Author: AB Tasty

AB Tasty is a complete tool for website and conversion rate optimization. We serve as your digital lab, equipped with everything you need to create experiments that will help you to better understand your users and customer journeys so that you can create the clearest and most engaging user experience possible, ensuring your website performs well and yields the maximum results.

Article

Nov 16, 2020
8min read

Call to Action: A Simple Guide to More Conversions

AB Tasty

AB Tasty

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A Call to Action, also known as a CTA, refers, in marketing, to any item that will, using imperative wording, encourage an immediate action or response from the user.

Calls to Action are essential in marketing campaigns. They’re a way to lead customers to a specific action. They generally come as a button, but they also exist in many other forms. In this guide, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about CTAs, how they work and how to use them on your website.

What is a Call to Action?

Behind this mysterious name hides a very simple marketing concept you’ve all seen before. Calls to Action (CTAs) refer to any device conceived to persuade users to do a specific action. 

E-commerce companies usually use them in the form of buttons to encourage buyers to add an item to their shopping cart or to complete a transaction. It is a key element to integrate playful interaction with your users and an effective means to increase conversions. 

The goal of a CTA is to use a word or a sentence (most of the time containing action verbs) to push your users toward a specific action like “click here”, “subscribe”, “check out” and many others. These action words can also be used with a “now” creating a sense of urgency. Calls to Action were proven to be very effective and to optimize conversion rates.

CTAs can be used to push users down the purchase funnel, but they can also be used for any kind of action like registering, subscribing to a newsletter or adding to cart. 

What makes an effective CTA? When creating a CTA for your website, every detail counts. Here are some aspects you need to pay attention to for your CTA button: 

  • Visual aspect
  • Wording
  • Action word
  • Placement
  • Form
  • Color
  • Size

Do not underestimate the impact your CTA button can have on your conversion rate. A well-written Call to Action needs to be adapted to your audience, their age, their gender or their nationality. Remember that a CTA isn’t just a command or an invitation for your users, it is part of the full purchasing process. That’s why it needs to be discreetly integrated but obvious enough to be noticed by users.

Why do you need a clear Call to Action in your CRO strategy?

Always remember the importance of CTAs in your purchase funnel. Your customer’s path to completing a transaction is paved with CTA buttons. They are a key element in your CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) strategy, they need to be quite obvious since they are meant to lead users to the action you want them to complete.

A good and clear Call to Action comes with a nice visual, adapted to your target audience, with a clear and straightforward message. That way, and only that way, you will get the best out of your CTA and note effective results in your conversion rate AND your CTR (Click Through Rates).

An efficient CTA is nothing but a perfect compromise between your e-commerce site’s goal, which is to increase sales or to sell a specific product, and users’ needs, i.e. a smooth navigation experience while purchasing a product. That’s why your CTA needs to be neat and easy to find, and user experience always needs to be taken into account.

Best Call to Action examples of 2020

CTAs come in many forms. To help you with your CTA A/B testing, we listed the 5 best forms of CTAs in 2020: 

1.       Direct Calls to Action  

Let’s say your goal is to push your customers down the purchase funnel. Then, you might opt for a direct CTA, such as:

  • Shop now
  • Buy now
  • Add to shopping cart

This is an Amazon product page showing CTAAn Amazon product page containing an add to shopping cart and buying button CTA (Image Source).

2. “Get for Free” Calls to Action  

With these CTAs, you can highlight an opportunity for the users. Generally, these come with a “subscribe” box. You can collect your users’ email addresses in exchange for a sample of a document or a free trial. These CTAs usually appear as:

  • Download for free
  • Free 30 day trial
  • Start free trial

This is a screen shot of Tidal's free trial

Tidal homepage enticing users to register with a free trial (Image Source).

3. Basic Calls to Action examples

CTAs can be a mere invitation. For instance, on a social media’s ad or as a shortcut to a long text. This kind of CTA is often used in blog posts or Facebooks Ads. Awakening the user’s curiosity, it is supposed to make users want to go further and learn more about a topic with messages like:

  • Check it out
  • Start here
  • Find out more
  • Learn more

This is a screen shot of Philips CTA for their newsletterPhilips USA homepage with multiple CTAs (Image Source).

4.       Registering Calls to Action

This kind of CTA is often found on social media or e-commerce sites. The goal is simple: encourage your visitors to create an account and register with messages such as: 

  • Create your account 
  • Sign up
  • Join us

This is a screen shot of Bose's sign up CTABose homepage with sign up CTA (Image Source).

5.       Email Calls to Action

 All of the above have one thing in common: they allow you to connect with your users by collecting their emails, which will be useful for your email marketing campaigns. According to what you are proposing, users can fill in their email to get something like a discount, a coupon or a free PDF. For these, you can use wordings such as: 

  • Subscribe
  • Get coupon
  • Download free PDF
  • Sign up

This is a screen shot of Anastasia's CTA to join the emailing list

For more, read our article about “14 Examples of CTAs You Can’t Resist”.

