12 call-to-action (CTA) tools that convert visitors into buyers

Looking for tips and tools on how to convert more site visitors into buyers? Our guide will help you
discover the best customer engagement tools that will help encourage site visitors to get in touch.

The CTA challenge

You know the problem: people are visiting your website, but they’re going away before they make themselves known to you. Marketing products and services is a distance relationship these days. To persuade site visitors to connect with you, you’re going to have to work extremely hard at that first point of contact.

63% of businesses say that generating traffic and leads is their biggest marketing challenge.

It comes down to GIVE TO GET. You have to deliver sufficient value to your audience for them to justify handing over their details. With so much free, readily available information online, that bar has risen progressively over time. Consider, do you give your email to anyone who asks? Are you happy to hand over your personal details to read an article?

These days, we are a lot less likely to disclose personal info to anyone who asks, considering data breaches are known to happen to corporations as large as Facebook and LinkedIn, leading to sensitive information falling into the wrong hands.

The conversational path of most sales journeys
starts in discovery

It comes down to understanding your audience and what it takes to persuade them to learn more about your offer. You must encourage site visitors to become INVESTED. It’s likely that people who visit your site are there to learn something. While the conversational path of every business is different, generally, the running order goes like this:

‘How do I do it? How can I get my job done better?’
‘What sort of service, tool or instrument can help me? ‘
‘What are my options?’
‘How much are the options I’m considering?’
‘What does this supplier do?’
‘What do other people think about this supplier/and their offer?’

If you’re very lucky, you might have a brand people already know, so your site visitor might be beginning their journey this way: ‘I know this brand does this sort of stuff, so how can they help me?’

Established digital customer engagement and CTA methods

First impressions are everything. Your landing page is your opportunity to start on the right foot. You want to make it an interactive experience, so what are your options? Here we outline the best digital customer engagement tools to make visitors leave your website feeling like they know your product/service (or maybe even become a buyer there and then).

Before we jump in, it’s worth spending a moment to consider the solutions you already have access to. The most common ways to encourage site visitors to get in touch today include:

Create a Google ad, social media ad, or on-page banner to draw site visitors towards an offer, perhaps offering ‘buy now discounts’ or time critical deals.

Create a podcast or add a video that shows how your product or service works, how it can help the viewer get the job done, or a video of a customer testimonial. A survey by Lemonlight, a video production company, revealed that 76% of marketing teams surveyed invested in video production in the last three years.

In its various forms, up to 91% of buying decisions are said to be influenced by word of mouth (WOM) endorsements. However you display them, it’s vital that you to get WOM endorsements in front of your customers.

Hold your best, most informative content, whether it’s — ebooks, guides, how to’s. — behind a ‘gate’ (i.e., a form that asks for email/contact information).

Invite your site visitor to get in touch by completing a simple data entry form, perhaps using a webinar, or attendance at an event, to motivate them to apply.

Use an AI-powered chatbot (see intnt.ai as an example). An untrained chatbot is like a shop assistant who hasn’t received any product or customer training. AI trained chatbots apply their Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) algorithms to interpret the intent of site visitors, making them considerably more qualified to serve visitors better.

How no-code is transforming the CTA landscape

It used to be very hard for non-technical people who also aren’t designers to produce impactful website content. You either needed to be a coder, or a designer, or, ideally, both. Fortunately, there are many different no-code platforms and apps you can use to create the CTA tools that can turn your website into a customer-converting machine.

At Newton Day, we use Encanvas digital documents to author the rich media content and call-to-action solutions our clients need on their websites. We chose Encanvas solution because this single no-code tool allows us to apply all the various treatments needed to create an impact. Encanvas has produced a digital-native document format called Canvas Data File (CDF). It provides a no-code toolkit that enables you to publish digital documents directly to a URL, so you can easily add interactive rich media digital documents onto your site, just by adding the URL reference.

Encanvas Publisher can track how many times your digital documents are opened. Additionally, documents are split into sections, so you can also track which sections of your content are seeing the most interest. All this functionality is out of the box, without requiring other apps, platforms, coding, or design skills.

Of course, there are other tools that can achieve similar results, including rich media content creator platforms like CEROS, Visme, Vev, PageTiger. The major advantage we find with Encanvas is that it’s database-powered, so you can do clever things like auto-translations on the fly, and build ROI calculators with math logic built in.

6 new digital customer engagement/CTA tools

Rich media brochures can include charts that build on the fly, interactive maps, gamification tools, and video content. They upscale the impact of your content and offer a far more engaging experience compared to boring flat brochures.

Brochures have traditionally been a flat, non-transitional, non-interactive medium. If they ever get on websites today, they’re often published as PDFs. Sure, PDFs are advantageous in that they are a digital format readable by most devices, and the applications to view them are plentiful.

However, one major flaw of PDFs is that you can’t assess what aspects of your content are interesting to readers. Additionally, rich media use within them is limited, and in an age of dynamic graphics, charts, scroll and hover effects, as well as video, that’s a big weakness.

Guides and reports are a good way to tell people something they don’t already know. People are getting increasingly comfortable with self-serving themselves with interactive reports and eBooks. Readership of eBooks has grown significantly over the past decade. One of the advantages of digital books is that they can be supported by databases, which makes it possible to track reader behaviors. It also creates a more interactive learning environment by offering quizzes that track learning progress, and even adapt it’s language according to the visitor’s IP location.

Sometimes, site visitors can benefit from taking a tour of your product or service. Producing an interactive wizard based document allows your site visitors to step through features at their own pace.

You might want to allow your clients to step through your business ROI calculator so that they can find out just how much money they can save by using your service. What can be more convincing than that?

Surveys can be a useful engagement technique that help you get to know your customers faster based on their preferences. You can also go a step further and use a Q&A script to specify product choices based on what your potential customer is looking for. If the use case warrants this, solutions can extend to 3D interactive visualizations and even personalised VR environments.

While we’ve mentioned a range of customer engagement tools, there’s always room for one more—and perhaps it’s one nobody has thought of yet. Whether you want to use data visualization or a map as a visual stimulus, or even think about some guerilla marketing technique, digital documents are a good way to deploy database-driven digital engagement solutions that make your site stand out. If you’ve an idea, get it touch—we’d love to hear it!