The first part of optimizing your buttons is to reduce friction, and that can lead to really big wins. The second part leads to big wins too, like 34% more sign-ups, 10% more leads, and increases in click through rates of 26%, 38%, and more. The second part is neutralizing anxieties, and that’s today’s tutorial. 

This tutorial builds on our Removing Friction tutorial. So make sure to watch that if you skipped it. 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. 

OK, so when you’re writing and designing buttons or calls to action, calls to value, you want to think of your visitors as lizards and of your buttons themselves as closed doors. To you, a button is just a button. It’s a thing people need to click to convert. It’s a functional object that performs a simple job. 

But that’s not what your visitor thinks. For every visitor who just, like, rushes to click a bright orange button, there are 10 who are like, wait. If I click this, what happens next? And that’s true across the entire customer journey even for repeat customers who should really trust you by now. 

A button is a closed door. Your prospect cannot be sure what’s on the other side, and they’re not sure if it’s worth the risk to find out. And they’re most worried that if they open that door, life is going to get harder for them. So today, let’s rewrite our anxiety-inducing calls to action and calls to value. 

So when you see a button like Start my Free Trial, OK, that seems fair. We’ve seen it all over the place. You might have written this. 

It might sound like it’s meeting a lot of the criteria because I want to is like, I want to start my free trial might be true. There’s other things that are going on, though, such as the word start, which we talked about in basic tricks to get more clicks. Start feels like it’s the beginning of work. So I don’t know that I want to start anything. 

But the question that I need to ask when we look at any of our buttons is for that lizard brain, for my prospect, what for them do they think is really on the other side? So for us, when we had that empathy for our prospect here and we decided to make them feel better about what’s on the other side, we added click triggers. So in this test, the click trigger that we had was this quote. 

“As a marketing solution, we love Friendbuy. Every site should use this.” OK, so if we’re asking is my life going to get easier or harder on the other side, it sounds like it’s going to get easier. However, is it? Has this helped me feel good about what’s on the other side of this? 

So for us, we saw about a 15% increase in signups, and this lasted about 28 days. But confidence wasn’t reached. And after 30 days, there’s really no point. Just turn off the test– cookies and all of that jazz. 

So what we had to do was try something else. What else could help our prospect, that poor little lizard, not have anxiety about what’s going to happen as soon as I click that button? So the next way that we optimize this– and you’ll see, of course, how that fared here– is we’re trying to help them see, one, that life’s not going to get harder. 

No credit card needed to get started, OK? And then we’re trying to remind them of the outcome that they’re looking for, right? They can do great things. 

One of those things is being able to customize. So in this case, it was customize your invites, offers, and more. And these can sometimes be really– you can switch these up. You can try different things here. 

You probably want to lead with the top one should be something that ensures it’s neutralizing any anxieties that your prospect may have about this language itself. Now, you can, of course, change the button copy, right? We could rewrite this button so that you don’t have anxiety about maybe my life is going to get harder once I click this. But adding this click trigger worked really well. 

And of course, we’re never done optimizing. There’s always more you can do. But to get a 34% increase in signups, whereas this was barely getting 15% and didn’t even get to converge– sorry, to statistical confidence. 

This is a good thing. This is something to keep in mind. Add click triggers next to your buttons in order to neutralize anxieties that may be caused by that button. 

Is it worth the risk is another one. So for this, when you look at a button like Try Schedulicity Free, again, that’s a really common phrase to see on a button. Try blank free, try it free. 

It’s meeting a lot of the criteria for basic tricks to get more clicks. The word try is good. The word free is good. 

The question, though, that we have to– and this is why this is more advanced, why we don’t always just go out with basic tricks to get more clicks, but rather build on that. So is it worth the risk? Now, it might feel like, well, come on. 

You’re here. You’ve landed on my site. You’re looking at this stuff that I can do for you. How can you say that, that isn’t worth the risk? 

But to think that way is not going to be productive for us, right? We have to know that our prospect, good prospects, people who do want to buy from us, are still at the point where their mouse is hovering over the button. And maybe it’s on a pricing table, or maybe it’s somewhere else on the site. 

They’re about to click that button, but they have these anxieties. We need to have empathy for those and make sure that the answer to is it worth the risk is a resounding Yes. And a way to do that is to better tap into that phrasing I’ve taught you previously, I want to blank. 

So I want to try schedulicity free isn’t really true, right? It’s fine, but it’s not what I came here for. I want to end my scheduling hassles. 

Yes, that’s what I came here for. If this doesn’t pan out, if the solution isn’t right for me, nonetheless, at least I’ve gotten closer to my goal, hopefully, of ending my scheduling hassles. This is a reminder of why I’m here, why I’m interested in schedulicity in the first place. 

