It’s a commonly known fact that adding and optimizing CTA in your marketing materials increases the CTR index. When it comes to web push, it’s the same story. In this article, we are going to talk about CTAs–how can they increase your web push CTR and improve your overall marketing efforts? Let’s find out!

The CTA abbreviation stands for a call to action. It’s a small button or statement placed on your website or in other marketing materials in order to encourage users to take a specific next step. As it happens, people are more likely to do something when you simply tell them to. As a result, CTA improves CTR (click-through rates) in:

• Emails: by 371%
• Facebook pages: by 285%
• Videos: by 380%
• Push notifications: by 50% [PushPushGo]

As you can see, the juice is definitely worth the squeeze. Adding a CTA is a relatively straightforward action that can significantly enhance the efficiency of your marketing campaigns. However, like everything else, CTA has to be well-thought-out and designed to help you achieve a specific goal. Let’s talk about that a bit more.

How to design and optimize an effective CTA button

For starters, let’s concentrate on the form itself. As our experience at PushPushGo suggests, a button is an optimal form, far more effective than just a text with an embedded link. The reason is apparent–buttons are much more visible and eye-catching than plain text. 

Remember that every CTA button has to meet two crucial conditions:

• It has to be clearly visible and easy to click
• It should draw potential customer’s attention

In order to achieve these two objectives, you could try some of the proven techniques. Here are a couple of examples:

• Try first-person CTAs (e.g., “I want this ebook!”). In some instances, they can offer a 90% increase in click-through rate.
• Use contrasting colors (e.g., orange, red)
• Try to personalize your CTAs (diverse personalization applications offer you the possibility to personalize the message to every customer. At PushPushGo, we use a product feed to provide our clients with the opportunity to personalize their notifications. Our clients provide us with their product catalogues. Based on that, we can create personalized notifications. Besides product feed, we can also use DataLayer. Thanks to its easy availability, it is an ideal place to transfer data from the client, which we can use when building segmentation and automatic scenarios.)
• Put CTA in various places in the text, but at least one at the very end of it.
• Reduce mess around the CTA button. Let it stand out from the background.

Take a look at some of the examples of CTAs that successfully attract customer attention:

Dropbox:

Shopify:

Canva:

GetResponse:

USE POWER WORDS

These are words that encourage users to take action, primarily by evoking a specific psychological or emotional response. Again, a few examples:

• Sign up now
• Try for free
• Get started
• Learn more
• Sign up for free
• Give X a try
• Get X for free
• Claim your free reward

CTA shouldn’t be long or complicated. Make it as short and clear as possible.

USE ADDITIONAL TECHNIQUES TO MAKE YOUR CTAS EFFECTIVE

If you want to make your CTAs even more effective, try some of the following strategies:

• Offer something for free: Customers love freebies and gifts. If you can give something for free (e.g., in exchange for their email address), do so! You will grow your email base in no time.
• Give instant benefit: Today, customers hate to wait for their product or reward. Promise them they will get their product/service/offer ASAP. You can also try to create a sense of urgency: “Schedule a call in 5 minutes”
• Use the before-after bridge: It’s one of the most popular copywriting techniques. Show your customers you can solve their problems: “Still looking for a perfect laptop?”, “Discover the best lawn mowers on sale”.
• Use social proof: This technique always works. Show how large your customer base is: “Join 100,000 satisfied customers!”, “Over 5,000 people bought this product”. This way, you will encourage potential customers to join this vast group of satisfied individuals.

CTAs in push notifications

Earlier this year, Businessofapps.com published the list of Push Notification Statistics for 2021. As their findings show, push notifications prove to be effective in diverse aspects of online business:

• Push notifications have the highest open rates in the following sectors: business and finance, entertainment, and coupons
• The biggest senders of push notifications are e-commerce companies (over 22% market share) and online media (18.79%)
• Segmented push notifications have the highest click-through conversion rate (almost 2%)

At PushPushGo, we have similar experiences. During years of work, we have conducted hundreds of web push campaigns. The ones with CTA buttons were the most effective ones. Take a look at some examples of such campaigns:

If you do not include a CTA button to your notification but enable the "Require Interaction" feature, browsers by default add a CTA “Close”. Is it really something you would like your subscribers to do?

Push notifications allow you to achieve diverse marketing and sales goals, from growing your base of loyal customers through retargeting and rescuing abandoned carts to promoting special offers and new arrivals. Web push is ad-blocker-proof and works with every major Internet browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and more). If you want to find out more about push notifications, we encourage you to take a look here: