🗞 What's New: Crafting an irresistible CTA

Crafting effective CTAs is a blend of art and science:

• Focus on relevance, positioning, and eye-catching design. Create a compelling offer, and gamify things to boost engagement and conversions.
• What jobs are most affected by AI? Customer service agents, digital marketers, and salespeople can all adopt AI to remain competitive.
• A 6 figure exit for a trading site. Stefano Treviso went from poverty in Venezuela, to homelessness in Italy, to building a successful content site.

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by Thomas Griffin

Creating a compelling CTA isn't always easy. It takes a bit of creativity and strategy to craft one that really resonates with your audience.

Relevance matters

First things first: Your CTA needs to be relevant to the content on your page. Think of it as a natural extension of the information you're already providing.

Instead of using a generic phrase ("Click here!"), go for something more specific and action-oriented, like "Download now!" That way, your visitors will know exactly what to do next. This makes it more likely that they'll click and convert.

Create irresistible offers

Who doesn't love a good deal? People are always on the lookout for ways to save money, and you can use this to your advantage.

Instead of a simple "Buy now," you could offer a discount or a special deal, like "Get 20% off today!" This not only grabs attention, but also gives your visitors a compelling reason to click.

Most people tend to scan content rather than read every word. By highlighting an attractive offer, you can catch their eye and encourage them to take action.

Gamify your CTA

Creating excitement and curiosity can significantly boost your conversions. While this may not suit every situation, gamifying your CTAs can be very effective. This is especially true for landing pages, or during specific marketing campaigns.

Think about incorporating elements of a game, making things more fun and memorable for your visitors!

Improve your design

The look and feel of your CTA is just as important as the text. A well-designed CTA catches the eye, and guides users through the buyer's journey.

First, make sure your CTA stands out. Use contrasting colors to make it pop against the rest of your site. But, be careful not to make it too big or flashy. Balance is key.

Also, use action words in your CTA. Words like "Get," "Download," "Try," and "Join" are powerful, because they encourage immediate action. And remember, a concise CTA is more likely to catch attention. Aim for 2-5 words that clearly convey what you want people to do.

Positioning matters

Where you place your CTA is crucial. You want it to be easily noticeable, so consider placing it above the fold. This means that users don't have to scroll down to see it.

However, don't stop there. You can also place CTAs at the end of your content, and strategically throughout the page, to catch attention at different points in the user journey.

Test and optimize

Creating the perfect CTA is an ongoing process. It's all about testing different variations to see what resonates most with your audience. A/B testing can be particularly useful here.

Try out different colors, texts, and placements to see which combinations yield the best results!

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from the Trends.vc newsletter

AI tools are “intelligent units” that go beyond task automation. They can create original work: Market analysis, risk assessment, investment insights, and more. This helps employees focus on the more complex, creative aspects of their jobs.

But people are concerned about job displacement. With so much uncertainty, we’re diving into how AI impacts the future of jobs.

What jobs are most affected by AI?

• Customer service agents: AI chatbots can resolve standard customer queries and complaints without call center staff.

• Digital marketers: AI can create, manage, and optimize marketing strategies involving social media, search engines, email, content creation, and online advertising.

• Salespeople: AI can manage customer inquiries through chatbots, analyze consumer behavior, qualify leads, do cold outreach, and predict future buying trends to optimize sales strategies.

How can you survive the adoption of AI?

The first thing you can do is to use AI tools. This is the reality. If you rely on yourself only, you may lose to a colleague that knows how to use AI to do tasks faster and better than you.

But there are other ways to remain valuable and competitive.

Customer service agents:

Learn AI tools to automate routine tasks so you can focus on more complex, high-value customer interactions. Find ways to communicate to offer a personal touch that AI can’t match.

AI tools for customer service agents:

• Brainfish is AI for self-service customer support.
• Tidio interacts with customers as a real customer support agent.
• Yuma offers automated AI customer service for Shopify merchants.
• Balto offers real-time call guidance in customer support call centers.
• Kustomer is a customer service platform with AI chatbots and assistants.

Digital marketers:

Build strategies that resonate with audiences based on your domain expertise and cultural knowledge. Use consumer psychology to adapt your marketing efforts to world events and trending topics.

