Your website is one of the most important medical marketing tools in your arsenal. The purpose of a website is not to list everything imaginable about your practice. It is to get the visitors to take action based upon the information provided. This can be filling out a form, calling, visiting another page on the site or answering a questionnaire. A call to action (CTA) on a website is an image, text or form that grabs your visitor’s attention and clearly shows them what action they should be taking next on your site. Carefully crafted CTAs deliver results in the form of new patient inquiries.

If you have ever been on a website searching for a way to contact the business on the site, you can appreciate the importance of having clearly defined CTAs. People by nature are lazy and don’t want to search for something as basic as a phone number. CTAs provide website visitors with the information they are seeking clearly. If you have 300 visitors to your website daily and none of them are contacting you, you are losing 300 potential patients. That is a lot of lost revenue. Not every call to action will motivate a visitor to act and some fail completely. That is why it is important to know how to craft an effective call to action for your website.

Call to actions should stand out from your website. They should be one of the first things you see when you land on a page. The most effective way to achieve this is through placement and design. The eye is naturally drawn to the right hand side of a page; therefore you should place your call to action there. Your call to action should contrast in color with your background and be large enough to see clearly and pop from the screen. It doesn’t have to be gaudy, just attention getting.

Call to actions should be clearly stated with as few words as possible. Your visitors should not be confused about what they are supposed to do next. The landing page that your call to action links to should match the offer listed in the call to action. Finally, be sure to be specific about what will happen after they act. If they are going to find out if they are a candidate for a procedure or treatment you offer, will it come to them by email or should they expect a phone call? These are important considerations that your visitors will have and can impact the success or failure of your click through rate.

If you are having trouble figuring out what you can give away in your call to action or how to craft them, give MindStream Creative a call. We have helped many medical practices develop effective call to actions and can provide the guidance needed to get results.