In this [video] learn an easy way to improve the conversion rates of your blog call-to-actions.
This blog post is part of “Your Definitive Guide to Lead Generation” blog series.
Finally, the last Inbound16 hack. This one's an interesting one, and I'm going to use the HubSpot blog post as an example. We know that people have told us, at least you should be doing this that every blog should have a call to action in order to continue the conversation in some way, shape, or form. If you're not doing that, I implore you to do it. It'll bring your contact generation, your lead generation activities up, but keep in mind that these are less sales-qualified people, right. These are people still at the top of the funnel. They're reading your blog posts. They're learning about the challenges that you solve, and your solutions.
Back to the calls to action, right. Putting calls to action within blogs is something that we all know that we should be doing, but the question now becomes, "How?" I took this blog post, 12 Personalized Email Examples You Can't Help but Click. Looking at the browser now I can see that this is going to be a fairly long blog post. I can see that on this right-hand side here, and as I go through, I don't see too much at the top. There's a little call to action right here which we'll get to in just a second because that's an important one. That means they're doing it right. HubSpot has got in the practice of really optimizing these posts from the call to action standpoint.
The first one I want to show you is all the way down here at the bottom and it kind of gets lost in the images because it's so well designed right, a big design challenge that we had to overcome with our agency is making it stand-out from the blog post itself. You want to create that contrast so that your eyes do gravitate towards it and finally all the way at the bottom, there's a free guide on how to personalize your email marketing. Looks pretty useful. The thing is, after all these images and all that content, the likelihood of me clicking on that is pretty much slim to none. I'm pretty exhausted with this blog. I read it all. I looked at all the pictures. There's a lot going on, so while good to have, maybe not the best way to potentially have calls to action within your blog post.
What I would recommend doing, and I'm assuming HubSpot did this after I think they did a quick case study on it for what performed better, are these kind of large, blue, so they stand out from the rest of the text, H2s or probably H3s here on this page. This is kind of an interesting strategy. You can see, "Download our free guide here to learn how to personalize your own emails to generate more opens and clicks," and I think the reason this is out-performing, the reason why people are recommending utilizing these types of calls to action in the blog, are because of the following. Number one, people are just skimming blogs now, right? They're not even really reading it so if you can have things that stand out a little bit more from that text so that when people are skimming it they can easily identify it before they get all the way to the bottom, that's probably a really good thing to utilize.
Number two, is that people are becoming desensitized to things that look like call to action. You want to make sure that these occur as naturally as possible. They're a little bit more friendlier language, and they don't ... My alarm bells from a sales perspective don't immediately go off to say, "Oh they're trying to sell me something here." It's just a subtle call to action and I would actually recommend utilizing several of these calls to action, or these types of calls to action throughout your blog post in order to hopefully convert people at different points. Maybe they're not ready if you put it too early. Maybe if you put it too late, they've already left the page, so there's kind of that happy medium there to get a balance from.
To learn more about creating successful CTAs, check out this helpful list of resources.
Looking for more ways to improve your blog? Get the Rules to By Checklist free now.