Click.

It’s been your goal all along—to cajole a potential customer into clicking your link.

But after all of the marketing tips, the content written, and the setup, it’s time to consider an additional step…

…what happens after the call to action (CTA)?

We know just how powerful a CTA can be, after all….

• Emails with a single CTA tend to increase clicks by as much as 3x or more.
• One company found that adding a CTA to its article templates increased revenue by 83% in just one month.

The problem is that if you don’t have a plan for this additional traffic, the CTA won’t really be worth the investment.

So how do you make sure that people who click on your CTAs and become genuine leads—also end up being potential customers?

Here are a few things to keep in mind.

Build a Proper Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is a process you put in place to take a large amount of something (in this case, web traffic) and funnel it into something more pointed (in this case, customers). Much like you might use a funnel to pour a large amount of liquid into a small-rimmed container, a sales funnel is designed to identify your potential leads and turn them into actual customers.

Here are some stages of the sales funnel you’ll want to consider incorporating, if you haven’t already:

• Marketing. The widest part of the funnel. How are you capturing the attention of potential leads? Content? Emails? Offers? Free tools on your website? Social media marketing and sponsored ads?
• Lead capturing. The next stage in the operation is to turn traffic into leads, usually by pointing someone in the direction of a landing page. For example, if you have incoming traffic from a sponsored social post, you’ll point them to a lead page—which in itself has a CTA on it.
• CTA. The point of decision. A potential customer clicks forward or they simply back away.
• Then what? The problem we find ourselves solving today.

The most obvious answer is that the CTA points someone to a place in your business where you might make a sale.

But let’s be honest: there’s no single one answer for every company. Much of it will depend on what you want your CTA to be in the first place.

Defining Your Call to Action

For many small companies, a call to action might be something as simple as a phone number at the end of an email.

They make their pitch, they tell you about their service, and then they say, “to schedule an appointment, call us.”

The goal was to create more phone calls, and then the next stage in the sales funnel is to direct people to sales over the phone.

This is a great example of a simple sales funnel. But what if you don’t have time to field calls all day?

What happens next in your CTA depends on what you’re selling. So let’s look at some common examples of businesses and what types of post-CTA steps you’ll want to include.

Business Type #1: Service-based businesses.

If you run a service-based business, it usually means that when you want someone to become a customer, their first step is to consult with you.

That might mean a brief phone call, for example, or it might mean scheduling a 15-minute phone call to discuss their project or their needs.

For service-based businesses, this might sound like an inexact science. But there are ways you can turn CTAs like this into a more reliable system.

A service like Calendly helps you turn CTAs into phone appointments for a service-based business. In fact, you might even set it up so your CTA is a click through to your Calendly link.

This would send anyone who is interested in your services directly to booking an appointment with you.

Business Type #2: Product-based businesses.

Let’s say you have something different to sell: a digital product, or maybe even something they can order from your website.

In these cases, you’ll generally want a CTA to go directly to a sales page or a dedicated product page.

The key here is to avoid doubling-up on your CTAs. Do you really want to create a landing page that sends someone to another landing page? Likely not.

For product-based businesses, you’ll want the process to be as simple and low-friction as possible. That’s why sites like Amazon enable you to use one-click ordering.

When you have a product-based business, make sure the checkout phase is as easy as possible.

Business Type #3: Financial-based businesses.

If you’re looking for people who are interested in mortgages or insurance, the best way to get moving beyond the CTA is to have a clearly-defined sales funnel in place.

You could treat your business like any other service-based business and have potential customers set up a phone appointment with you.

Or you could use the CTA to have someone fill out a form that gives you plenty of information upfront.

The key here is to transform your usual lead generation process from what most might consider a “snoozefest” and make it genuinely interesting for the potential lead.

Tools such as mortgage calculators incentivize people to move through your sales funnel.

In this case, you might construct something that ends with a “Request a Quote” CTA.

The problem is, how do you incentivize someone to filling out a form?

Isn’t that kind of boring?

If you build your CTA into something as fun as a “quiz funnel,” for example, you can point people in the right direction.

Making Your CTA Work by Focusing on Follow-Through

Let’s be clear: when someone clicks your CTA, most of the work should already be done.

This is at the bottom point in the sales funnel.

This is when you’ve already done a lot of work capturing an audience’s attention and bringing them to your landing page.

If you don’t have a system in place for these potential customers, you’re going to lose out.

But we have a way that you can focus on follow-through and ensure that many of these people who click on your CTA are already primed to working with you.

By using a leadPops “quiz funnel,” for example, you make the entire process about the customer. You make them invested in learning more about themselves.

When they’re already invested in learning more, the steps beyond the CTA are simpler.

And they’ll actually want to continue them.

The customer ends up filling in their phone number and—voila—you have a genuine, bona fide lead.

A lead you created yourself.

But it only works if you get a sales funnel working for you.

That’s where a service like leadPops comes in.

By using a funnel that’s designed to get people invested not only in the process of becoming a lead, but in following through, you’ll have an answer for what happens after the CTA.

The only question at that point is how you want to reach out or contact your new leads—and potentially, your new customers.

Interested in trying it out?

Sign up for a free trial of leadPops today.