Ideally, all aspects of your ecommerce experience drive shoppers towards a conversion. Depending on your business and the point in the sales funnel your prospect is, your conversion goal could be to get individuals to enter contact information, finalize a sale or share a promotion.
Whatever your goal is, the final hurdle to get a conversion is getting a user to hit a button to actually take some sort of action. And when it comes to helping nudge your customers to finally click that button, I’ve put together a few best practices to follow.
Your call-to-action needs to clearly state the action that customers are about to take. Use unambiguous, active language on and around your button that reinforces the value to expect. If you leave anything open to interpretation or use words that imply extra work or more commitment on the part of the shopper, they’ll have more hesitation and are less likely to convert.
So, do use words like “see”, “give”, “get” or “reserve” as they demonstrate momentum and will encourage individuals to continue. A study from HubSpot showed that from a list of action words, “Click here” and “Go” actually had the highest conversion rates. Alternatively, words that can have the opposite effect include “download”, “submit” or “register.”
Additionally, shifting from second person to first person can also have a considerable effect. A study by Michael Aagaard, Unbounce’s Senior Conversion Optimizer, demonstrated how changing a call-to-action button from “Get your free template” to “Get my free template” resulted in a 90% increase in conversions.
With online shopping being so visual, it makes sense that color can have a huge impact on conversions. For starters, certain colors can have drastically different connotations from country to country. For example, while yellow signifies jealously in France, it can mean bravery or wealth in Japan. Purple is considered a color of mourning in Thailand, while the Western cultures tend to view it as a symbol of royalty. So, it’s important to pick colors that carries positive sentiments, keeping in mind that you may have to use different colors for different countries. It’s also important to keep colors consistent in your ecommerce experience and on brand.
Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to button color. Every customer segment is different so experiment to see which colors create the highest conversion rates for your business. As UX Dilemma points out, the best way to bypass the different associations that can occur with each color and each culture is to emphasize the button with a color that contrasts the other colors on your page.
Image source: Bright Hub
In addition to being a contrasting color to the rest of your page, UserTesting Blog says that buy buttons should appear large enough on your page so that customers can easily pick it out, but not so large that it appears obnoxious on the webpage.
You also need to avoid hard-to-read fonts and all-caps. The lack of letter variation in all-caps actually makes reading it more difficult. Follow these simple guidelines of formatting a call-to-action button by using a rectangle shape, having clear boundaries and borders and using white space around the buy button. Vitally, make sure all of your spelling and grammar is correct! These can cause a great deal of hesitation in shoppers and cause them to not hit that button.
Creating a sense of urgency can have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your ecommerce buttons. One case study found that creating a sense of urgency helped increase sales by 332%.
There are lots of ways to create a sense of urgency including limited-time discounts, communicating that only a limited amount of stock is available or adding countdown clocks to the end of a sale. Use words such as “now” and “today” to reinforce this sense of urgency.
There’s obviously a lot more that goes into optimizing your checkout than just the button. But it is the final barrier, so you need to do everything you can to eliminate any risk of hesitation. Be mindful of the particular needs and desires of your target market to help your buttons convert. And be prepared to test different combinations to see what works best for your ecommerce business.
