By using a CTA we drive visitors to a landing page where we can convert them into leads. If you search how to increase conversion rates in Google, you’ll find numerous articles mentioning tips and tricks to better optimize landing pages.
Everyone focuses on landing pages, and almost no one is focusing on the higher portion of the funnel: the Calls to Action.
Further research will tell you how to optimize Calls to Action by using more appealing graphics and text, colors, and where to place the CTA on your website pages to get more clicks.
All of these tips work—I’m not questioning that—although I have realized that there is something that just a few people know: Smart (or personalized) CTAs.
A Smart CTA is a Hubspot feature that shows different calls to action to different visitors; if used in the right way, it’s able to show personalized Calls to Action based on a variety of variables, such as: where the user came from (referral), what pages they visited, what other offers they downloaded, what newsletter they subscribed to, etc.
Therefore we’re going to show the right content to the right people and in doing so boost our conversion rates. It makes sense right? And it works!
Here’s how to do it.
How to Create Smart Calls to Action (CTA) on Hubspot
Hubspot is the leading inbound marketing platform for features like this one.
Login to your Hubspot account and go to your Content-> Calls to Action section of the portal and click the “Create a CTA” button. You’ll see sub-item: “Create a Smart CTA.”
Hubspot offers different types of Smart CTAs. They can show content based on a visitor’s country, device type, referral source, lifecycle stage, or contact list membership.
After trying all of them, I chose to filter visitors (and show them different CTAs) based on contact list membership. This is because we can create lists based on many variables, and therefore categorize our visitors even further.
We now start adding the so-called “smart rules,” in other words telling what to show to every visitor.
There are 2 main things you will need to plan:
- The default CTA: to show to everyone who doesn’t meet our rules.
- Filtered CTAs: one or more CTAs to show to visitors who meet certain criteria.
For instance, I have many offers on my website (and a CTA for each one of them), so I decided to create a list for every offer which includes all the people who have downloaded the offer.
Once I had a list for each offer, I decided to create a rule for each of the lists so that I could show a different CTA to the visitors who had already downloaded the promoted offer.
Simplifying, here is what I have now:
Default CTA= Offer 1
- If the visitors has downloaded Offer 1 then show CTA for Offer 2
- If the visitors has downloaded Offer 2 then show CTA for Offer 3
- If the visitors has downloaded Offer 3 then show CTA for Offer 4
- If the visitors has downloaded Offer 4 then show CTA for Offer 5
- If the visitors has downloaded Offer 5 then show CTA for a Consultancy Request
Once done setting up all the rules, Hubspot will finally ask for the default CTA and then you should have something like this:
Now it’s time to test it. Click on the top right icon and copy the code to embed it on your website.
Then you can test to see if the Smart CTA is working. Open your website in an incognito window to check if the Default CTA is showing. Then try to click and download the first offer and go back to check if the Smart CTA has changed. It should work.
Now relax and enjoy boosted conversions. You’ll see better conversions/click rates as soon as the visitors click on the first CTA.
Here’s a screenshot that shows my Smart CTA populated with data:
You can notice how the first (default) CTA (located at the bottom of the report) has a 0,11% CTR, while the others have much more engagement, with supercharged CTR and conversion rates.
Smart CTAs make Hubspot an advanced tool for website personalization. In a world that is moving into inbound day by day, this is one secret for your success. Enjoy it.
