Your Call To Action: Why Are You Hiding It?

So maybe you aren’t doing e-commerce, but you probably still have a call to action: an opportunity for the visitor to raise her hand and say, “I’m interested!” That’s when you convert her from a visitor to a prospect (or maybe just a suspect.) In any case, I am always awed at how companies hide their conversion opportunities (aka their calls to action.)

Recently, I was working with a very close friend on a website. The whole purpose of the site was to get the visitor to pick up the phone and call, or to send an email. “So why do you bury your call to action behind a ‘Contact Us’ link?” I asked her. “If the idea here is to get them to take contact you, and this is the only action that they can take, why isn’t the phone number in the persistent navigation, right at the top of the screen (on every screen?) Why isn’t the email contact info up there too? And if possible, why don’t you have a “contact us” form on every page?”

I don’t think my own web site is always a model of best practices, but in this one area, I think it’s worth looking at. The potential customer can contact us with a form on every single page. I don’t have lots of data yet, but I can see that I get more “contact us” forms filled out from the home page than from any other page.