subject: How to develop a clear action for your customers [print this page] Your website should drive people to do one thing. Depending on the industry, your single driver may be an online purchase, to contact you for more information or to contact one of your retailers. All the content you place on your website should drive people to do that one thing. So you should try to have your call to action visible at all times. Some people click on the first link they see on a landing page. Others read for long stretches before they take action. Have links at the top, bottom and in between. Make it easy for visitors to take action whenever they're ready. Track everything. Try to custom tag each link so you know which ones are the most used. This will come in handy for the next time. If you have a multi-stage process, like a survey, shopping cart, or registration form, see where you lose people and work on that. You've spent good money getting people to your landing page. You might as well use each campaign as thoroughly as possible so you can optimize your future landing pages. Don't offer escape routes. Amazingly, I've seen landing pages that offer the visitor many options to get side-tracked. One advertiser recently told me this was because they wanted to keep the same look and feel as all the other pages on their website. The case must be made to the powers that be in your company that it is all right for your landing pages to have some similarities to the rest of the site's interface, but ultimately they serve as stand-alone pages that funnel visitors down to the desired call to action. If your company is not known to visitors, there is a delicate balance between educating them as to who you are and why they should do business with you, ie., actually taking that action now to get the relationship going. But offering your visitors links to your mission statement, store locator or the like gives them permission to bail out on the reason why they came in the first place. Of course, having a link to your privacy page might not be such a bad idea if you're asking the visitor to hand over contact information, but do remember to then put the call to action on the privacy page as well. They should be able to do that one thing in the fewest number of moves. If they are purchasing a product, they should be able to click a Buy Now button that takes them straight to the checkout. It should be clear what you are trying to get people to do. Try to avoid long pages of detailed information if there is no way for the user to do something on that page. Ask for the least amount of input possible. Most product based websites should ask for very little information.
