Monday, 09 July - 17:27 Category: e-marketing

Making Buttons Work Harder

SYNOPSIS:  Using action words on buttons can help increase your click rates.

The “submit” and “buy” buttons are the stalwart soldiers in the marketer’s armoury.  It’ engrained in our psyche as ‘the thing we click on to send our details somewhere and buy stuff’.  And every marketer wants you to click on one.  The question is whether there is something better that generates more results?  Let me give you an example… 

Just imagine that you sell gifts online.   You could substitute the Buy Now button for Make Somone Happy with X.  Let’s say you sell financial advice.  If you want people to sign up for your free e-mail autoresponder how about “Help Me Save More Money” instead of Submit?  Our e-mail form which enables you to sign up for our Perpetual Profits Marketing programme doesn’t use the word Submit on the button but instead “Grow Your Profits”. 

The logic behind this is that you are selling the benefits of signing up or buying (whatever the action is) all the way, even to the button.  Interesting idea isn’t it?  And it’s been widely tested and… well that’s where I’m not sure because I can’t find any statistics out there but I know lots of the major marketing gurus use the technique and they DO test everything.  However, I have one reservation… 

A chap called Steve Krug wrote a book (Don’t Make Me Think) which proposed that we become programmed to react in automatic ways when reading certain words.  For example FREE and SEX.  (Which, I bet caught your eye before you actually read them, are two of the most powerful in the English language!)  Anyway, the point is that Submit and Buy may now have become programmed into our subconscious to generate a specific action because we’ve seen them so many times.   I wonder if Google picked up on this because the word Click is forbidden in their Sponsored Links system.  (I guess because the word is so strong and was seen so often on web pages that we’d all just click because the ad is telling us to.)  That raises another interesting question… maybe it’s BETTER to use Submit and Buy because they are synonymous with the actions we so frequently see them associated with but then what of ‘selling the benefit’ all the way to the click? 

So how about this… Do both.  Have your button sell the benefits but also put the standard action word in front of it.  Like this… SUBMIT: Help Me Save Money!  Whatever you do you should test the approaches.  Try all three and see which one works best.

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Posted By:Jed Wylie on Mon, Jul 9th 2007, 17:27