The Big Yellow Button

Online retailers such as Amazon have made the “Add to Cart” button famous, but what if you don’t trade online? Andrew helps you discover what your big yellow button is, and how to ensure customers can find it.

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Ready to Buy?

Amazon's Call to Action

Amazon's Call to Action

Everyone knows Amazon’s Big Yellow Button. It’s what you look for when you decide you want to buy those Star Wars socks you’ve been dreaming about. And it’s always right there, waiting for you, urging you to click it.

In 2008 Bryan Eisenberg wrote an interesting article on the evolution of said button and the text that surrounds it. So much thought is put into how to simplify the checkout process and encourage customers to buy products. But what if you’re not selling products?

What are my customers looking for?

If you offer an offline service rather than a product that can be bought online , the first question you should be asking is why people are visiting your website in the first place. What are they looking for? Often times it’s assurances that you are reliable, that you offer quality, and that they can trust you to provide the service they need at the price they can afford. Sometimes they already know all about you, but are simply looking for a phone number or email address.

This question helps determine the priority of information on your website. Your Big Yellow Button may simply be your phone number. In which case, make it big and bold and easy to see, and make everything else secondary. If you feel your visitors are more keen to find information, make this the priority, and structure it well. In this case, large flashing “sign up now” (read: “give us money”) buttons can be distracting and harm your reputation more than anything.

If you do sell products, but aren’t yet trading online; give us a call, we need to talk.

A SOLID example

Our Big Yellow Button

Our Big Yellow Button

On our own website, our Call to Action is simple – we want people to contact us. However, visitors to the site aren’t likely to pick up a phone until they know they can trust us. As a design agency, customers need to know we do good work. That’s why our Big Yellow Button on our home page is what we like to call a portfolio teaser. The sliding graphic on the front of our site gives a sneak peek of some of the work we’ve done, and encourages users to click through to view more examples explained in greater detail.

Once people are happy they can trust us with their project, they will be looking to contact us. We provide contact details on all our pages, and highlight those details on the home page and blog as the places where most visitors land. The top right of every page contains a link to our contact form, underlined with “Free Quotation” to encourage users they’ve nothing to lose by getting in touch.

A Social Approach

Sometimes the goal of a website is to spread the word. This is especially true of blogs and news sites, but equally important for sites that don’t sell a product or service – for example a local cafe. The cafe isn’t all that keen for people to contact them, or to provide information about their lovely decor. The Big Yellow Button for a cafe is to get people onto their premises and drinking their coffee.

SexyBookmarks plugin for Blogs

SexyBookmarks plugin for Blogs

Enter Social Networking. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are the ultimate platform for spreading the word. For a blog, you want as many people as possible to read your content, so you provide readers with an eye catching “share the love” feature, allowing them to quickly and easily share your link with all their friends and followers.

Similarly, for our local cafe, the best way to get people drinking their coffee is to have existing customers ‘Like’ them on Facebook, or write a good review. Lookaly is a great local service which allows customers to review businesses in Northern Ireland. You can even add a “Review us on Lookaly” widget to your website.

Button Up

Now that you’ve figured out what your Big Yellow Button is, it’s time to implement it on your site. As this is the main goal of your site, it should be the major focus. Want customers to call you? Put your phone number in a prominent position. Want customers to buy your product? Make it easy for them to do so. Want customers to know more about you? Work hard on your content, make it easy to read and clear away other visual clutter.

If you’d like to talk to us about defining your main goal for site visitors, give us a call on 028 9002 2361 or email us at info@wearesolid.com. Oh, and if you liked this article, why not share it on Facebook or Twitter using the buttons below?

Written by Andrew Rossborough

Andrew heads up creative direction at SOLID, managing projects and taking a hands on approach to client consultations and design decisions. Follow Andrew on twitter.

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