The call-to-action is a crucial element in your website’s objective to generate insurance leads and drive conversions. Even if your website is the perfect balance of accessibility and practicality in all other regards, if you make the opportunity to get to purchase a challenge, you will be creating obstacles for yourself. The CTA moment of truth relies on you providing a return on investment (at least) equal to or (preferably) greater than the work the lead needs to do in order to receive the ROI.

Fortunately, if you know what to avoid it is easy to create effective CTA. While the following list is by no means complete, it will cover red light areas that need to be avoided if you’re looking to convert.

1. Bad Design

The overall design of your site is a crucial factor in attracting and engaging your leads. The art and science of web design has had a few decades now to evolve and refine, so there’s no longer any excuse to have a sloppy site. It’s been found that 38% of people will move on to cleaner pastures if a website’s layout is too unwieldy, so take the time to provide a good reflection of yourself on the web.

This extends to your call-to-actions as well. If your buttons do not attract they’re not doing their job, which makes doing your job a lot more difficult. Make sure the buttons you use for CTA are large enough to be a dominant element of the page, and are placed for maximum effect. Avoid making your insurance leads look for the button or they’re more likely to look elsewhere. Do not underestimate the power of button color either. Another important design element to improve CTA conversion rate is to not push it too soon, you want to make sure your call to get the lead to buy has been backed up with a strong value statement.

2. Bad Verbiage

Simple rule number one: avoid “Submit”. Telling a lead to do something with no tie to what they’re getting for it is not going to land you the conversion numbers you’re wanting. The key strategy here is to build value for your lead through direct communication that is not vague. “Get my free quote now” provides a no nonsense message of both incentive and immediate result. When choosing your words, keep in mind that attention spans can be short so be brief and impactful instead of long-winded. It is equally important to be clear, concise and to the point with the message of your CTAs in order to avoid quick loss of interest.

3. Bad Personalization

I could go into great detail regarding the benefits of speaking directly to your target, or I could just point out that personalized calls-to-action have 42% greater view-to-submission rates than those without. That probably got your attention. Taking a cookie cutter approach to how you connect with your leads, while less work, can result in little sense of connection on the part of your lead. People like to have a sense of individual investiture for their time and action. Make them front and center in the process. Just the difference between saying “Get my quote now” versus “Get your quote now” can lead to a 90% greater click-through rate.

4. Bad Delivery

You put all that work into making your CTA enticing and welcoming, then drop the ball on the landing page? If you want to make sure that your reputation as a trustworthy professional remains intact and grows, make sure the landing page delivers exactly what your CTA promised. Make the information or other product your button promised the full focus of the landing page. You want the language used on both pages to be consistent, clean-cut, and non-ambiguous. The one thing worse than giving your lead the impression that all is not as they requested is wording that leads them to believe a bait-and-switch is going on anyway.

Of course you want the lead to commit once you’ve brought them to a commitment point but unless you’ve created an atmosphere of enticement and value for their commitment, it’s just an empty request with no incentive. Avoid leading with a CTA that involves a time frame like “Now” or “Today” unless you can give a clear reason that’s linked to the benefit you’re going to provide. You want to avoid a flight reaction in response to what you’re asking the lead for so if you can link a limited time offer, special discount, or other perk for the lead to act upon immediately, you go a long way towards avoid buyer’s hesitation.

There are many more nuances of CTA method to explore and test in order to ensure that your website is optimized to deliver the utmost level of conversion. These factors discussed are but tips of the iceberg. However, if you follow these guidelines you are providing yourself with the opportunity to get to “Yes” in a direct manner, and providing your leads with a straightforwardness that they expect and will appreciate.