History of CTAs | What Is a Call to Action? What is Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

History of CTAs

People peddled their goods and services long before the internet, online shops, and eCommerce, and worked out ways of increasing sales and attracting prospective customers ‘ attention. Some of these approaches have actually been ancestors of what we now know as CTAs. They used many of the same guidelines:

Eye-catching design (sometimes also ear-catching!)
Creating a sense of urgency
Concise and imperative wording
Ensuring a conversion is a process that is easily accomplished.
Prominent placement

These are all features that describe CTA’s nature whatever its shape. When promotional strategies shifted and new media outlets expanded and fell in popularity, there emerged different combinations of calls to action.

If you’re new to the digital marketing environment, you’ve likely come across these three letters — CTA — and wondered what the California Truck Association has to do with running a successful eCommerce website in the world.

Things that start to make more sense when I tell you that CTA is really just an acronym for the word “call to action” a longstanding marketing strategy in marketing and sales. Depending on your age, you’ve undoubtedly seen CTAs in practice throughout the history of media in many different forms.

Which, instead, is a call for action? What does that mean, really? The word call to action refers to any request for an immediate response or incentive for an immediate sale. This is most commonly achieved in digital marketing, using so-called CTA buttons. These are highly visible, strategically placed, clickable buttons with contrasting fonts and action-packed phrases that are carefully worded. The CTA button prompts a very distinct response; it’s impossible to miss and easy to click on — a good CTA’s most important features.

But what exactly is a good measure of the effectiveness of a "Call-to-Action Button?" This is a perfect place to introduce a new term, and yet another acronym to address: CRO (optimization of conversion rate).

Conversion marketing

It is a marketing strategy that aims to increase the number of conversions successfully made. To help answer the question, we’ll introduce it, what’s CTA in marketing? We define conversion as a marketing term as “the point at which a recipient of a marketing message performs the desired action.” Simply put, it gets someone to respond to your call to action.

Here are some real-life examples of conversions:

Sign up for a newsletter

Fill out email and send a form

Attending a webinar

Click on an ad

Sign up for a free trial

And, the holy conversion grail-completing a purchase.

How, then, do you need a call for action? We are coming in there.

Any eCommerce website’s ultimate aim is to achieve a good conversion, either directly or through a series of smaller steps called micro-conversions. What is termed a conversion rate is a quantitative measure of how well this goal is met. A conversion rate is a proportion of the total number of visitors to a website that takes one or more prompts to perform a particular action. It’s the total number of people who see your CTA, to be even more precise, meaning we could write:

The closer the conversion rate is, of course, to a 1. ratio, the better. In an ideal world, anyone who lands about urban gardening on their website will buy your “Urban Garden Cookbook.” But how do you attain the goal? And, more objectively, how do you approach it as closely as possible? To answer that, we go back to our second acronym-optimization of CRO or conversion rate.

Optimization of conversion rate is a set of strategies used to improve the conversion rate of a website by optimizing aspects of its architecture. The main idea is to define factors that affect the conversion rates and conduct testing to determine which variation leads to the best results.

In all of this, what is the meaning of a call for action and why should we care?

Okay, it just happens that calling to action is a critical part of making good conversions possible. Although they may seem a rather simple concept, and we’re so used to seeing that we take it for granted, there’s a whole science behind what a CTA button can make or break. That’s why understanding how calls to action came about and developed is critical. We’re going to start with the history of calls to action and then move on to their more modern counterparts, finally discussing what CTA is on a website.

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Created on Feb 20th 2020 06:45. Viewed 389 times.

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