Would you ‘click here’?

Has it ever occurred to you that the wording you use for your calls-to-action may be costing you money? Why? Because these links are often quite non-specific. For example, ‘click here’ doesn’t really suggest to the customer why they should.

By being more specific in your choice of words, you can dramatically increase the number of click-throughs that occur. Therefore, it’s important to use words that urge or encourage an action but which also specifically explain what that action is.

Relate it back to a real life situation. If you’re driving along in your car and saw a big sign that said ‘Turn right,’ you’d probably ignore it, because you don’t really want to go right and you haven’t been told why you should. But what if the sign said ‘Turn right now to see the All Blacks’? Chances are you might just turn right and take a look.

Research in this area has shown descriptive action statements like ‘sign me up’ and ‘click to continue’ are much more likely to get people to follow through with that instruction than something like ‘click here’ or ‘next’. Choosing the right action statements can produce many more click-throughs, and, if used in the right way, can help lead customers through a decision journey.

It’s also quite amazing how subtle changes can make a big difference. A recent Marketing Sherpa study found that they got 8.5% more click-throughs from their newsletter to the website by simply changing the link wording from ‘Continue to article’ to ‘Click to continue’.

There is a flip side to the argument which is that the ambiguity of an action statement can sometimes cause people to click through anyway due to curiosity. This could be true in some cases, but when it comes down to it, it’s situational and commonsensical. You’ll never really know if your calls to action are working well unless you try some variations and see which works best.

So, in the true spirit of eating our own dog food, we changed our newsletter link text from ‘continue reading (name of article)’ to ‘click to continue’, and next week we’ll tell what difference it made.