A/B Test your CTA for better results

A/B testing

A/B testing is the most accurate technique for CRO. This digital marketing strategy consists of making changes on your website and observing the impact of this change on a segment of users. 

This is the best method to improve your conversion rate, because you can try out any feature and choose the one whose results are best. It is more reliable since users are the ones determining which feature works best. With this method, you can test your idea with your target users or potential customers.

A/B testing your CTA buttons is the best way to improve your website’s UX and your conversion rate at the same time. At AB Tasty, we offer a super quick and easy way to run these kinds of tests – our drag and drop visual editor.

How to run an A/B test for your CTA? 

Here are the different steps you need to follow to A/B test your Call to Action button:

  • Define your test’s goal and the KPIs you want to improve

Changing your button’s feature must serve a goal. It wouldn’t make sense to change your CTA’s color, to run your test and wait for random results. Your goal can be to increase the number of users that subscribe to your newsletter, for instance.

  • Define the original and alternative version (A and B version)

Choose the CTA you want to run your A/B test on, let’s say the red “subscribe to newsletter” button. This red button will be your A version. 

What do you want to change about it? Maybe users will be more likely to click on this button if it were blue? Then, change your button’s color. (If you’re using AB Tasty, this takes two seconds with our drag and drop editor). The blue version of the CTA button will be your B version.

  • Run your A/B test 

Worried about exposing 50% of your website visitors to this new change?  If you have enough traffic, you can run your test on a smaller percentage of your entire website audience to mitigate the risk of any potential lost conversions.

  • Collect data and check your analytics

Usually, A/B tests take several weeks before you get reliable results. During that period, observe your A/B testing tool reporting. Did your conversion rate increase? Did it decrease? 

  • Hard code changes (or not)

Figures don’t lie. Based on the test’s results, change what needs to be changed and keep what needs to be kept. Step by step you will find the best combination of features for the perfect CTA. 

Conclusion

CTAs are essential in your conversion rate optimization strategy, but they can’t appear randomly or look like any old button. They need to be wisely thought out, otherwise they might not have the expected effect. 

Thanks to A/B testing, you will be able to find the right features in order to get the best performance out of them. Remember that visual aspects (like form, color, or size), wording, the chosen action word, and placement matter in your CTA’s performance.

So, what’s the takeaway? An effective Call to Action can boost your website KPIs, and you can A/B test any of your website’s pages – the sky’s the limit.

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Article

Oct 4, 2020
7min read

How to Add Continuous Deployment to Agile Product Management

AB Tasty

AB Tasty

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If you are a Product Manager, then Continuous Deployment seems like an obvious win.

When you adopt continuous deployment, you take everything that you love about Agile Product Management— the rapid iterative processes, the increased product quality and market viability, the accelerated rate of collecting and incorporating customer feedback into products—and you supercharge it.

For example: If you follow a traditional Agile framework, then you are going to aim to release new product iterations every 1-2 weeks. When you upgrade to Continuous Deployment, you will start to iterate your product a few times per day by releasing code as soon as it’s been thoroughly tested and deemed ready to commit.

This is a huge leap forward, and the benefits of evolving to Continuous Deployment for Product Managers are clear. They include:

  • You get to A/B test new features in real-world environments even faster than before.
  • You can incorporate customer feedback into your live product in near-real-time.
  • You are able to create reliable products with few (if any) code-level faults.

All of these benefits directly translate into the thing you care about most— releasing high-quality products and features that align tightly to your customer’s deepest needs.

Evolving Your Agile Product Management Seems Like an Easy Sell, Right?

Well, as great as Continuous Development appears for the core work of Product Managers, there is this other thing to keep in mind before you rush to try to adopt the framework…

For better or worse, there’s a lot more to your job than just creating great products for your customers. You also need to lead your Features Team to get them to actually create those great products and features. You need to get (and keep) your Business Analysts onboard with every product and feature you want to make. And you need to give Marketing a suite of products and features that they understand and know how to share with the world.

As much as Continuous Deployment can make your life easier when it comes to releasing all those great products you manage, it can also create a lot of friction between you and all of those other people who you also need to manage as a big part of your job.

So let’s take a quick look at why you will likely face some pushback from your stakeholders if you try to evolve towards a Continuous Development framework, why the conventional wisdom for disarming their concerns doesn’t really work, and how you might actually get them to adopt Continuous Deployment alongside you.

Let’s start by taking a look at each of their concerns, one at a time.

