‘Get in touch’ is a classic call to action. You must have seen it thousands of times on Twitter posts, Facebook updates and website buttons. The reason being is simple. Interaction between you and your visitor is the likely next step between them merely poking about your website, to them becoming an actual paying customer.
You use what’s dubbed a ‘Call To Action’ (CTA) to instruct them to get in touch. Then you cross your fingers that this time it works and that your visitor will pick up the phone, or use your contact form.
However, the trouble is, that consumers are becoming more and more desensitized to the phrase ‘get in touch’ as a call to action. As they’re seeing it more, they’re paying attention to it less. Their eyes glaze over and they move on, much like a dog that refuses to come to heel.
This is a problem you need to solve. You certainly want consumers to be getting in touch. Friendly customer service, human interaction and accurate personalised product recommendations – these are all things that help drive and secure a sale. Your website can’t provide these things – but you can.
Therefore, it’s essential that you make a connection with your customer. They need to get in touch. How can you make a call to action, that replaces the bland ‘get in touch’ and is an effective method of customer engagement?
Alternative ways to urge your customer to ‘Get in Touch’:
- Understand your customer
- Be clever with your wording
- Provide a ‘why’
- Evoke emotion
- Be original
- Consider your tactics
Understand your customer
There are two things you need to do to drive your visitor to ‘get in touch’ (or at least, increase your chances that they will). First off, in a social media post, you want to think about the copy you’re putting before the CTA. It can’t just be written on the fly. Do not wing it and stick some unoriginal drivel in there. It shouldn’t be emotionless. It mustn’t be repetitive.
In the copy before the CTA, you need to be considering how to grab your audience’s attention. What are their motivations? What are their desires? The message that you’re sending out has to really resonate with them.
Be clever with your wording
The second thing you want to do is switch up the wording of the call to action itself. Consumers have seen the phrase ‘get in touch’ so much that it doesn’t even register to them as an instruction any more. That, and they likely just can’t be bothered to follow through. In this article we’ll take a look at how you can reconfigure both parts of your post to be far more effective.
As stated above, you need to think about what you’re putting before the CTA phrase. Whether this is a blog post, a tweet, an Instagram story etc, you need to gently explain to your visitor why they want to follow your call to action and get in touch.
Provide a ‘why’
Perhaps you are offering a benefit to getting in touch – maybe if they quote a code, they’ll get a discount on your services.
Saying that you’re an expert at what you do isn’t going to persuade your visitor to get in touch (any old chump could claim to be an expert), but talking about how you expertly solved a problem similar to the one your visitor is having might.
Evoke emotion
Or you could evoke emotion. People love to feel included, so you could talk about how they should ‘join your peers and use our services’ or ‘come meet our friendly staff’.
Curiosity is another good emotion to play with. You could propose that they ‘come see what all the fuss is about’ or ‘Want to see the best of what we have to offer?’.
Panic is another emotion to try out (bear with us, we haven’t turned into psychopaths). Phrases like ‘this offer won’t stick around forever’ or ‘for a limited time only’ evoke a reaction in your visitor that’s more likely to make them click the CTA.
Be original
After the preamble, you need to write the CTA itself. Remember, you’re aiming for memorable, not dull and cliche. Consider the tone, point of view, emotions being stimulated, human connection and the benefits being offered. Obviously, not all in one CTA – just pick a couple of points and focus on those.
Consider your tactics
- Tone: For example, say you’re a hip fashion e-store, with a target audience of trendy millennials. If you were to consider the correct tone for your CTA, you might go with something like ‘groove our way’, ‘we should vibe’ or ‘let’s have a powwow’ (for obvious reasons, please do not use these suggestions if you are not a hip fashion e-store).
- POV: When it comes to point of view, the second person is better. Make your visitor the character in this (admittedly very short) story. Phrases like ‘Start your story with us’, ‘reach out to us’, ‘let us help’ or ‘drop us a note’, cause the visitor to feel more involved and creates a relationship.
- Emotion: You can use emotion in your CTA too. ‘We should stay in touch’, sounds distinctly friendly and personal. If you want to try to make your customer feel included again, ‘Let’s stay connected’ or ‘come join our other satisfied customers’ are ideas.
- Human connection: Then we have CTA’s that try to create a human connection. For instance ‘let’s get acquainted’ sounds like something you’d say to someone you were keen to get to know. Alternatively ‘talk to us’ suggests the opening of a conversation. Perhaps it might persuade your visitor to get in touch?
- Benefits: Offering benefits in a CTA definitely works. Some CTA’s just ask the reader to perform an action. But the effective ones get them to perform an action by showing them that it will benefit them. For instance ‘check out our stock photo gallery’? Uneventful. Unpersuasive. ‘Check out our stock gallery and download royalty free images’? To a digital marketer, that’s very exciting.
- Rhyme (?): Finally, for the more daring of you, we suggest using rhymes in your CTA’s. ‘We think it’s time that you dropped us a line’, ‘before you defect, let us connect’ and ‘no more pretend, we know you’re our friend’. Having seen no one use these before and having read no other blogs suggesting that anyone should, we can’t vouch for them. But hey, going against the crowd sometimes works.
To conclude
There you have it. Instead of just whacking out a bog standard post asking your visitor to get in touch, we hope we have inspired you to use some more effective and creative techniques. As ever, if you need any help or advice on anything internet related, get in contact with us via email, or Twitter.
Shake and Speare is a digital agency in Bristol that provides myriad services for tradespeople, such as website design, SEO, and more. If you are looking to create excellent websites for tradespeople to improve your customer service, reach out to us today!