It was not to try it. That’s nice that it’s easy. But something much easier and better is ending my scheduling hassles. 

And of course, here we saw a big increase in click through rate with 98% confidence just by changing that phrasing. And now when I ask the question is it worth the risk, now I can answer probably. I’m not able to answer 100%, but it’s probably worth the risk. 

Again, here’s another one. Get started for free versus show me my heatmap. Show me my heatmap outperformed get started for free. This is worth the risk. 

I want to see my heatmap. Maybe my heatmap’s on the other side. And this is one of those examples of taking the Coke bottle, taking the cap off the Coke bottle, and talking about the ultimate outcome they’re looking for rather than the literal thing they’re about to do. 

So this is a call to value, and this is a call to action where this call to action is on the left. Call to value is on the right, and that leads to a lift that is far superior to the call to value or to the call to action. Now, where you put a call to action versus a call to value in a flow is a whole other tutorial unto itself, but just know that a call to value is more likely to tap into the value that your prospect was looking for. 

This is the value I want. This is not the value I want. Try Schedulicity free is not the value I want. End my scheduling hassles. Is this is the action you want me to take? This is the thing I really want to do. Hopefully, you’re seeing my cursor as I’m, like, saying this and that because that’s important. But here in this case, the one on the left is call to action. One on the right is call to value, and it can be very, very productive for you when you’re writing your buttons to think about calls to value because they can dramatically neutralize those anxieties. 

Get my quotes versus show me my quotes? I want to get my quotes. That’s true. 

I want you to show me my quotes. That’s like even better because this is me doing the work. This is you doing something, and I get the benefit of it. Here, we saw a 10% increase in leads, which is a big deal, with 96% confidence. 

All right, finally, is my life going to get harder? You cannot imagine how much of a question this is for your prospect. Is life going to get harder for me when I click Try It Free now? 

You want me to believe it’s going to get easier, but I’m a reasonable lizard, and I know that life gets harder a lot of times. When I start down a path, instead of just sticking with, like, doing nothing, doing nothing doesn’t get me in trouble. Clicking a button might actually get me in trouble. Is my life going to get harder? 

So here is a really good example. We thought we were being super smart with this. I think this was co-schedule. Try it free now was the control, and we’re like, well, people who use co-schedule use it with WordPress. 

And so if I can really quickly connect it to WordPress, that should be a valuable thing for me. Uh-uh. My life is going to get harder because now I have to sign into WordPress. 

What if I need, like, admin access? What if it’s like another plug-in that’s going to slow my site down? Like, suddenly, there’s all these anxieties that have popped up for me versus try it free now, which may have its own anxieties but not quite as bad as this. 

So we saw a decrease in click through rate there. Now, you saw this one in my last tutorial. If you missed it, make sure you go back and watch it. But here, we saw when we kept this fourth button here, which we didn’t show in the other version. 

But we did multiple tests on the site– a 37.8% increase in click through rate just by saying get started instead of sign up. Sign up is my life is going to get harder. There’s going to be form fields to fill in. 

There’s going to be, like, a credit card involved probably. There’ll be all sorts of crap that I don’t want to do. Get started? I want to do that. 

That’s better. I can do that. It might not be the most optimal phrasing, but it is better than sign up. So keep those things in mind when you’re working on these buttons that are so, so critical. 

To neutralize your prospect’s anxiety so that they take action, use this checklist. Does this button make me think about spending or losing money or time? If so, should it? 

Is it clear what happens immediately after clicking? Is there any doubt or confusion? Is this button going to land me on the right place for me, or will it make my life even harder by taking me down a path I then have to find my way back from? 

Am I actually ready to go where this button leads? Once I click, do I have reason to believe I can find my way back? And if there’s another button in the vicinity, is that button making matters even worse? Do other nearby buttons look like the better place for me to go? Do all buttons look like the right place for me to go, and thus, none of them actually do? 

Your task now is to revisit the buttons you’ve been optimizing and neutralize any anxieties, turning buttons from scary closed doors to chill places that will help make their lives better. And keep in mind that your entire customer journey is filled with buttons. So if you haven’t addressed your cart and checkout buttons, why not? Those are critical. 

When we neutralized anxieties across the funnel for a SaaS website, we saw 104.5% more people click from the homepage deeper in funnel, and then 26% more choose a solution or a tier, and then 10% more convert to trial starts. So yeah, these little buttons, these are small hinges that swing big bank vault doors. If you loved this and want more, we’ve got you. 

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