Free call-to-action generator for a stronger first draft.

Take a damp proofing company whose website has a form nobody completes. The page explains the survey well, the photographs are good, and the button at the bottom says Submit. The inputs are what the form asks for. Offer: a survey of the affected wall with a written report. Audience: homeowners who have found damp and do not yet know how serious it is. Desired next step: book the survey. Friction to remove: the fear that a survey is a sales visit and that a price will be quoted on the doorstep.

The line those inputs should produce is close to: Book my damp survey. Underneath it, in smaller text: Takes about forty minutes, written report either way, no obligation to use us for the work. The button names the outcome and the person receiving it. The line beneath removes the three specific objections that were stopping the click, in the order a worried homeowner has them.

What holds this up is that the button and the line below are doing different jobs and neither is trying to do both. The button answers what happens if I press this. The support line answers what will it cost me to have pressed it, where the cost is time, obligation and social awkwardness rather than money. Most underperforming calls to action are underperforming because a single element is trying to carry both, and it ends up long, hedged and unconvincing.

The version most people write instead is Submit, or Learn more, or Contact us today for a free no obligation quote from our friendly team of experts. The first two describe the interface: they tell the reader what the software will do, not what they will receive. The third is longer than the reader will read on a button, puts the strongest reassurance in the middle where it is skipped, and uses free, no obligation, friendly and experts, all of which are claims the reader has been given by every competitor and therefore discounts automatically.

There is one more thing the weak versions share. They are written from the seller's side of the transaction. Contact us describes what the reader does for the business. Book my survey describes what the reader gets. Reading the line back and asking who the sentence serves is usually enough to find the problem without any further analysis.

Do not rewrite the button when the problem is the offer. A call to action is the last few words of an argument, and no verb rescues a proposition the reader does not want. If a page converts badly, check in order: is the offer wanted, is it clear, is it believable, and only then is the button phrased well. Teams reach for the button first because it is the cheapest thing to change, which is exactly why it is usually the thing that has already been changed four times.

Skip the generated line when the action carries genuine consequence. Delete, cancel, pay, submit an application, agree to terms: in those places clarity beats persuasion outright, and a warmly worded button is a usability problem rather than a conversion gain. The reader must be able to predict exactly what happens next, and dressing that up is how people click things they did not mean to click.

Be careful with urgency you cannot substantiate. Only two left, offer ends tonight and similar devices are effective enough that they are widely regulated, and in many jurisdictions a countdown that resets or a scarcity claim that is not true is a straightforward consumer protection problem rather than a grey area. Use urgency only where it is real, and where you could show the working if somebody asked.

Watch the interaction with accessibility. The accessible name of a control is what a screen reader announces, and a page of buttons all announcing Learn more gives a non visual reader no way to tell them apart. If the visible text must stay short and generic, the control still needs a label that makes sense read out of context. This is also the moment to check that the button is a button, since a styled span may look identical and be unreachable by keyboard.

The reliable shape is a verb the reader performs and the thing they end up holding: Get the checklist, Book the survey, See the pricing, Start the trial. What it must not be is a description of the mechanism. Submit, Continue and Learn more describe the interface's behaviour, and the interface's behaviour is not why anyone clicks.

First person is worth testing rather than assuming. Start my audit sometimes outperforms Start your audit, on the theory that the button reads as the visitor's own words rather than an instruction given to them. It does not always win, and the difference is usually small next to naming the outcome at all, so treat it as the refinement it is rather than the fix.

Most of the gain available around a call to action is not in the button. It is in the short line beside or beneath it that reduces the perceived cost of pressing. How long it takes, whether a card is needed, whether anyone will telephone, what arrives and when, how easy it is to undo.

Write that line by listing the reasons a specific person hesitates, in their order, and answering the top two in as few words as possible. It should be genuinely short. If it runs to three lines it has become copy, and copy above the button competes with the button. And each reassurance must be true and kept: promising no phone call and then telephoning does more damage to the next hundred visitors than the one conversion was worth.

Two buttons of equal weight ask the reader to make a decision they did not come to make, and the common result is that they make neither. Decide which action the page exists for, give that one the visual weight, and demote everything else to a plain link. A secondary action does not need to be hidden. It needs to stop competing.

This applies across the page as much as within a single block. A page with the same offer repeated in four places at four different weights reads as uncertain about its own purpose. Repeating one call to action, in the same words, at the natural pauses in a long page, works better than varying it, because the reader who has finally decided should not have to work out whether this button is the same as the one further up.

The most common cause of a good click rate with a bad conversion rate is a mismatch between the promise and the destination. See the pricing must land on prices, visible without scrolling and without a form in front of them. Book the survey must land on a booking step, not a general contact page with a dropdown.

Every gap between what the button said and what the next screen shows is paid for in abandonment, and it is paid twice, because the reader who feels misled is also less likely to trust the next promise on the site. When testing, read the button and then look at the screen it produces as though you had never seen either. If your first reaction is to look for the thing you were promised, the flow is broken regardless of what the click rate says.