Fact, it is actually not hard at all to get people to click buttons on your website. Even still, sometimes when we’re writing or designing buttons or calls to action on our website, we miss really basic opportunities to make those buttons even more clickable. So today, let’s take quick advantage of those opportunities.

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.

This tutorial is Buttons for Beginners. And these are basic tricks to get more clicks. OK, basic tricks, let’s look at the home page for Intercom.com, and talk through, because we can’t really show some things, but we can talk through a lot of the things that you can do here for really basic tricks to get more clicks.

So starting with the general idea with a button is, yes, we want people to click it. So we have to draw attention to the button without sacrificing your viewer, or your visitor giving their attention to other things on the page that are also supposed to get their attention. This is a balance. We figure it out. But we have to attract that attention, and then get them to take action where when they take action they should be a good fit.

So if we were to go to the most basic tricks ever, the most basic trick on the planet is to go to google.com. And here, we have really the most basic trick possible, which is remove all distractions of every kind from the space, and focus people on a single action, understanding that the leftmost button is the one that is most likely to be clicked.

So we all as marketers, “know this”, yet, we let things go crazy on our pages, right? And we are not Google. We’re not a single solution. We don’t have the luxury of what Google has here.

But what we can take away when it comes to basic tricks to get more clicks is focus your visitor on one thing, and know that the leftmost button is going to be the most clicked button of the buttons you’ve got when the two of them look identical, or the three of them look identical, or whatever it is. These are two identical buttons. You’re more likely to click the one on the left. And basic click tracking on your website can help you see which ones aren’t getting clicked, and that’s a really good place to start for like, well, why, is that getting clicked, and why is that one not getting clicked?

So we take this basic lesson from Google, and then we build on that. Get attention, get good clicks, because as we just saw in Google, you can easily focus people on clicking a button. The question is, was it a good click? Now, for Google, as a single search engine, it’s probably a good click, and it doesn’t cost you anything to keep re-clicking with different searches.

OK, fine, what about for us when we’re creating marketing sites, in particular, landing pages, whatever that might be, wherever you’re going to put a button. This is even true in app. We want good clicks so that we’re not just shoving the work along to the next point in the customer journey. Eventually, you’re going to have to get a qualified click.

So we’re talking about tricks right now though, right? So we’re going to focus in some future tutorials on how to make sure you’re getting the most qualified clicks. But let’s say your objective is your boss has said, you are going to be let go– this is terrible– but you are going to be let go if you don’t get us 10 times the clicks on our home page. Your whole job then– they didn’t say better clicks, they just said 10 times the clicks– OK, let’s do that then. Let’s grab attention, and let’s not worry about the second part, which is that good attention.

Let’s just focus on getting attention. What can we do? It starts with color, because we’re trying to get attention. We’re talking to the lizard brain. We’ll talk more about this in future tutorials.

But what you want to do is grab the attention of the person who’s landed here. We want to get more clicks. That’s our objective. What can we do?

What we have right now before us are four buttons. We can clearly see these four buttons. There are other things to click of course, lots of things to click, but we’re talking about actual buttons. So we’ve got a blue button and a white button, effectively, or colorless button.

Naturally, they change color when you hover over them. We’re not going to worry too much about that right now, because in hovering, it means you already got my attention. I’m here now. Well done. How did you make that happen?

Now, we’ve got blue, and blue, and then white and white. Your job is to figure out what should my visitor click on here. And again, there’s the qualified click we’ll talk about later. But if you’re just trying to get more clicks, what’s the easiest click?

Is it to watch a demo? What’s the friction there? Or is it to get started, what’s the friction there? Now, these both feel to me like high friction asks. They’re not simple.

Getting started is going to come with all sorts of trouble. Viewing a demo might be asking me to set aside the next five minutes of my life, which is hard. So both of these are tough. But if we were to choose one, we would choose one of these two buttons?

Let’s say it’s the one on the left, because again, we know that’s the one that’s more likely to be clicked. How can we get more people to click on it? We’ve also seen in heat maps again and again that the buttons up here at the top are less clicked than the ones right here.

Now, you might see something different, and I would say, go with your heat map, because you know your heat map for your own business. All I can say is what we’ve seen again and again for clients. So if these are the ones to focus on, if this is where the clicks are already kind of happening, then what do we do here?

We’ve got blue and white. Color is an opportunity here. This is why I don’t care what anybody says about don’t waste your time on button colors. It’s not a waste of time. It’s a good thing. This is where an orange would be a really nice contrast.

A designer is probably going to say like, well, let’s at least pull out the yellow from her sweater. No, you want something that sticks out and is entirely different. That is a basic trick to get more clicks. If we already had oranges or like other hues that were similar to that on the page, then we might go with a green or something else. But an orange is going to go really far in getting your prospect’s attention.