Why Your Marketing Department Might Push Back on Continuous Deployment

Marketing departments traditionally follow a Waterfall approach to collaborating with Product Managers. They like to perform a lot of market research upfront. They like to get involved in a predefined project planning phase to incorporate their single round of customer research. And then they like to have a well-defined product with static features, benefits, and value propositions that they can easily understand and push.

Continuous Deployment dissolves all of these structures, and forces Marketing departments to become nimble, responsive, and adaptable to daily changes in the products and features they are selling. It’s a big adjustment in approach, and it’s natural for Marketing departments to feel unwilling to throw out everything they know and relearn their profession.

Why Your Business Analysts Might Push Back on Continuous Deployment

Business Analysts operate pretty similar to traditional Marketing departments. BAs like to have a lengthy discovery phase upfront. They like to extract a clean set of product requirements, and to enshrine them into a fixed document that acts as a binding agreement between “the business” and the developers. This document gives them some control over the whole process, including a fixed set of outcomes to track project success against.

Continuous Deployment blows away the concepts of fixed requirements, static product descriptions, and project success being linked to checking boxes on an internal contract. It takes control of the project away from the BAs, and places it into the hands of the product team— who are themselves being directed by the direct feedback of users. It makes sense that BAs might be reluctant to give up their control over product development.

Why Your Own Features Team Might Push Back on Continuous Deployment

If anyone should embrace Continuous Deployment with open arms, it’s your Features Team. But often they will push back more than anyone else when you try to make the shift to Continuous Deployment— even if the team already operates from a traditional Agile framework!

Some of this pushback is just inertia. Your Features Team has refined a set of workflows over the years, and they don’t see the point in adopting new tools and processes just to fix a way of doing their job that (from their perspective) isn’t broken.

But some of it runs much deeper. Continuous Deployment changes the Feature Team’s job description. Instead of building towards well-defined product milestones—and defining success by how quickly and accurately they hit those milestones—Continuous Deployment shifts Feature Teams off development and onto testing and bug fixes, while forcing them to adapt to a much more ambiguous definition of whether or not they are excelling at their jobs.

Disarming Each of These Objections (It’s Not as Simple as It Might Look)

If you’re going to adopt Continuous Deployment as a Product Manager, then you’re going to need to convince each of your stakeholder groups that it’s a worthwhile change. And—contrary to the advice you’ll find if you search through the development community’s discussions on this topic—convincing these three stakeholder groups to toss their old way of doing things and adopt Continuous Deployment is not as simple as:

  • “Explaining the pros-and-cons of Continuous Development.”
  • “Changing your organization’s culture.”
  • “Communicating more.”

We don’t mean to be flip here, or to poke fun at anyone who is offering genuine advice. We’d just like to point one thing out— while these actions are necessary elements of any change management program, they don’t really address the deep concerns your stakeholders feel about adopting this new Product Management methodology. No amount of pros-and-cons lists that outline why Continuous Development is great for you will address the fact that:

  • Your Marketing department is worried because they don’t know if they are selling a product or feature set that has already dramatically changed since you last spoke.
  • Your Business Analysts are worried that you are going to waste a lot of time, money, and manpower building products with no clear use case.
  • Your Features Team are worried that 90% of their job is going to become fixing bugs and cleaning code instead of hitting targets that they can point to during a performance review.

These are not shallow concerns that you can paper over with platitudes or educational sessions on the value of Continuous Deployment. These are deep, material issues that you need to find a way to address for your stakeholders before you can evolve your Agile Product Management with scrum and reap the benefits of Continuous Deployment.

How to Disarm Your Stakeholders’ Concerns About Continuous Deployment

The answer is simple, but not easy. You have to really dig into each of their concerns, and proactively find a way to solve their problems for them.

You need to fold Marketing into your day-to-day work so they are aware of what you are developing, what changes you have planned, and how soon you will be giving them new products and features to place their campaigns behind. You need to share the customer experience feedback that is informing your decisions, so it can inform Marketing’s messages too.

You need to bring your Business Analysts in too. You must justify the expense of adopting new tools, team members, and training protocols to develop a Continuous Deployment capability. You must then proactively quantify and report on the ways your faster iterations will create a more viable and profitable product suite that remains aligned to the business, its strategy, and its regulatory frameworks.

Most important, you need to take care of your Features Team. You must make sure they don’t miss their development milestones because they are constantly cleaning code. You must make sure they still build and deploy new features and not just new test cases. And you must give them both the training they need to adapt to Continuous Deployment methodologies, and a centralized platform that automates, streamlines, and accelerates their most critical new workflows.

Continuous Deployment represents a big leap forward in Product Management. There were growing pains when the field moved from Waterfall to Agile, and it’s wise to expect—and proactively handle—this new set of obstacles as you evolve to the next stage of Agile product lifecycle management.

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