What Goes Into A Great Call To Action

How to Choose the Best CTA for Each Blog Post

Increasing the conversion rate of visitors to your business blog is all about the effectiveness of the calls-to-action (CTAs) on every published blog post.

The selected CTA can make or break the conversion rate of any given blog post. Here’s how PageLadder decides which CTA best fits each blog post published. Feel free to adapt our process to fit your particular business or industry.

Process for Selecting a Blog Post CTA

Start with a list of all marketing offers. This list will be whittled down following the below steps to pick the best one for a specific blog post.

1) Identify Your Blog Visitors’ Sales Funnel Stage

Find out which stage of the sales funnel the majority of your blog visitors are in to narrow down your CTA list to offers that match. First time blog visitors that don’t know anything about your business would not likely respond to a CTA for a free trial. A top-of-the-funnel stage offer, like an educational ebook or webinar, makes a better CTA fit for first time visitors.

At PageLadder, new visitors are 60% of our monthly blog traffic. So, our calls-to-action are usually top-of-the-funnel stage offers like educational ebooks. The chosen CTA should cater to the sales cycle stage of the majority of your blog’s visitors.

The other 40% are subscribers and repeat visitors. They know more about us and may be ready for middle or bottom funnel stage offers like a webinar or free trial. Here’s where Smart CTAs come in for customizing offers to different stages of blog visitors. There’s more about Smart CTAs at the end of this post.

2) Target the Blog Post for a Specific Audience

Think about the audience you’re targeting in the topic of the blog post. At PageLadder, one group of marketers we target is in the nonprofit sector. We wrote a blog post and used a CTA offer specifically geared toward non-profits.

3) Pinpoint the Most Popular Offer Types

Look at your marketing analytics for trends in CTA clickthrough and conversion rates. Spot the most popular offer types and cut the underperforming CTAs from your list.

4) Determine the Offer Relevancy to Blog Post Topic

Next, trim your list of offers to include only those that are relevant to the content of your blog post.

5) Match the Skill or Knowledge Level of Each Blog Post Topic with Visitors

Blogs catering to multiple skill levels or expertise typically contain blog posts geared for a specific knowledge or skill level. Eliminate CTAs for advanced visitors from a blog post for beginners.

6) Refer to Marketing Analytics for Clickthrough & Conversion Rates

After narrowing down your offer list using the above steps, make the final choice using marketing analytics. Look for CTA clickthrough and conversion rates. Pick the CTA with the best numbers.

That’s it! You should have the best CTA offer for your blog post!

But, There Are Smart CTAs Too!

The other 40% of blog visitors mentioned above are repeat visitors. Smart CTAs can tailor the best CTA for them too when they’ve been captured as leads in our database. All blog visitors can view a different offer customized to their sales funnel stage or other criteria we define.

By using Smart CTAs, you can choose different CTA offers for different visitors.

Do you take anything else into consideration when choosing CTAs for your blog posts?