Boy do I love me some good button copy

A call to action (CTA) is an exhortation to do something specific. On a website, they usually appear on buttons or links; the action here (sign up, buy now) will happen after the user clicks.

At the 2014 Authority Intensive conference, I heard Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers discuss the user's fear of commitment as it relates to clicking a button. Joanna advised that we remove that fear by helping the user understand what will happen after the click. (Joanna wrote the book on button copy, btw.)

Clear CTAs that provide a sense of what's going to happen create good user experience; they're good for conversion; they enrich the whole site; and they're fun to write, unlike this:

Recently I wrote about the concise, verb-rich writing on Zuli's site. Their calls to action deserve a few words of praise, too. Just look at these clear drivers from their home page:

• See for yourself
• Experience it
• Pop the hood
• Check it out
• Get answers

For every one of these, I had a good idea of what was going to be on the other side of the click.

Simplicity IS harder than it looks. It's nice to see some folks doing a great job.

Don't do it! How to avoid link soup & ice cream bars.

Ever go to the grocery store when you're hungry? If you're like me, you wind up spending a fortune and taking home more food than you can eat, plus not fewer than three calorie-laden impulse-buy snacks.

Basically, you want it all.

Your only choice, as you careen out of the parking lot with your trunkful of groceries, is to snarf down the chocolate, go home, and flounder around in misery because you still don't have anything for dinner.*

Guess who else wants it all? 

Results-starved marketing managers. Look, when you're hungry, stay away from the grocery store.** When you're desperate for results, stay away from writing creative briefs for landing pages. Stay away from evaluating first-round landing page designs. Stay away from the phrase "can we add a link here?" Avoid that phrase like the plague.

Just as it's not particularly helpful, when you just need one simple meal, to have a trunk full of Trader Joe's Bite-Size Everything Crackers and the family-pack of ribs and two whole chickens and a dozen pears and a watermelon and a mini-wheel of Président Brie and some Haagen-Das bars, it's likewise not real helpful to wind up with a landing page containing half a dozen links.

You want results, but users want to know what to do. When faced with buttons here, buttons there, and a few text links thrown in "just in case they want to register for the site right now," they're likely to panic.

Users do not want link soup. They want one single, perfect, delicious link to click. Do yourself a favor and give it to them.

*P.S. You also forgot the coffee and your spouse is going to be pissed.

**Check out The Oatmeal's cartoon about the "minor differences" between grocery shopping when full and grocery shopping when hungry.