Learn How to Convert Website Visitors with CTAs

By Chantel Hall, Marketing Content Specialist

Many businesses focus on increasing the number of visitors to their website, but without any clear next steps for visitors to take, the higher number of visitors to your website won’t necessarily benefit your bottom line.

Effective calls to action (CTAs) are the best tool in your arsenal for translating increased website traffic into qualified leads. Your landing pages, blogs, and high-traffic website pages should all have CTAs that clearly show the visitor what the next step is to receive more information. Effective CTAs strike a balance between providing valuable information to visitors and allowing you to collect information about the new lead, their company, and the challenges your business may solve. 

This article will teach you how to convert website visitors with well-crafted CTAs.

Personalization is the key to effective CTAs

A study by HubSpot found that personalized CTAs performed 202% better than general ones.¹ Their study specifically looked at CTAs personalized to the lead’s lifecycle (i.e., using different CTAs for a lead than used for a new website visitor). Personalizing the CTA and the value proposition behind it creates more value for the lead and gives them more motivation to follow through.

When you’re trying to work out precisely how to convert website visitors to leads, remember that they’re at the very top of the funnel, and you’re still building awareness of your brand and products. Complex content about specific solutions or products won’t be valuable to someone still in the awareness phase. Keep your CTAs for converting website visitors high-level and relevant to the pain point or goal that brought them to your website. 

Leads will usually come back to your website repeatedly, and advanced tools can help you personalize the CTAs your leads encounter to their interests and current lifecycle stage. HubSpot’s Smart CTA² feature allows you to personalize individual CTAs to different types of viewers and display them based on who is viewing the page. This means you can display a value proposition to new website visitors designed to encourage conversion without having to sacrifice CTAs optimized for leads and customers.

What kind of CTAs should you use?

CTAs can encourage leads to take a myriad of actions, but for website visitors who aren’t leads yet, focus on CTAs that provide value to the visitor in exchange for the information you need to begin nurturing them as a lead. CTAs encouraging viewers to post your content on social media or read a related blog post can be useful, but they don’t allow you to collect the data needed to turn a website visitor into a lead.

The “providing value” part is critical here — most people aren’t going to volunteer their name and email addresses freely, so you need to entice them with something that’s useful to them. Some type of gated offer with a required form is an effective way to gather this information. Seventy-four percent of marketers use web forms for lead generation, and 49.7% of them say that web forms are their highest converting lead generation tool.³

However, the CTAs you use to convert website visitors can encourage them to take many different actions, and depending on what attracted a visitor to your site, their path-to-purchase will vary. The key is offering something relevant to where the lead is in the buyers’ journey so that they’ll feel like they’re getting something valuable in exchange for their information. Here are a few types of offers that your CTA can direct to: 

• Content offers: Content offers are a piece of content that a lead has to fill out a form to download. Depending on your product and buyers, more technical content like white papers or original research might make sense, while something actionable like a guide, template, or free course will work for others. 
• Newsletter/Blog Subscription: Getting users to subscribe to your newsletter or blog does the double-duty of collecting their information and setting them up to expect communication for you. The emails sent can also be used to track what content they’re clicking on and what’s bringing them back to your site. 
• Event sign-ups: This could be an offer to download a recorded event or attend a future event, digitally or in-person. Events give you a high-touch opportunity to build trust while you have their voluntary attention, so they are an excellent option for converting website visitors.

Strong CTA examples

Like the rest of your website copy, CTAs should be buyer-focused and clearly explain the value that website visitors will get when they follow through on the CTA. Here are a few examples of weak CTAs and versions re-written utilizing the principles we’ve discussed here.

For more in-depth information on writing and designing effective CTAs, read this blog post: How to Increase Lead Generation with a Focused Call-to-Action

Converting website visitors to leads is a unique opportunity to lay the foundation for a marketing-and-sales process that’s fruitful for both you and your leads. Make the most of it by personalizing content, using forms intelligently, and presenting visitors with CTAs that make sharing their information with you beneficial for them.

Sources:

¹HubSpot, Personalized Calls to Action Perform 202% Better Than Basic CTAs [New Data], January 21, 2020

²HubSpot, The Ultimate Guide to Smart CTAs, February 1, 2021

³HubSpot, Forms Aren't Dead: The State of Email Lead Capture in 2020, December 16, 2019

HubSpot, The 8 Types of CTAs You Need to Have on Your Website, February 16, 2021

Go Top Shelf, Compelling Call To Action Stats To Raise CTR, March 6, 2019

HubSpot, 20 Types of Lead Generation Content to Put Behind Your Landing Pages, September 8, 2020