Advanced Access Blog

There are elements on a web site that help convert leads which are referred to as a “Call to Action” or “Calls to Action”.  These elements are added to your web site in order to convert leads, and to give them a way to contact you should they want to move forward with the purchase process once they decide on a property in your inventory.  If you have no calls to action on your site to grab your readers’ attention, how can you expect them to move forward and contact you with further questions?  Your audience is not psychic, and cannot use the sixth sense in order to find out where your CTA items are.  The locations of these items NEED to be obvious rather than subtle!

Calls to action can take many forms.  For example:

1. You could include a bright yellow badge on a specific paragraphs (say for our example the paragraph discusses foreclosures) that says “Click here for more information on Foreclosures” or “More info here…” or something along those lines.  The point of this badge is to make the specific paragraph stand out, and provide a particular plan of action that you wish the user to follow.  For example, if you want someone to click on the badge to find out more information about foreclosures, they can do so.  Or, if you want someone to click on the badge to move to a property listings page, that is yet another possible action they could take.  The point is to get people to move through your site in a subtle yet non sales like fashion so they don’t feel that they are being “closed on” or manipulated into purchasing.

2. One of the most common methods of calls to action on real estate web sites is the contact form.  This form can take many different variations in layout but typically includes the following information:  name, address, phone number, email, and a comments field for them to tell you exactly what they’re looking for.  Why are these forms useful?  Because most clients will tend to want to utilize a contact form or email to get in touch with you first rather than the phone.  This is a method that’s comfortable for the vast majority of people out there. 

3. You can utilize a content table for each area that you serve that takes people to specific pages about the area.  These area pages can serve as lead hubs, that provide the potential client with a way to contact you, view information about their area, view properties for sale within the area, and other activities that you may want them to partake in on that page.  Plus, this content table will utilize standard anchor text links to link to these pages, which will help with the further optimization of your web site and help increase its rankings.  Please let me know if you would like more information about the content table and the pages it’s supposed to link to. 

4. Foreclosure alerts and Free Report Signups are yet further examples of very useful calls to action that I’ve tested on various web sites and found them to be very successful.  Foreclosure alerts, for example, are single form fields that request a potential client’s email address, they submit the email address through this form, and then you can add their email address to your address book and send them updates of foreclosures within the areas that you service.  This can be a highly effective method of killing two birds with one stone:  qualifying the lead, and closing the eventual sale.  Free report signups require a client to provide their email address before being re-directed to specific free reports that are notated somewhere near the form.  These two methods of calls to action are very effective.  Most of our clients have seen results after implementing these calls to action, when they hadn’t had any results before or they had sporadic results.

You can have the most comprehensive, content driven web sites out there.  But, if you don’t have a way of someone to take action on the site and help them further along in the sales process, then you don’t have a chance at converting that lead.  People are very fickle, impatient individuals.  It’s important to have your calls to action placed in an optimal position on your home page and interior pages.  If your call to action is at the bottom of your home page, then you stand even less of a chance of converting that lead.  Why?  Because a potential client is going to look on your page for 15 seconds for 2 things:  listings, and a way to contact you quickly and easily.  If they cannot find those 2 things, then they will go to a competitor that will provide them.  This means including your contact information, a contact form, and several of your high priority sales ABOVE THE FOLD of your home page.

The fold is a term gleaned from the printing industry.  Imagine a newspaper that’s folded over.  The newspaper contains all sorts of news items and everything that occurs above the fold.  This fold is where all of the top news of the day is shown.  This includes headlines, top articles, etc.  The fold implies that there is a point at which everything on a home page appears above the bottom of the home page that you actually see on your screen.  Because of the impatience that the majority of people have when it comes to finding information online, it is very important to include this information in a place that allows people to access it quickly, easily, and most important of all, allows them a means to move forward with their ultimate goal:  to purchase a property from you.

Calls to Action are important items for your web site.  If you forget to include these, then you’re running the risk of your web site just sitting there and not providing the methods of conversion that are so important in this industry.  In other words, you just sent the perfect lead to your competitor.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 19th, 2009 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Weekly Marketing Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.