Secondary calls to action can boost your website’s capture efficiency

We’ve posted guidelines for landing-page design before, and one of those is to make your call to action inescapable and avoid confusing your prospect with other options.

But what about the other pages on your website?  Although they’re not landing pages, many of the “meat-&-potatoes” pages on your site – those that describe your products or services in particular – have at least some chance of inducing a visitor to want to take some next step with your company.  Clearly, you’ll do better to anticipate this and provide for it than to leave your visitor to puzzle over what might be a best next step …but what exactly should you do?

Posting on FutureNow, Brendan Regan suggests providing links representing a primary and a secondary call to action.  The primary CTA is the action you most hope your visitor is ready to take;  the secondary CTA requires less “buy” readiness or perceived commitment, but nonetheless still moves the ball ahead.  Here are several examples;  you’ve probably seen the first one on sites like Amazon or drugstore.com, while the others are more typical of B2B sites:

eCommerce site: Add to Cart (Primary)  |  View Product Details (Secondary)

Lead generation site: Contact Us (Primary)  |  View Product Demo (Secondary)

Subscription site: Sign Up (Primary)  |  Take a Free Trial (Secondary)

Of course, you want the prospect to take the first action;  but frequently they won’t be ready for that.  The second gives him/her another option to learn more and stay engaged with your site …and isn’t that far better than leaving and checking out a competitor?

In fact, emphasizes Brendan:  “In the complex sales environment common to B2B sites, offering secondary calls to action is crucial, since the site needs to nurture prospects through a potentially long conversion process.”

Generally, you’ll want to make the primary CTA more visually prominent than the secondary, but keep them reasonably close together.  Brendan usually does this by making the primary a button and the secondary just a link;  but of course, there are numerous other design schemes – considering HTML elements, colors, fonts, placements and highlighting – that can accomplish that objective.

Brendan suggests this systematic approach for implementing secondary CTAs:

• Decide, then document, what your primary and secondary calls to action should be;  where should visitors be taken when they click on them?  (Note, these may well be different for different web pages.)
• Audit your site to find all appropriate pages that don’t have secondary calls to action, and then prioritize them.
• Develop a look and feel for your primary and secondary CTAs.  Whether as simple as using buttons for primary and links for secondary, or some more elegant scheme, it helps to be consistent so that visitors get increasingly comfortable with your CTAs over time.
• Start testing; it’s unlikely that you’ll hit on the best-performing copy or look and feel for your CTAs the first time out.

A word of caution here:  don’t expect adding secondary CTAs to raise your conversion rate …certainly not in the short term.  Do study your site analytics, and pay special attention to bounce rates and exit rates for the pages you’ve added secondary CTAs to.  Those indicators should go down, and that’s a good thing:  that means more visitors engaging with your site for the long term, and fewer taking a quick exit to check out the competition.