We see this mistake quite a bit or maybe we don’t! So many times we see order buttons and form submit buttons that don’t appear to be buttons.
Many web designers will make great looking graphical buttons to “match” the design of the rest of the site. While these buttons might look nice they aren’t always effective.
There has been a lot of debate about whether graphical buttons are as effective as regular ‘HTML’ style buttons. We suggest you test what works best for your market, but we’ll make the comment you may have heard before—if it looks like a button and acts like a button then it must be a button.
Why would you want to chance the possibility of lost sales by “hoping” the website visitors realize that the graphic button you have in place is indeed a button?
This goes the same for your opt-in form buttons. You should be consistent with the buttons so the visitor knows what is and isn’t a button.
There are a few things you can do to enhance the regular ‘HTML’ button to improve your results. You can see an example of some these effects by vis- iting 50BiggestWebsiteMistakes.com. You can see we’ve increased the size of the button and text as well as add- ing a red border around the button to help draw attention to the button. This increases action to the button.
Just as is true with many elements of marketing, copy is king, even on something as small as a button. By default the text on a HTML button says simply “submit”, which really doesn’t say much. You want to change the text or copy on the button to have some sort of instruction or action so that there is no question what’s going to happen when they push the button.
Some examples of copy to use on an order button would be ‘Click Here To Order Now’; ‘Order Now for Only $29.95’.
A few examples for the opt-in button would be ‘Claim Your Report Today!’ or ‘Get A Free Chapter!’. By applying several of these strategies just with the
button itself you’ll be surprised how much you will improve conversion of opt-ins and orders. Of course, be sure that you test everything and monitor by using your stats programs.
