With all copywriting, the call to action is critical. That’s where you tell people what you want them to do. The CTA is often the key difference between copywriting and ordinary writing, and writing them is an art in itself.
People are generally obedient. You probably cut along the dotted line when you do online shopping and your parcel arrives with a dotted line saying ‘cut here’. Similarly, evidence shows that more people call the phone number when you tell them to ‘call free today’ than when you leave the phone number standing alone.
For most websites, your goal is to gently nudge people along the buying process. Not hit them over the head with a ‘Buy now’ hammer. So the call to action should tell them what you want them to do next, step, by simple step.
If you sell products, then you probably have an e-commerce website. The initial objective is to get people to click the ‘Add to cart’ button. From the cart, the goal is to get them to give their credit card details. You can’t force them to do that too soon.
By changing the ‘Checkout’ button to ‘Continue’, Best Buy added $300m to their sales. For the full story, read this article from 2009
https://www.uie.com/articles/three_hund_million_button
Also, Schuh altered its product page call to action from ‘Buy now’ to ‘Add to bag’. This led to a 17% increase (Source: Econsultancy).
If you sell services, your objective is to get site visitors to call you for an informal chat. You then do your selling over the phone. You probably submit a proposal and do some negotiating before they hand you any money. No matter how beautifully its written, the website is not convince them on its own.
If you win most business via word of mouth, your website is a credibility piece. In this case, there’s no point investing lots of time, money or energy in SEO.
If you want to be found by strangers, then SEO is worthwhile. I don’t do SEO myself, as it’s such a specialist job. For this, I recommend Nikki Pilkington.
If you’re not sure what your key selling message should be, look first at your customer testimonials. See what features of your product or service they value most, and what adjectives they use to describe you. It might not be what you expect. If you want to attract more of the same, use the same benefits and language that your customers use.
If you’re an individual sole trader, not a faceless corporation, you want your website to express your personality. You’re trying to communicate human-to-human through the medium of a cold glassy screen. On one keyboard is you. On another keyboard is your potential customer.
Make the website about them, and what they’ll get, more than it is about you. You might want six million people to visit your website, but they are each reading one at a time, so address them in the singular, not the plural.
After writing hundreds of websites over the years, those are a few of the key things I do that not everybody does. While I may be winding down soon, I’m still open to writing web copy for a few select clients. And if I can’t help you, my team of copywriters always can.