And again, I’m talking about this. There’s always accessibility issues and other things like that with color and contrast. But just purely a basic trick, change this button to orange, bright orange, whatever the orange that is different from the shades we’re seeing here, because it will stand out.

Secondly, placement, does it belong here? You’ll probably get more clicks if you possibly strike these out and move these buttons up further, like right here. The higher up it is, we’re talking about just a basic trick. People like to click things. That’s why it’s easy to get people to move through, but hard to get them to activate an app, because they were just clicking. All they wanted to do was click their way through and try not to have to do the work of figuring out is this right for me.

They think, I’ll figure that out later. I’m just going to click and see where this leads me. I’m going to click and see where this leads me. So if you put the button up higher, but not in this here, we have this sort of banner blindness happening, most of us at this point know that when we’re ready to navigate, we’re going to go to the navigation, even if we don’t call it that, or know that it’s called that, we have a sort of banner blindness about headers on a website, the navigation on a website.

So it’s easy for me to block these out and just focus here, especially since the people are here, right? So what can we do? We can move these buttons up. That’s a placement thing. We can move the buttons. We can overlay them directly on top of something that we know is already getting attention.

So if we saw in click tracking, or heat mapping, or whatever, that everybody was just kind of hovering around this gentleman here, it might be smart to put the button we want them to click right nearby this if we are trying to get more clicks. Having it float here with white space around it is also potentially nice, because there’s that ability to get that attention, right? There’s nothing around it that’s conflicting with it or drawing attention away.

However, we could easily test moving this button even in their sight line, so we can see that these two are looking at each other instead of looking at the headline or the buttons. Now, this is a bit of an old trick. We’re talking about tricks though, so keep that in mind. It doesn’t mean it will always work, but it’s a pretty solid trick.

Get the gaze to fall on the button you want people to click. Having these two buttons side by side is another way to actually increase clicks. So I wouldn’t say remove any of these buttons. Contrast effect, which we’ll talk about in other tutorials, helps people understand that they’re making a decision, this or that, instead of just focusing on should I click this or shouldn’t I, the question becomes when you have two, which of these should I click. So it’s good to keep those two together as a basic.

Also, size is one other basic trick that we can throw out here. If you want more people to click the Get Started button, you could put it up here in their sight line. You can make it orange, maybe take this guy away from it, put this guy down further, which would probably work to keep you reading down the page. So I might cut that, put these two buttons up here, make one orange, and then make the Get Started button bigger, like bigger. It sounds silly, but it works. Basic tricks to get more clicks.

If you’ve ever been to a marketing or conversion conference, you have heard the joke about how you shouldn’t use the word submit on your button. There’s a dominatrix joke there every time. I mean, maybe joke is too strong a word. The problem with so many buttons is that the copy on them is just not thought through.

It might actually come with the template, or just never get edited, or it might be written by a designer, or a marketer, or even a copywriter who just thinks of buttons as micro copy, which I assure you they are not. At least your visitors don’t think of them as micro anything. So you shouldn’t either.

Words like submit, and sign up, and learn are words that work against getting people to click your buttons. Instead, try what we call a skating rink phrasing, as in the words and phrases that are so completely friction free your visitors basically just slide right through them to the other side of the button. So I like to think what I’m thinking about friction free, we are trying with buttons to remove any sense of work. Like, is my life going to get harder after I click this button? If the answer is even possibly yes, then it’s not the right button copy.

So what do we do with that? The way I think it’s worth thinking about it is there’s a scene in Mad Men where Betty Draper is out for a Coca-Cola commercial. And when she’s on set the director comes over and takes the cap off the bottle of Coke in order to remove the sense of there’s work. In order to access the Coca-Cola drink, you first need to take the cap off.

They won’t show the taking off of the cap in the commercial in this commercial that selling like easy and happy, because that’s work. And it’s important for us to get down to that level of empathy for our prospect. That’s work, taking a lid off is work. Doesn’t matter how easy it is.

So what we need to do is not think about the reality of what we’re asking people to do. We know as marketers that they’re about to start a free trial, or they’re about to start actually a paid– I might not be free at all, but they might be diving in and being asked to pay for this up front. We know that. We feel anxiety about that, and we feel the need to almost warn our prospect.

But we’re talking in this lesson about basic tricks to get more clicks. The most basic trick is to take to cap off the bottle. Your prospect never needs to know that a cap is involved. They will find that out when they have to. Your job is not to warn them that there’s going to be work ahead. Your job is to make it feel like their life is about to get easier as soon as they click this button.

So we do skating rink phrasing, which is just this whole idea– there was this picture I saw years ago of this like polar bear sliding across the ice. Dear god, I hope that sort of world continues. But there’s polar bears going, and it’s like this whole friction free wonderful thing. Just slide.

