The Complete Checklist for Creating Compelling Calls-to-Action

Lots of times, when marketers want to make a big impact on their marketing, they focus on going after a big project: big email campaigns, big website redesigns, big social media plans, big everything.

But while big projects can have big payoffs, you don’t have all the time in the world to execute them. You’ve got lots of other things on your plate — the only free time you have left in your day is the 43 minutes on Wednesday between scarfing down your bagged lunch and your weekly 1:00 p.m. client call.

Yeah … not a lot of time for those big campaigns, huh?

The good news is you don’t need them to make a big impact on your marketing — often, a smaller tweak can work wonders. And one of the smallest changes you can implement with the biggest splash is call-to-action (CTA) revamps. On our own CTAs, we’ve seen small changes yield 30% increase in conversion … which is no chump change.

So if you only have a few minutes in your week to optimize your conversion rates, souping up your out-of-date and gnarly looking calls-to-action is the way to go. To be sure you aren’t forgetting any crucial components of CTAs, be sure to follow along with the checklist below.

11 Essential Elements of an Effective Call-to-Action

To help demonstrate the anatomy of a well-crafted CTA, we’re going to pick apart the primary CTA we recently featured in a blog post about the biggest problem in your PR.

1) Use actionable language.

HubSpot’s CTA tool helps you create click-worthy CTAs.

In grade school, you were probably told that writing in the second person (writing to “you”) wasn’t ideal.

Forget that lesson immediately.

When you’re designing CTAs, effective copy all boils down to using action-oriented, second-person verbs. Use verbs like “discover, unearth, find” instead of ones like “be smarter.” In the CTA below, notice how we began sentences with “Learn” and “Download.” Besides empowering your readers a tad to click on your CTA, you’re also shortening your copy — which all boils down to a more effective and concise call-to-action.

According to AJ Beltis, Senior Content Marketing Manager for HubSpot’s Acquisition team, succinctness pays off for CTA copy. “I’ve found that direct CTA copy tends to perform better than lengthier CTA copy. Succinctly pitching the value of what you’re linking out to on a page with an abundance of copy and visual distractions can act as an unambiguous directive on what readers should do once on the page.” Create authoritative and click-worthy CTAs with HubSpot’s CTA tool.