AP 0535: Which Type Of Call To Action (CTA) Should I Use?

AskPat 535 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 535 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

Alright, here's today's question from Ramon.

Ramon: Hi, Pat. I really enjoy listening to your podcast from time to time. My question is, in this day and age with people having, being so overwhelmed with social media, and text messages, and mobile apps, when you have a web site with a sales page, your call to action, do you send them to an email list, like AWeber, where they sign up? Or do you make them buy the product immediately or do you make them pick up the phone and call? If you know Gary Halbert, you know that he quoted Claude Hopkins who wrote in “Scientific Advertising” some example whereby the call-only option generated three times the amount of inquiries from asking people to write a postcard, to giving them a choice between calling and sending a postcard. This was something that Gary Halbert quoted in several interviews that's available online. So which call to action do you recommend for somebody to click on when they read your sales letter, and especially if the product is a service, not a physical product? Thank you. My name is Ramon Thomas, I'm from South Africa and living in China.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Ramon, what's up? Thank you so much for the question. When it comes to CTAs, or calls to actions, on a sales page, typically there's a number of different ways you could go about it. Of course, different levels of asking for the sale and different parts of what's called the Yes Ladder. The Yes Ladder's really important, sort of a psychological method that you can use to work your way up to a big ask by starting with a small one. So getting people to nod or do some sort of small transaction first, which leads to another one, which then leads to the big one at the end. This is what a lot of people do and why these phone calls seem to work, or postcards and things like that like you were talking about, email addresses, instead of what people used to do in the past, which is just ask for the sale right up front.

And the reason why these other methods work really well, these other smaller yeses, is because it allows you to build a relationship with that person first. It allows you to prove yourself. It allows them to get some value from you, and then in return they will provide, or want to transact with you even more. Now, I can understand why a phone call would work better than a postcard because a phone call is a very hot lead, and somebody who just with a little bit of an interaction and somebody on the other end who is great at leading that call into some sort of sale, it could work out very well. And that's why there are call centers who are trained specifically for that purpose. And if it's an item that somebody wants and they know that they can get somebody on the other end, it might prove that there's human being there, which is a lot more to say than what people are offering today where we sometimes don't even know who's on the other end. And, again, that can lead to a sale.

So, which one is the best for you? Now of course for a lot of internet marketers, at least the ones that are in my audience, getting phone calls isn't necessarily going to be something they would want to do, but they could potentially use a service like Grasshopper to field those calls or actually be able to track them, which is interesting. Although, I would say that a webinar is also another option sort of similar to what a lot of people do instead of driving cold traffic from Facebook to a sales page where they then ask for the sale, they drive cold traffic to a registration page for a webinar. Again, similar to a phone call where there's a relationship being built, you get to provide value, and then all in that call or on that webinar, that live stream, you're able to then ask for the sale. And that's why those webinars convert a lot better than just, for instance, email drip sequence.

Now I will say that what's good for one business might not be good for the other. What's working for one type of business or product might not work for another. So you're going to have to really determine what works best for you by testing. Again, this is the answer to everything. Test so that you know. Testing reveals and illuminates the truth. So you want to make sure and do that. Now, you also want to keep track of everything as much as you can, from the clicks to that button, to the number of people who call, to the number of people who convert, to the number of people who go to the registration page, to the number of people who are on the registration page who convert to the webinar, and the people who convert from the webinar who actually go to the webinar, and so on and so forth. So again, the numbers never lie, so you want to keep track of the numbers all along the way.

So I hope that everyone understands how important it is to keep track of numbers, especially if you're doing testing, or else you'll never know what's going on. And that's the worst thing you could do, is kind of just put things up there and just kind of hope. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and either way, if it works or if it doesn't, you want to know why so that you can keep doing what is working and stop doing what is not. And if you don't know what's working, you're just going to go crazy, trust me.

So, again, to recap CTA, call to actions, you'll have to see what works best for your particular audience by testing. Whatever it is, you want to make sure you track and also work on getting each of those parts of that funnel, that Yes Ladder, to be optimized, because each one leads to the next. So work on that first one, try to get as many of that first step as possible whether it's signing up to an email list, registration for a webinar, or if you're running ads, click on those ads, work on that and then move on to the next step which is either making a phone call or the postcard thing. I haven't looked up that study that you talked about, but postcards, this seems more like direct response and that sort of thing which is relevant for some businesses and not relevant for a lot of others. So again, make sure you pay attention to what kind of business you have, what seems to be working, and I would also look at your competition, too. How are they driving calls to actions? What's working for them? Even put yourself in their funnel to see what that's like and see how you could improve that experience so that you could make sure that it's best for your particular prospects.

So, Ramon, thank you so much for the question. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And everybody else out there, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com, you can ask right there on that page.

And I also want to thank everybody, a huge shout out to everybody who had helped support the launch of my new book Will It Fly? If you haven't picked it up yet, pick it up now, WillItFlyBook.com. Over 10,000 copies were sold last week, and to launch with that big of a bang, it was pretty amazing, seriously life-changing for me and hopefully life-changing for a lot of you who picked up the book, too. A lot of you are actually already inside of it, some of you have already finished it, taking action, doing the exercises. One of the coolest things was seeing all of the pictures of the book in the wild out there, on Twitter and on Instagram. Thank you guys so much for all the support. If you haven't picked it up yet, please do so. It's something I'm very proud of and I know will help you in your online business journey. So check it out, WillItFlyBook.com. You can get the Kindle version or the paperback version, both are available. And again, thank you so much for all the support, WillItFlyBook.com.

And this week just for fun, all the quotes here at the end of each episode of AskPat for this week are going to be from my book. So here's a quote from my book, Will It Fly?, and that is, “It's when your idea supports your lifestyle goals that it becomes worth exploring more.”

That's what it's all about. Thanks guys, take care, and I'll see you the next episode of AskPat. Thanks.