Whether your business operates in a virtual landscape or if you have a tangible product sold through your brick and mortar premises, your website is likely to be an important contact point during your customers buying journey. They could simply be checking out who you are or they might have credit card in hand, either way, it is vital they can easily see how to get in touch.

How they prefer to do this will vary from person to person, industry to industry. They might want to email you with some beefy bespoke request, adding photos or diagrams. They may need to call you ASAP, as they are lost in your town looking for your shop before you close for the weekend.

With social media fast becoming a customer service touch point and some businesses streamlining their call centre teams, the contact types you offer will vary. What pages you place these on may depend on how a page reflects the position your customer is in their buying journey.

The important thing is where you place your call to action buttons and what they look like. Whether it says buy now, sign up, call, follow, like or submit, it needs to stand out to the consumer, not just to encourage the contact but because it might be the thing they are frantically searching for!

This can be seen in research carried out by TechWyse who used eye-tracking technology to test the success different website layouts. This technology creates heat maps to show what the viewer looked at first and what they were spending the most time looking at on a page.

You can see from the images below that the non-clickable less important red ‘No Fee’ starburst but the phone number gets very little attention. When this layout was changed, the phone number was the second resting point and was given the most time out of all the elements on the page.

Changing the layout so that the call to action button with the phone number was stood out from the top banner made a huge difference. The design is much clearer, less clutter around the button that could distract the viewer, the colour makes the button stand out, there is a sense of urgency about the action, ‘Call Now & Let us Help’ also implies a friendly and welcoming tone.

As you can see with the trucking firm, there are some key factors in the website layout that will impact on the conversion rate of your visitors.

Placement
Ensure that the action you wish customers to take is positioned prominently and is easy to find. Wherever possible, your phone number should take pride of place at the top of every page, as this is the contact method a customer will opt for if they are need to speak to you urgently.

If you have not heard of the F pattern, it describes the way western people scan webpages. Imagine the heat map over a page with more information, the pattern would look like the letter F, as people start on in the top left corner and tend to read less across the page as they move down. Key contact information is best placed at the top of the page and or on the left hand side.

Size & Colour
Make the button stand out from the page so that it catches the eye quickly. Using a large font and a contrasting colour will separate it from the background. This

Space
Avoid the desire to squeeze as much on a page as you can as this can visually hide the call to action. The page doesn’t want to be too fussy or crowded as this can make it difficult to follow or find the key information.

You should also avoid adding placing an alternative action button to close to the primary action. If you want them to call you, leave the ‘Or complete the form for more information’ option further down the page. Evidence suggests that these can cause conflict and many people will end up not taking either action.

Above are the header and footer for our own site. Although our main ordering system is through the website, our customer prefer to have a friendly voice on the end of the line to help them with last minutes orders or finalising artwork. So we decided that the prime spot should be the phone number.

Most people are used to contact details either being at the top or bottom of a page so we felt it was a good place to pop the rest of our contact points in the footer.

Ultimately, the most important point is to make it easy to find and encourage action. If you prefer to drive people towards your email, contact form, live chat or app download, then this is the action you need to stand out. The positioning and design of the call to action is just as relevant whatever the end result might be.

If you have found this useful, why not take a look at our article on ‘How to integrate print into your marketing campaigns’ so you drive traffic to your website or in-store with print marketing.

Lisa Cooper

Lisa Cooper is a photographer and marketing writer working for Print-Print Limited, promoting business and building your brand through quality print marketing.

If you’re interested in small business promotion then please get in touch info@print-print.co.uk