If you’ve ever been on a skating rink, you know if you fall, or if you suck at skating like I do, you will just like slide. Just keep going. And that’s what we want. Remove any lumps, or bumps, or moments that could possibly be tense for your prospect. We’ve talked already earlier in the video part of this. I’ve mentioned like learn is a bad word. That’s a frictiony word. Learn requires work.

So some of the things that we want to do are really think about those verbs. A nice short verb goes a long way too. Like get, get is here in the control that we have here for this button. Get started, that’s good. Get is good.

Start is another question. Get started. What does that actually look like? Get started sounds like there’s so much work to do ahead that I have to just try to get started with it, like get started on your weekend chores. I don’t want to.

I want it to be end of workday and I’m relaxing with my husband. Like, that’s what I would like to do. I don’t want to get started on it. I want to get to the point of happiness where my life gets easier. And yes, this is important for buttons.

So some of the phrasing that we can use, let’s dive right in. And I’m going to just try to highlight that. We’re going to work on this primary button and go from there. So try is good. It’s a nice short verb. It doesn’t expect a lot. It allows you to opt out. It allows you to give it a shot, not like it, and, walk away.

Try is a good thing. I don’t care what all the Star Wars fans in the room say, there is such thing as try. And we like it and buttons. Try is good. Get is good. Free is always, always, always, always good. I mean, again, we’re going to test wherever we can, but these are really basic tricks to get more clicks.

See is good. Make can be good if the thing you’re making is something like happiness, or ease, or joy. If it’s make a table, that’s a bad thing. That’s going to be a lot of work. So we want to think through using words like try, get, see, sometimes make, just that these nice short easy, I can back up, I don’t have to stay here.

Watch is good, as long as it doesn’t imply that your life is going to be spent watching this thing that’s going to take a long time. We also want to complete the phrase I want to. So I want to get started might be true. It’s just not really what I actually want. I don’t want to get started.

What is the thing that I want? And oftentimes, the headline will help you with that. We have another lesson coming up later. So if it was, I want to build customers for life, you could very easily say that as a starting point.

However, I would argue that this headline is possibly wrong, because build is a big scary thing. Customers are intimidating, and life is like so far in the future, what I’m really solving for right now is acquiring more customers. And of course with Intercom, you’re trying to engage and keep those customers. Yes, you are.

The for life part is tricky. So I wouldn’t put this in a button, even though a good practice is to take the promise of the headline, and just repeat it in the button that’s closest to it, I would default to much easier calls to action, such as– It’s easy. Try it now. Is it easy? I don’t know, but you can try it.

And if you find that it’s not easy, you can cancel. We don’t have to tell you that part. That’s the cap on the Coke bottle. We don’t talk about that. All we have to say is, it’s easy. Try it now.

OK, what else might it be that I could try? It’s free to try it, or it’s free to try. OK. I’m going to just refresh this, because my editor is like, no, don’t do that. So we’ve got a couple of things there starting with, it’s easy, something in exclamation points.

Like, the it’s easy part is intentionally like your life is going to get better. Sell them on that. Get it now could be. I want to get it now. It’s very close to get started, except it’s promising the thing that you want now, instead of starting off on the thing that you want.

So here we go. Let’s try another one, free, try it now. Another one could be around this engagement. Now, because the promise of Intercom is this engagement, at least that’s what they’re messaging here heavily, we might be able to do something with that. See how to engage customers now and forever, so we have build customers for life. Building is work.

Engage might not be as much work. It doesn’t feel as laden as the word build does. Now and forever is my improvement on for life, because it includes now, so that could reflect the want of this initial headline, and then make it a little bit easier, right? However, I wouldn’t say that this is a basic trick to get more clicks. I think this would leave you with better qualified clicks, so that’s wonderful, but that’s really not what we’re talking about in this particular lesson.

And then what’s the basic outcome of engagement? Like, what are we really talking about? It’s make customers happy easily. So that’s a nice, easy win. I actually really want to make my customers happy, and I want to do it easily.

So I want to make customers happy easily. I want to get it now. I want to see how to engage customers now and forever. And then we can add in things like easy.

And if easy isn’t what your prospect cares about, if it’s affordability, or something else like that, then that might be the adjective or adverb, depending on how you’re using it, that you want to throw in there. But the point is, this is far more likely to actually get people sliding along and saying, yes, and clicking on it, then get started.

Your task now is to visit at least four pages on your website and rewrite each button on each page using the techniques you just learned. Be sure to update those buttons by publishing the pages if you’re allowed to, or set up A-B tests, so you can measure how these efforts are paying off. When you’ve done that, prepare to optimize those buttons even further in our next tutorials when you will see more advanced techniques in getting not just a lot of people clicking, but more of the right people making qualified progress forward by clicking the buttons throughout your funnel, and turning your whole funnel into a skating rink.

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