“Everything from the font to the colors matter when driving traffic toward a call to action,” common advice on conversion says.
In my experience a strong call to action (CTA) is more about grabbing attention (without misleading) than choosing a specific color. OptinMonster said it well in a post about call to action colors: one of their main points was that contrast makes more sense than nitpicking psychological color theory for every link.
Sure, I’ve blogged about the significance of color choices. But general color scheme planning of brand colors, link colors, etc. is more intuitive than picking a red-tone link color because some study showed that red makes people buy things. Another study will say it’s green.
If your brand includes a lot of blue, then yeah, make your headers blue as well. But you’d want another color, a bold one, for links or calls to action. Creating contrast from the colors the reader sees everywhere else is the important bit.
Which color?
My mileage has been that it’s fairly flexible.
Sliding to either third of the color wheel usually creates a decent punch. If your branding is blue, a red or a yellow would probably make a good call to action simply because they’re pretty complementary colors, but distinct. But hey, even green CTA colors have worked for me with blue color schemes.
“Surefire” Templates Fail Because They’re Surefire
There are certain universal truisms in marketing, such as understanding your target market’s motivations and habits. However, any time an expert has success with a particular phrasing or copy setup and shares it as a template for other marketers, the internet invariably becomes flooded with that technique.
The technique worked largely because it was different, and promptly stops being as effective because it’s not.
Want an example?
“The 5 Hidden Secrets To Rock Hard Abs” or maybe “You’ll Be Shocked When You See These Photos of Orlando Bloom”.
At one time a bunch of reputable marketers did a bunch of tests and touted that headlines with numbers in them, especially if they’re pitched as a secret, grab more clicks. Or if you employ shock to hook people.
And guess what happened.
Everywhere you look are the 3 major tips for something, 8 deadly secrets, top 10 habits of successful people, etc. etc. We’ve inundated, and they don’t grab attention anymore. Clickbaity titles still work for some, but a lot of people refuse to click on anything that seems to be vying for their click that hard.
It’s understandable to be confused or frustrated about building strong landing pages, or sales pages, or squeeze pages, whatever you call them. There’s a lot of noise out there about this topic, and the topic exists because there’s so much noise in general. Staying above it is tricky.
But remember, in the same way that good copywriting is invisible, worthy sales funnel setups don’t feel like sales funnels. Getting the tone and the plan right early on will help you a lot more that copy/pasting some expert’s “perfect” call to action.
