We’ve done countless tutorials on optimizing your buttons, also known as your calls to action and calls to value. But what if sometimes you have buttons that you don’t want people to click?  

Be sure to check out our other tutorials on how to craft and optimize buttons that get clicked. This is your tutorial of the week. To use it, block 30 minutes in your calendar to watch it. It does not have to be today. Invite your team to join you. Watch it together. Create action items and do the work I show you. Open the right tool for the job, like your CMS, right now and let’s get going. 

Your refund policy, the cheapest version of your product lineup, how to reach your support team– there is no shame in wanting to deoptimize the buttons that drive to those things. It is your right as a business, at this moment in history, to choose not to point your leads to your refund policy, given that robust refund policies for smaller businesses can lead to the wrong people buying, and then, of course, asking for their money back. 

After all, companies like Costco and Walmart are training the world to believe everything can be returned for a full refund, even used digital products, and that can kill small digital businesses. So how can you make buttons less noticeable so your business doesn’t suffer and so your customers aren’t distracted, without preventing the right people from clicking the buttons they need and want to click? Basically, do the opposite of everything we’ve taught you so far. Let me show you how to break all our rules. 

So let’s start with a CTA that should be deoptimized but isn’t. So you can see here “important offers, pricing details, and disclaimers.” And that might be ignorable, except this “show-all features” animation is pointing at it. So this is the case where we’d want to first deoptimize this. So let’s not worry about the pricing table right now. Let’s worry about this. “Important offers, pricing details, and disclaimers,” that sounds like there’s a coupon code inside there, so I’m going to click it. 

And if I, do this big, old this pops up. It’s not good. It’s just all the legalese that they need to have in close proximity to this. Not bueno. So what we want to do is deoptimize it so it’s more like that. Now, if we take out offers, and we could even say “important fine print” or we can just leave it at “fine print.” It would depend on what legal says at that point. 

But we don’t need to say “offers or pricing details” in there. Fine print and disclaimers is something that we would be more likely to want to go with. So that’s an example of where we should be deoptimizing, because it’s probably going to be really bad for conversion, however, it still needs to be there. And this isn’t being untruthful in any way. It’s just not optimized. 

Now let’s work on optimizing an actual– or deoptimizing buttons around buttons that we want to make sure people do notice and click. So here we are on the actual plans and pricing page. This is, again, still for Intuit QuickBooks, the US site. So this is true at the time of this recording. It might look different when you look at it, but it’s what’s going on right now. 

They have this offer, buy now for 50$ off for three months or have a free trial. So let’s work on the buy now for 50% off for three months. Everything here, the CTAs, are all the same, right? So they’re not working to help me understand which one to select and then, also, which one to ignore. So of course, all of our training so far has talked about which ones to select, how to make people want to click your button. Now we want to look at how to make them not. However, to do that, I think it’s an important thing to start with, let’s give them one to focus on. 

So clearly, they want you to choose plus. It’s 50% off, so save 50% instantly. We might do that. And that could then optimize it, make plus look– even though you can say save instantly with all of them, we only want to put that on there, which makes you lean toward the save 50% instantly. Doesn’t mean the other ones won’t get it. We’re allowed to put what we want to put. At this point in history, at least, we can put that on the button. It is not dishonest in any way whatsoever. It’s just the other ones aren’t as optimized as that button is. That’s an allowable thing. 

Now, what we don’t want is for people to select Simple Start. So this is the one that we’d want to deoptimize, likely. I’m making an assumption here about what Intuit has in mind here. But what can we do here to make this unattractive? One, as I mentioned, you can change the color of this button. So it could be a really super muted, dull-looking green, or maybe it stays that green and these greens all get like brighter, or there’s something else about them. Maybe these are all orange. 

So again, you’re focusing over here and kind of discounting this, like ignoring it, Simple Start being the one that we’re ignoring in that case. You could make this button gray. You’re allowed to make it gray. It’s not a great user experience, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about deoptimizing buttons for the sake of deoptimizing buttons, which usually has something to do with increasing conversions on the other buttons. So change the button color to green. 

What else can we do with this copy to make it so you don’t want to click it? Something like that. “Commit now.” OK, I don’t want to. I do not want to commit to Simple Start. But right away, we can see, at least at this point, Commit Now, that sounds pretty bad. I don’t want to do that. And again, you’re allowed to deoptimize things. So we could then go back here, and just to keep that lizard brain happy, we could make all of these the same. And now I, the lizard, am looking at these three. 

And maybe, again, these buttons are all orange or something that’s more attractive that’s going to group these three together and make the lizard brain just ignore this one over here, or they stay green and this is gray, whatever that might be. But we’re definitely trying hard at this point to deoptimize this. So Commit Now might be one way that you could go about deoptimizing this button. You could also take the button background away entirely and just make this Commit Now in green on a white background so it doesn’t even look like a button. And that might lead to a little confusion but it’ll also, of course, dramatically deemphasize that as a button. 

Your task now is to visit a product category page or your pricing table and deoptimize the button copy for the product or tier you don’t want people to buy. If you loved this and want more, we’ve got you. The next logical step is to take 10x Web Copy, the complete A to Z program on how to write any page on your website, including your home page. You will develop career-making skills using tools like the 10x Page Plan and the Obstacle Interview. You will move confidently from hero section to closer section on each page you write, and you’ll love actually seeing how to find sticky messages inside survey responses. 10x Web Copy is available now at a startup-friendly price.