The 3 website buttons that’ll boost your homepage conversion
Avid fans will have heard me bang on about the marketing money-pit before.
But for the newbies, this is where good people spend time, money and sanity on marketing which sends all their leads to a website that doesn’t nail the sale.
So the leads don’t turn into paying customers. The $$$$$ tumbles down the marketing money-pit. And you do more marketing to try to drum up more business.
For that reason, and a bazillion and 1 more, your website copy needs to be killer.
Today I want to hone in on a tiny but mighty part of your website homepage - your buttons. These are your conversion epicentre. In fact, when copywriters are optimising websites for conversions they will often ‘work from the button out.
Although this button advice applies to all pages of your site, it’s most crucial on the homepage, so we’ll focus our attention there.
Button 1: Call to action (CTA).
The most infamous of all buttons (except maybe Benjamin). This is the thing you really, really want the reader to do. It’s ‘Book a call’. It’s ‘Buy now’. It’s ’Start the free trial’. It’s the closer.
Place this one top right if you can. And it should appear in at least two places on the homepage. Sometimes in the heading section (there’s pros and cons for this, which we’ll save for another day). Always at the end of the page.
The copy on this button is usually pretty direct and straight to the point. See the above examples. There are rare cases where clever button copy might work for your CTA, but use with caution.
Button 2: Call to value (CTV)
The lesser known second cousin of the loud and boisterous CTA, but so very important. This leads your reader to a small commitment. They are not quite ready to commit to buying from you. But they are certainly interested enough to want more.
This is a modern-day barter system; you give them something of value in exchange for their email address. An eBook, a cheatsheet, a discount code, a demo. Something they want enough to part with their contact details.
The copy in this button should be written in 1st person from the reader’s perspective and answer the question ‘I want to [insert ultimate desire that your offer provides].
I’ll point out here that your reader's ultimate desire is NOT to “Download my eBook” or “Get your voucher”. They want the goodies the freebie will bring “More website conversions”. “Get rid of my belly fat”. “Save $10 today”
Bonus tip: You can place your CTA and CTV buttons next to each other to really increase your homepage conversions. Why?
Humans love binary choice. If you only have one button you’re asking people to choose between clicking the button or doing nothing - guess which they’ll usually pick?
If you place two buttons side-by-side their binary choice is either take this action (your CTA), or take this one (your CTV). And so you’ve got yourself a conversion either way.
Button 3: Call to journey (CTJ)
Yep, I made that name up myself, you won’t find that in any copywriting 101 textbook
The reader might not be ready to take an action at all yet. And that’s OK, so take them on a journey to another page on your site.
Any page on your site is great to link to from the homepage, but my favorites are the About page or, How It Works, depending on your business.
I like the CTJ button halfway down the page or at the bottom. You don’t want to navigate people off the homepage too soon, or they won’t read your homepage copy-gold.
Side note: You should also be linking to all the other pages on your site within the homepage text - that’s good SEO practice.
Last tip for your buttons: Always place a proof point or quash an objection near your button. This might be a testimonial or statistic, something that’ll tip the fence-sitters over.
Last, last tip: Remember when we talked about finding out your audience’s small wins in your research phase? Don’t try to sell the big transformation your product or service offers near every button.
Sometimes people just want to know the small win, they can emotionally connect better with that.
This is only the tip-of-the-button iceberg. We could go into colours, UX, click hooks...the list goes on.
But my aim is to provide you with just enough copy-knowledge to be dangerous, so we’ll leave it there.
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