How much focus do you put on the very end of your business blog posts? If you tend to gloss over this, you’re missing a very big trick for getting more conversions! This is because the ending of your blog posts is more than just a chance to tie everything together in a neat conclusion – it’s also somewhere that you can add a strong Call to Action (CTA) to encourage your readers to take action and get more conversions as a result.
As a blogger, you never want your readers to be wondering what to do once they’ve finished reading a post as it’s very likely that they will do nothing. After all, you’ve not encouraged them to do anything else if you’ve got no CTAs to guide them.
This is why blog posts without a strong CTA are a lot less effective and don’t convert very well. That’s no big surprise if you’re not spelling out exactly what you’re hoping readers will do once they get to the end of your post.
So, what kind of CTAs work well in business blogging and how can you make yours as effective as possible? Here are some tips!
Types of CTA
Your CTAs can take a few different forms but the common ground is that they’re always trying to encourage the reader to take a particular action – such as subscribing to your mailing list, signing up for a lead magnet or taking a free trial of a product or service, for example.
Some of the types of CTA that could work well depending on what you’re hoping to achieve include:
Option #1. – Sign Up
Depending on your business, the ultimate aim of the game may be to get readers to sign up for your product or service so it makes sense to have a strong CTA to this end if it’s not too much of a hard sell.
GoDaddy have included this CTA at the end of posts, which related to the topic:
Unlike most of the other CTAs we’ve included here, Basecamp do a simple text version. Here’s how they encourage sign ups for their product at the end of posts:
Option #2. – Get More Subscribers
A strong mailing list is key but like a lot of things in life, you won’t get subscribers if you don’t ask for them. Including a CTA in f your blog posts can work wonders and it doesn’t need to be at all complicated.
Freshbooks use a very simple “Sign Up Today” button at the side of their posts, for example:
Option #3. – Promote a Lead Magnet
Strengthen your authority by using a lead magnet such as an eBook or webinar as a CTA. This is a way to get details while also offering something of value and interest to your readers as a trade-off. Always make sure that your lead magnets are of the highest quality. You’ve got your reputation to think of!
Here’s an example of a lead magnet that pops up when you read Freshbooks posts, for example:
Option #4. – Offer a Product Demo
Product demo videos are a way for readers to get a visual guide as to how a product or service works and again, it doesn’t require them to take any risk.
Option #5. – Offer a Free Trial
Who doesn’t love the opportunity to try something out before you commit to a product or service? A free trial is a low-risk way for readers to find out what you’re all about. They may not be in a position to buy from you right now but they might be open to a low-key invitation to find out more and see how you could help them.
A free trial is a low-risk way for readers to find out what you’re all about. They may not be in a position to buy from you right now but they might be open to a low-risk invitation to find out more and see how you could help them.
Another take on this is a free consultation, if this is more appropriate to your business.
Your choice of words can make a lot of difference here. “Start … now” is much more direct than “Sign up now!” – even though they amount to the same thing in the end.
Option #6. – Help Them to Learn More
Sometimes, your readers will need a bit more information on a product or service before they make a decision. Using a CTA that gives them a bit more insight is a low-key way to encourage them to take action. It’s not an outright sell but it may just sway them enough to tip the balance in your favor.
Option #7. – Send Them to Relevant Blog Posts
On a similar note, don’t be afraid to use other posts that you’ve written to help to educate them further on a topic.
Directing readers to other blog posts that have some relevance to the one they’ve just finished with can be a great way to keep them on your blog while also helping them to learn more about the subject in question.
Here’s how Freshbooks do it in the middle of their posts:
Want more people to share your posts on social media? A simple ask can help that to happen! Here’s an example from the Paypal blog as to just how straight-forward this can be:
Option #9. – Encourage Readers to Leave Comments
Not actually trying to sell or promote anything in a particular blog post? You can still go for a CTA that encourages readers to start a discussion in the blog comments and if the topic is a reasonably controversial take on a topic, you might even be able to get a debate going.
Tips for Writing CTAs That Get Conversions
As you’ll no doubt have noticed from the examples included in this post, effective CTAs are always short and succinct. Ideally, you’ll want to hook the reader with as few words as possible.
Some other tips for creating compelling CTAs include:
- Don’t come on too strong with the phrasing in your CTAs. You want to be persuasive and encourage readers to take a particular action but at the same time, you don’t want to be too aggressive with your tone. This is as bad as having weak CTAs in terms of achieving those all-important conversions.
- Speak to readers in “their” language. Your brand probably has a voice that readers expect to see on your website and across your marketing materials and you’ll want your CTAs to retain this while also being persuasive. It can be a fine line to achieve this and you may need to do some playing around with different phrases to find what works best for your business.
- Active verbs are much stronger and more likely to incite the desired action.
- If you’re trying to capture details as part of your CTA, use as few field boxes as you can. The less information people need to fill out, the less likely they are to be put off or distracted.
- Play up some of the key benefits as briefly as you can in your CTAs. Sometimes, you may need to go a bit beyond a simple “Sign up today” or “Try us out now” type of CTA but use the least amount of words that you can while still getting the full message across. Again, it can be tricky and you’ll probably need to do some testing to strike the right balance for the most effective CTA for your particular business.
- Conveying a sense of urgency can also work well and you’ll often see this in CTAs for marketing emails too. Limited time offers and discounts are a good example of this. If you’re using a webinar as a lead magnet, you could also include a countdown timer for sign ups, for example.
- If you have some strong social proof in your favor, definitely run with it! Having a good amount of subscribers or customers already in place can be used to your advantage in your CTAs as people are much more likely to take action if they can see that plenty of others have already done so. There’s less risk involved in their mind and this means there’s a better chance of conversions.
Over to you – how strong are your CTAs? Have you learnt anything new in this post that you can use to make them more effective?
