Writing more specific calls to action, Keap's great calls to action, investigating my lower-than-expected income

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Good morning. Let's get this week started.

TIP: Make your calls to action clear.
EXAMPLE: Keap show us how to nail a call to action.
THOUGHT: Figuring out why my income was lower than I expected

Tip: make your calls to action clear

Very simple one today: if you’re asking someone to do something on your landing page, please be very clear about what you’re asking them to do.

“Learn more,” “Get started,” and things of that nature are more vague than we give them credit for.

Does “Learn more” go to a video? A more detailed landing page? Does it book a demo? I’ve seen all of these things, and more - because “learn more” is vague. It could be basically anything.

So look at the text around any calls to action you have, click on them, then ask yourself if the person who clicked on it would be surprised by what happened when they did so. If the answer is yes: change it!

It’s not going to skyrocket your conversion, but it’s also a change that only takes a few minutes - so you may as well do it.

Example: Keap has a great call to action

Take a look at this double call to action from CRM provider Keap's home page:

It’s a great example of a call to action done right. Here’s why:

Two clear pathways. Not everyone is ready to sign up for a free trial - but of the people who aren’t ready, some of them still want more information. Hence: “see demo” alongside “try free.” This lets Keap capture contact details + provide something of value for people who want to know more, but don’t want to start a trial.
Clear hierarchy/distinction. The two CTAs are different, and they’ve used the design to make this obvious. There’s also a sense of hierarchy. You can tell they’d rather you click the green filled-in one.
Crystal clear wording. "Try free": it’s a trial, and you don’t have to pay. “See demo” is also crystal clear - if they just wrote “demo,” you’d assume they were talking about booking a demo with a salesperson. “See demo” is distinct from "book demo," because it's telling you you'll see something right now.

This provides a better experience for your audience. At scale, it can have a reasonably high impact on your conversion as well - and it's easy to do!

Thought: My income was lower than I expected. Here’s one reason why

Reviewing my income for the 2021-2022 financial year, and it’s a bit lower than I would have liked. Over the next few newsletters, I’m going to tell you some reasons why. Here's the first reason.

I used to work part-time - 18 hours a week. That is not very much! I never bothered with prospecting for work because I had the opposite problem - I constantly had too much on, and was always chasing my tail trying to hit deadlines.

But in September last year, I changed things up, and switched from part-time to full-time.

You can probably see where this is going: 40 hours is a lot more than 18. But I had been so busy with client work, I hadn’t given this a second thought.

So I sat down to work my first full-time week in September, and realised I was going to blow through every single thing I had scheduled by halfway through the month - with nothing scheduled beyond that.

Not a great feeling.

What I should have done

This was highly foreseeable. I had known I was going to switch from part-time to full time, so in June or so, I should have started prospecting by contacting people (like previous clients, general contacts, and even cold outreach to potential clients) and letting them know I would have some availability.

In fact, I should have built an entire prospecting system, with a clear set of processes to keep my pipeline full - because panicked, random acts of prospecting are extremely inefficient.

But whether you have a system, or if you're doing random acts of prospecting, it's always going to take time to go from nothing at all to actual work. So June was the time to think about this - not September!

This meant a slow couple of months - which I resolved by making another mistake. I’ll tell you about that next week.

That's all for today. Hope you enjoyed. As always, hit reply and tell me your thoughts.

Sam

PS: If you like this newsletter, the absolute best thing you can do is to forward it on. As you can tell, I try to keep this super-practical. Forward this on to anyone who wants to optimise their marketing without necessarily spending the time or money hiring someone to do it for them.

PPS: But if you do want to work with me, I am now only taking on landing page reviews. $799 for an in-depth review of your landing page copy. Top 3-5 highest-impact, lowest effort changes you can make, followed by line-by-line analysis of your landing page. Buy one here.

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