick access from one stage to the next, via calls-to-action.

Conversely, doing Calls to Action wrong can significantly affect your turnover, irrespective of whether you’re a Fortune 500 company, or a Small/Medium Business. In fact, Call to Action mistakes don’t discriminate based on business notoriety, age, or size.

Here’s what the data has to say about this:

• 53% of the top 30 Fortune 500 companies don’t have any primary Call to Action button on their home page, which can be found in 3 seconds or less (says this Moosylvania study);
• 80% of those companies feature no Newsletter Sign-up button or link on their homepage;
• 70% of small businesses don’t feature any Call to Action on their home page either (as this Small Business Trends report indicates);
• 75% of the SMBs surveyed don’t use Call to Action words in their metadata (e.g.: contact, learn, find, get);
• 87% of SMBs bury their Contact Us call to action by displaying it in the same font and size as the rest of the homepage content.

The picture is clear: even though Calls to Action should be clear, easy to notice, and compelling, many businesses, both big and small, struggle to understand their usefulness. This is why today’s post focuses on copywriting and web design Singapore mistakes to avoid for your Calls to Action.

1. Avoid Button Blindness like the plague!

Some Call to Action buttons are too small. Others get drowned out in an ocean of noise: other links, text, images—you name it.

The first rule of thumb is to place the call to action above the fold.

The second rule of thumb is to place the call to action immediately after the information which makes the action relevant, useful, and even urgent for the user.

The third and final rule of thumb is that button colour is not important (see: ghost icons)—as long as contrast, placement, and size make it easy to spot.

Image source: Iuvo

2. Avoid vague Call to Action wording!

Think of that big, red Power button on your old TV remote. “Ok… So what does that have to do with conversion optimization and web design Singapore?” is what you’re going to ask me next. The point is that you instinctively know what it does, even though the word ‘Power’ may have faded out from underneath it.

That’s not how things work online, though. Users may intuitively figure out what a button does, based on previous experiences. But they might also get confused by having to second guess themselves and abandon the process—or worse, get an unwanted, unexpected result.

Here’s the very straightforward wording Amazon uses for their buttons. This is a best practices kind of situation:

Image source: VWO

3. Avoid losing conversions by having two primary Calls to Action compete

What happens when you put two big, important, blaring Call to Action buttons on the same page, in your users’ face? They get confused and have a hard time figuring out what action would be more important to take.

So, then, what do you do if you want to present the user with two different options of useful actions they might take?

You frame the more important one as the primary Call to Action and add a secondary one as a text link. Then, you make sure they don’t compete with each other, like Evernote do on their homepage:

Image source: Evernote

Their main desired user action is the Sign-in, but there’s also easy access to the paid subscription plan, with the ‘Explore Evernote Business’ button at the top.

Another theory, developed by Dan Ariely, explores a timeless theory from psychology, which says that presenting users with too many options can lead to Action Paralysis. As such, it’s always better to adopt the One Call to Action per Page approach and link to the secondary one.