Call to action (marketing)

This article is about the marketing term. It is not to be confused with Call to Action.

For other uses, see Call to action (disambiguation).

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In marketing, a call to action (CTA) is an instruction to the audience to provoke an immediate response, usually using an imperative verb such as "call now", "find out more" or "visit a store today".

A CTA can be a simple non-demanding request like "choose a colour" or "watch this video", or a much more demanding request. An obvious CTA would be requesting the audience to purchase a product or provide personal details and contact information.

Clever marketing strategies often combine a series of small CTAs. These smaller CTAs create a pattern of behaviour that makes it easy for the audience to follow-through with just one last CTA, completing a more demanding request, had it been asked without context. An example could be the purchase of a designer torch. The website might request the user choose a style, then a colour, a size and even a personalised engraving. When the user gets to see their personalised one-of-a-kind product, they are more likely to feel inclined to buy it as it rotates in full 3D rendered colour on their computer monitor or tablet.

On websites

In web design, a CTA is a banner, button, or some type of graphic or text on a website meant to prompt a user to click it and continue down a conversion funnel. It is an essential part of inbound marketing as well as permission marketing in that it actively strives to convert a user into a lead and later into a customer. The main goal of a CTA is a click, or a scan in the case of a qr code, and its success can be measured via a conversion rate formula that calculates the number of clicks over the times the CTA was seen. Another way to test the effectiveness of a CTA is using A/B testing where several graphics are presented to users and the graphic with highest success rate becomes the default.

Example of a website CTA

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/29/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.