Last week on the Hughes & Co. blog, I took a look at how to create and craft an effective Call-To-Action (CTA). That blog very briefly touched on where you should place your CTA. This week, I am going to tell you how placing your CTA “above the fold” can help you bring in even more leads.
The term "above the fold" refers to anything on a webpage that is visible to the visitor without any scrolling, making it the first thing a visitor sees when they land on your website. Usually this is somewhere between 600 and 700 pixels of space. You may already be thinking, “Well, that’s a good place to put a CTA," and you are completely correct. The content above the fold gets the most attention, and it only makes sense to put a CTA where it is right in front of the visitor’s eyes.
Since the content above the fold is the first thing a visitor will see, it can be very beneficial to place a CTA somewhere in the area. Many visitors want information and they want it quickly, so by giving them a top of the funnel offer right away, you can give them a lot of information and very likely will get the info you require from them to start nurturing. For example, if you are an educational institution, your CTA may say something along the lines of “Interested in Becoming a Student?” with a button that says “Learn More Now”. This CTA would ideally take them to a landing page with a few points about becoming a student, and would then request more information from them in return for the full guidelines or process. This is calling upon the visitor to take action right off the bat from visiting your site and makes it easy for them to find out how they can become a student.
While placing CTAs above the fold is a best practice, you should be selective as to what CTAs you place there. While an effective CTA can be a great asset, the wrong CTA could have consequences such as increasing your bounce rate. For example, calling on the user to “Sign Up” for a service as soon as they visit your site would not be the best idea. With the limited information presented above the fold, the visitor may feel it is a little aggressive, not yet having a clue what it is they’re signing up for. However, by offering them something easy to understand and with value (as show in the last paragraph), you are likely to get that visitor to stick around longer, and ideally get them to provide you with some information about themselves via a landing page.
Just because a CTA is above the fold and in front of people, doesn’t mean it is going to be effective. It is still extremely important to pay close attention to the design and layout of a CTA. You want to make sure that the design of your CTA stands out from the rest of your website while complimenting it at the same time. Use the style and design of your website as a guide, but don't use the same colour palette or branding, as it could very easily get lost and go unnoticed.
Word choices and design decision all influence the effectiveness of your CTAs. And CTAs, of course, have a direct correlation with your website's lead generation capabilities. Make the most of your website with CTAs that work. Trust the experts at Hughes & Co. to do the heavy lifting when it comes to developing stand-out CTAs to yield the best results for your brand.