The call to action. Your CTA. All your marketing copy leads to this one vital sentence. Yes, your images are essential. And indeed, your content is crucial. But get these last few words wrong, and you’ve just wasted the valuable time and great effort you spent crafting the perfect content.
The reason why creating a great CTA is critical to your senior living community’s digital marketing efforts is right there in the name. Your CTA is calling on your audience to perform a specified action that moves them along the new resident journey. Each CTA should feel like the natural outcome or conclusion of that piece of content—the obvious next steps for your audience to take when engaging with your community.
A Good CTA Drives Conversion
A good CTA drives conversion, helping your prospective residents and their families make the decision to get in touch with you to schedule a tour or ask questions. A poorly written, unclear, or difficult to follow CTA can drive new resident leads right off your website and to your competitor’s doorstep.
The pressure surrounding the importance of the CTA causes many senior living marketers to wonder, “are my CTAs effective?”. Today we’ll take a look at the three questions to ask yourself when evaluating your CTAs to make sure they’re ready to help your digital marketing initiatives convert and drive new resident move-ins.
1. Are Your CTAs Easy to See?
No one is going to respond to a CTA they don’t see. So while the activating language of your CTA is critical, the visual aspects are no less essential.
With that in mind, make sure your CTAs are in an obvious, uncluttered section of your website pages. Placing your CTA in an open space increases conversion by as much as 232%.1 You can also consider using a button to increase the click-through rate (CTR) by 45%.
The color of your CTAs matters, too. SAP, a leading business and management software, conducted a case study on color and learned that when their CTAs were orange, conversion rates increased by 32.5%2 A similar analysis by Performable found that red was another effective color—boosting conversion by 21%.
2. Where Are Your CTAs?
Every piece of marketing that you publish should have a clear CTA. But when it comes to where CTAs should be located throughout your senior living community’s website, there are some places that tend to show higher conversion rates than others. Below is a breakdown of different website locations by conversion rate:3
- Sidebars: 0.5 to 1.5%
- Generic, end-of-post: 0.5 to 1.5%
- Pop-ups: 1 to 8%
- Sliders and bars: 1 to 5%
- Feature boxes: 3 to 9%
- Welcome gates: 10 to 25%
When designing your website, it’s important to keep in mind not just what your CTAs look like and what they say, but where they’re going to go in the flow of your overall design.
Email is another excellent avenue for motivating prospective residents and their families to take the next step on the new resident journey. When you include a CTA in an email, keep the format direct and to the point. Focus on a single call to action for any given email and you may increase your CTR by an incredible 371%.4 For sales, that number jumps to an astounding 1,617%!
Social media is another formidable forum for a CTA. Try using them on your senior living center’s page to potentially raise your CTR by 285%.5
3. Are Your CTAs Personalized?
Personalization at every level of marketing is important, and becomes increasingly so as your prospective residents and their families move through the new move-in journey. They expect you to specifically gear your marketing products toward their unique needs, concerns, and desires—and that includes CTAs.
To that end, use retargeted marketing techniques to personalize the CTAs on your website pages, and you’ll convert 42% more of your site visitors.6 Retargeting helps you keep both your prospective resident audience and the adult child decision maker audience engaged, with retargeted material customized to their needs and concerns.
If you aren’t interested in a full-fledged retargeting campaign, try switching the wording of your CTAs to make them feel more personal. CTAs written in the first person have been known to increase click-through-rates by 90%.7
A Good Website Makes a Great First Impression
Your CTAs make a tangible impact on your digital marketing efforts’ success (or failure). And in the competitive world of senior living, you don’t want to miss out on new resident leads. Dreamscape Marketing can help you make the most of your digital marketing assets with high-impact CTAs. Call us at 888.307.7304 to schedule a strategy session.
For a list of references, please contact us.