AI tools for digital marketers:

• Fullstory uses AI to analyze customer behavior.
• Customers.ai offers in-depth visitor insights and remarketing.
• Albert.ai is an autonomous AI agent that builds and optimizes marketing campaigns.
• Surfer SEO uses AI to boost organic traffic, increase visibility, and improve your rank in search results.
• Brand24 uses AI to track mentions across social media, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, reviews, and more.

Salespeople:

Build strong relationships with customers by focusing on trust and a personal touch. Keep in touch with your clients after sales to solve problems, and to make sure they remain happy with your service. Clients are real people, not mere quotas.

AI tools for salespeople:

• Regie.ai is an all-in-one hub for AI sales outreach.
• Bland AI helps you build, test, and scale AI phone agents.
• Reply.io sets up outreach sequences, handles prospect replies, and books meetings.
• B2B Rocket offers AI agents that can dial your leads, engage them, and book meetings.
• Oliv is an AI sales rep that does pre-meeting research, takes live notes, and updates your CRM after every call.

Become a Trends Pro Member to get the full report on AI Impact on Work, or get the next free Trends.vc report here.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Trends.vc for more.

from the Growth Trends newsletter

🍎 Apple's WWDC 2024 announcements.

❌ Ignore this warning in Ads Manager.

💲 Link to your product here. Our most affordable ad.

🎯 Creating a billboard advertising strategy that gains attention.

📈 Improve your Google Ads conversion rates.

✨ How to calculate customer lifetime value.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

by Marc Andre

Each week, FlipMySite publishes an inspiring success story featuring a founder growing and selling an online business.

Stefano Treviso went from poverty in Venezuela to homelessness in Italy, to finance worker in Spain and Cyprus, to successful founder with a six-figure exit in Dubai.

Going from broke to homeless

Stefano grew up in Venezuela. His family was wealthy at one time, but a series of events drove them into poverty. As a kid, Stefano was always hustling and looking for ways to make money. Later, he started a few different businesses, but Venezuela’s hyperinflation and poor economic conditions made everything a struggle.

After several years and a few failed businesses, Stefano realized he needed to leave Venezuela. His cousin in Italy offered him a place to stay for three months to get on his feet.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned. Stefano’s cousin kicked him out of the house after just eight days. After that, he ended up sleeping on the beach.

Stefano made some money working as a photographer on the beach, saving up enough to move to Barcelona. He’d always been interested in finance, and in Barcelona, Stefano landed a sales job with an online broker.

About a year later, Stefano found a job with another finance company, which allowed him to relocate to Cyprus. This position was in customer service, and he spent many hours helping customers via online chat.

Stefano’s customer service experience inspired him to start a website with beginner information for traders. He researched the competition, and it seemed that none of the existing sites had quality information that was easy for new traders to understand.

After taking a few months to develop the site, Stefano launched The Trading Bible in 2019, with four static HTML pages. By this time, he had two years of experience working in the industry.

The Trading Bible

Stefano tried WordPress when setting up his website, but felt it was confusing and too complicated. He was already learning to code, so he decided to create his own custom CMS, which later became MozartCMS.

He started pumping out articles, then built a tool to compare brokers. After entering the data for each broker, the system created unique pages for every possible comparison, resulting in 3K new pages of content.

Over time, Stefano added about 100 more articles to the site. He chose the article topics based on what seemed logical for a finance and trading website to cover.

Organic search accounted for almost all of Stefano’s traffic. He monetized by selling ads directly to brokers. This allowed him to build his own ads, make them look organic so ad blockers never targeted him, and have a faster, better looking site.

Initially, Stefano reached out to affiliate managers and asked for an introduction to someone in the marketing department. The results were so good for advertisers that most stuck around long-term.

The downside of Stefano’s monetization approach is that his income wasn’t steady, since he sold ad slots for several months at a time.

The exit

In 2023, Stefano decided to sell the site due to the instability. After a seven month process, Empire Flippers sold The Trading Bible for Stefano. One of the biggest challenges was that potential buyers didn’t want to acquire a site built with a custom CMS. Many preferred WordPress, since that’s what they were familiar with.

Stefano used some of the proceeds from the sale to buy an apartment in Dubai. He published his first book, Zero to Dubai, which shares his personal journey. Aside from MozartCMS, he’s also working on I Go Venezuela, a tourism website, and Glofinex, another finance website.

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Thomas Griffin, Darko, Dru Riley, and Marc Andre for contributing posts. —Channing