6 Design Tips to Make Your Calls-to-Action Stand Out

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The end goal in content marketing is to use your content to generate more leads and customers, and creating engaging and stand out calls-to-action is a major part of that.

While creating your content, adding calls-to-action to read related posts, download helpful ebooks on a similar topic, or even sign up for your service or buy your products is a great way to try to convert customers through quality blog posts.

But in order to help maximize clicks on these CTAs, you need to focus on their design. Ensuring they grab attention and jump off of the page is the best way to improve conversions with your blog.

To help you turn your blog content into a conversion tool for your business, we wanted to offer a few of our top design tips to help your calls-to-action stand out.

What is a Call-to-Action?

First things first, what even is a call-to-action?

Essentially, this is a button, sidebar section or block of content that teases a feature of your service, a product, a lead magnet, an online course, a customer service chatbot, and more.

The intent is essentially to get your blog reader or website visitor to take action with your business.

These can lead to anything, and can even be a basic in-text link, but the object is to let your reader or website visitor know what action to take next.

Scattering CTAs throughout your blog content and website is a great idea, but at the very least, you should always end every blog article with a clear action to take next, whether it’s reading another post or just signing up for your email list.

Why Call-to-Action Design Matters

There are two factors when it comes to a successful CTA: the CTA copy and the design. If you don’t have an enticing offer or reason for someone to click and take action, they’re not going to.

In the same vein, if your call-to-action doesn’t stand out well enough or isn’t visually appealing, your audience might scroll right past it.

This is why you want to put just as much emphasis on the design and overall look and feel of your calls-to-action as you do the verbiage you place inside them.

Read on to learn more about all of the design principles and practices you should be keeping in mind when creating graphical CTAs for your website and blog.

Call-to-Action Design Tips

If you’re ready to create stunning and eye-catching calls-to-action, here are our top six best design practices to increase clicks and conversions.

1. Color matters.

Color psychology is always important. Colors mean different things, but there are also colors that pop more than others and entice clicks more than others.

For example, when it comes to your call-to-action button, you want to be sure to use a bright color that stands out from your website or your CTA background. Your button needs to pop.

Red is obviously a bright color that works well, but some experts say orange is a great go-to as well. Green means “GO,” so that’s a reasonable choice as well.

Regardless, take a look at your overall call-to-action design. If your background is a light color, like in this CTA below, a bright pastel color can be a great way to grab attention.

Another great example is the bright pop of color in this CTA.

By using a bright color for the full call-to-action, it really pops from their blog post and attracts attention, leading to even more conversions.

Your blog is likely a mostly white background with dark text, so you want to make sure that your calls-to-action really stick out from the rest of your content. This is why bright colors are better over dark colors, and bright buttons can help improve conversions.

2. Test different button shapes.

Sick of boring, square buttons? That doesn’t have to be the norm on every single call-to-action. Try something round or even rounded edges on your rectangle button.

Take a look at the CTA design below, and how the rounded button gives off a different look and feel than your typical rectangle.

On another note, you can even try differently shaped call-to-action designs as a whole. Take a look at this example below, where the entire CTA has rounded corners.

This can make the graphic feel softer and less harsh, enticing users to check it out more carefully and increase clicks.

You can also A/B test how well different buttons and graphic shapes perform. Maybe your audience actually likes a rectangular shape better. It all comes down to what is going to generate the most clicks and conversions.

3. Make sure your text is legible.

If someone can’t read your CTA, they have no idea what action you want them to take, rendering your mission useless.

Instead, use large, legible text. This should typically be a clean and concise serif or sans serif font. However, if you’re going to use a script font, keep it in the header where the font size should be large enough to be easily read.

And your button/action text should always be in a serif or sans serif font.

Take a look at this CTA below. The fonts are clean, minimalistic, and easy to read. This helps ensure maximum clicks.

This clean sans serif font is another great example of ensuring legible CTAs.

When it comes to a design that you’re using to generate conversions like your call-to-actions, it’s always best to lean to the safe side and stick to standard fonts.

4. Add shapes, icons, and illustrations.

Create a visual design to go alongside your CTA. This will help grab your audience’s attention and draw them in. Not a lot of people are going to pay attention to or click on a block of color that’s full of text.

Instead, make sure that you’re including some type of design within your call-to-action graphic. This can be a group of shapes, an icon relevant to your landing page, an illustration or a sneak peek at what users get when they click.

A mockup of your lead magnet is a great visual to include because it lets people get a small preview or snippet of what your business is actually offering.

Here’s an example that shares a mockup of what the actual service offers if someone were to sign up within their call-to-action.

Another fun visual idea is to include a custom illustration or animated graphic, like in the example below.

You could even use stock photos within your CTAs to help grab reader attention, like we see in the example here.

You can also use shapes like arrows to point to your CTA button and let users know exactly where to click.

Your call-to-action needs to be extremely visual, well-designed and attractive to stand out to your blog readers.

5. Incorporate white space.

Using white space and margins around your design is essential to creating a clean and clutter-free design. Your CTA design shouldn’t go edge-to-edge on your canvas.

Instead, sure to leave some white space and empty margins surrounding each of your design elements. Less is more – don’t overcrowd your design.

Notice how in this CTA example below, there aren’t any elements smushed together, and there’s a clear amount of space around the edges.

White space is an essential design element in everything you create, but especially in calls-to-action when the main point is to create a visually appealing button or graphic that gets your audience to click and convert.

Also, don’t forget about your CTA placement. This also plays a major role in conversions.

6. A/B test your designs.

I mentioned A/B testing briefly when talking about different button shapes, but let’s get into this a bit more.

A/B testing is important in many different marketing strategies, but especially when it comes to something that’s sole purpose is to generate leads and conversions.

You want to come up with a few different design options and see which ones generate the most clicks and conversions. While you might think a certain design is going to perform best, your data could show otherwise.

This can help you to further optimize your call-to-action design and conversion rate, and ensure your CTAs are grabbing as much attention as possible.

Create Your Own Actionable Call-to-Action Designs

Ready to get started creating your own stunning call-to-action graphics? You can easily create engaging visuals with a graphic design software and interactive shapes and icons.

Once your audience clicks through your call-to-action buttons, feed them right through your lead management software to start nurturing them into customers.

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About the Author

Chloe is a Content Marketing Manager at Visme, an online graphic design software. She loves to write about digital marketing and design and find new ways to engage audiences through content. Chloe is based in Charleston, SC, where she loves exploring her city with her son.

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