This may sound obvious, but if you camouflage your sales buttons (aka call to action buttons!), you are making it really hard to buy from you! And if your customers have to root around in the fine print for a link to buy your thing, they are very likely to just give up. Buying from you shouldn’t be a challenge. It should be as easy and obvious as possible.
So, this blog is for those of you who are struggling to convert your website visitors to sales. You could be throwing up those barriers and not even knowing that you are preventing people from buying from you!
We self-sabotage our sales pages all the time. I know talking about making the sale and asking for money can feel super uncomfortable sometimes, but this is why we are in business. We’ve created something that will help, inspire, entertain or improve the lives of our customers and so we need to actually help them get their hands on it.
There are two parts to creating a website that actually sells for you. One, getting people onto your website in the first place. Getting that all those eyes on your stuff. But then the second part comes in – converting them to actually buy from you.
And this is where so many of you get stuck.
You send people over to your carefully crafted sales page from your socials, advertise your new thing to your email list, or maybe even use ads to drive traffic to your page. And then, crickets. People aren’t buying. You can see they are visiting the page, but you aren’t getting the ding of sales in your inbox.
What is going on???
One of the easiest ways you can convert those visitors to sales is to improve the design of your call to action buttons. Those sales buttons should shout CLICK ME! Like those big red buttons that kids (and me) can’t resist pressing!
Here are 9 design rules for making your sales buttons irresistible.
1) MAKE obvious call to action buttons
As in really obvious – no silly shapes.
There are certain rules of the internet that we are all used to. One of them is that buttons are there to be clicked. Camouflaging your call to action buttons to look like images or titles or simple links will harm your conversion rates. I see them all the time, even on professionally designed sites, and especially on ‘pretty’ websites or sites where they are trying to be different. As a website designer and arty-farty sort, I actually fell into this trap on my early website. I designed a button that was a giant watercolour splash. Looked great. Sold nothing.
A button should look like a button. Rectangular, rounded rectangles and sometimes circles (thanks Apple) get clicks.
2) Use contrasting colours
A BUY button needs to really stand out.
If you have a set of branding colours then pick one of them to be your call to action colour and use them throughout the whole website. This keeps everything consistent and teaches your visitors what to click to navigate the site and buy from you. But make sure that your call to action colour stands out. Using opposing colours on the colour wheel can really make them pop out.
So yellow against a purple background. Pinks against greens. No pretty blush pink buttons on a white background surrounded by other blush pink elements. It might look lovely but you are actually camouflaging and hiding the good stuff!
3) Make the text easy to read
Another branding trap we can fall into is using hard to read fonts on our call to action buttons. I know, you love that pretty handwritten script and it looks great written huge across your header, but a hard to read button will confuse people. And confusion causes no sales. Use your plainer, body copy, font big and bold. Something that immediately catches the eye without the customer having to work out what it says. They’ll read it without even trying. That’s what you want because people scan through.
4) Be really, really, really clear
Tell people what to do. A call to action button should tell people exactly why they should click it. What action they will be taking. It may sound obvious, but it will up your sales conversions. Using ‘inventive’ calls to action don’t work here. So, no ‘join the party’ (unless they are going to a party or ‘ready to love myself’. Use things like:
- Download the free ebook
- Click here to get instant access
- Sign me up!
These do what it says on the tin and people will click it because they know what they are getting.
5) Lift it up
This can be a stylised frame to make it stand out or a subtle drop shadow to give it a bit of depth.
But this is a simple way to get your call to action buttons to stand out against the rest of the sales page.
6) Use subtle animation.
I’m not talking about video here or buttons whizzing around the screen. But that subtle little animation that shows that you have clicked the button. Why is this useful? Well, even fast websites aren’t instant. I’m often left hanging after clicking the button, wondering whether I’ve clicked it or not or if I’m hovering over and I’m wondering: Is it a button? Is anything happening?
You can mimic that satisfying click feeling – ooh I love a good click – by changing colour on hover and click. It doesn’t even have to be a huge colour change, it just gives the impression of action. Or you can add an arrow on hover or an arrow animation. You can get super fancy with some animated CSS effects that don’t slow down your page (people love clicking things that move).
But don’t overdo it and don’t use a whole bunch of different animations throughout your site because that will cause confusion. And as we know confusion and distraction causes no sales.
7) Let it breathe
Make sure your whole call to action section is free from clutter. This section of your sales page should be focused on price and the ‘click to buy’ button. Nothing else. This is not the place for distracting fancy graphics or more info on what they are buying. Make it super easy to see with lots of space around it. I even narrow the area down so people are literally working their way down from lots of detail through to one Call to Action.
8) Buttons for everyone
Make sure your button actually works on mobile. Grab your phone and click your button. If it is hard to click, the font is too small to read, not obviously a button on mobile view or just doesn’t show up (yes, a common problem!) then you are throwing half your sales page visitors in the bin.
More than half of your website traffic is probably viewing your page on a phone or tablet. If your button only looks great and works on desktop then… Eek!
9) Simplify your offer
If you are offering a payment plan. Great. But don’t offer more than one. Too many decisions at this stage and buttons all over the place can put people off and you want to make it easy.
Put your payment plan button first. People don’t want to feel embarrassed that they need a payment plan. Make that your most important BUY HERE button. Make it easy!
——————–
So, all your sales buttons should now get more clicks because at the end of the day none of these rules are difficult or hard to apply to your sales page.
And when you’ve sorted out your sales page buttons, you will need to get more visitors to your site to click them…so check that blog out next!
Thanks for reading and leave a comment below if you have any questions!
Kat xx
