It’s one thing to understand the importance of having strong calls to action (CTAs) on your healthcare website, and another to be able to design effective ones. Here are 3 critical tasks you need to ensure you complete as part of your design process:
Task #1: Understand the Audience
This is bigger than simply knowing who your target audience are. It’s about understanding what makes them tick, their pain points and the stages of their buying cycle. There’s not much value in confronting first-time visitors to your site with a CTA to “Buy Now” the moment they arrive on your homepage, and yet that’s precisely what so many sites do in 2017, a.k.a. the year of the popup CTA!
Healthcare companies that truly understand their audiences monitor their traffic, know what percentage of their visitors are looking to be educated versus those who are ready to convert, and tailor their CTAs accordingly. Instead of a generic popup on the home page two seconds after arrival, visitors are more likely to find a CTA offering more information by the time they reach the end of a blog post, or an option to join a mailing list after they’ve viewed five different pages of content.
Task #2: Design for Clarity
Clarity of language is crucial for a CTA to be effective, not only in terms of language but also in layout and design. Forget creating a generic CTA button that you use on all the pages; rather, get your designers to craft individual graphics for each platform you use. These should contain actionable language that tells the reader what to do, indicates clearly what the value proposition is, avoid jargon and any attempts at humor that can muddy the waters and make it easy for the visitor to perform the necessary actions.
Task #3: Test the Effectiveness
The guessing game went out the window around the time big data came in. There’s no longer any reason to assume you know what will work and what won’t, when testing and data collection can tell you for certain. Testing the effectiveness of your CTA designs is paramount for choosing the right one, and various A/B testing tools make it simple to do. According to the CXL Institute, however, “serious gains” in conversions come from using CTA language you know resonates with customers, and the only way to determine that is to test it.
For more information on creating effective CTAs for your healthcare organization, call Wax Custom Communications at 305.350.5700 or visit waxcom.com.
