If you run a website, then getting visitors to your site and keeping them there is only one half of the goal. As well as getting visitors to your site, you need to ensure that they are also interacting with it and behaving the way you want them to. This means your visitors should be reading, it means they should be exploring and hopefully it means that they should be clicking.
To do all those things though, your visitors will need to click on your links and buttons in order to navigate their way through and to illicit the correct response from your site. To this end, it’s crucial that you can get people to click your links and that you make them as highly clickable as possible. Here we will look at how to do just that.
Colour
The colour you make your links and buttons is one of the biggest determining factors in how often they get pressed. Did you know for instance, that red buttons are considerably more likely to get clicked because red colours feel like a call to action? Red inspires ‘urgency’ and even creates physiological changes in the body (our heart rate increases for instance), so using red links can greatly increase your chances of generating clicks.
Pressability
Likewise, you also want your buttons to be satisfying to click and you want them to call out in other ways to be pressed. If you’ve ever been in someone else’s car and had an urge to press a random button on their dashboard, then you’ll know just how powerful some buttons can be – create that effect on your website and you can get people to click without being able to stop themselves.
Clickable buttons then should be large and rounded so that they look easy to press (this is very important for people using touchscreen devices), and they should suggest some form of tactile feedback. An embossed button for instance can encourage clicks because people will expect it to depress when they click it. Because this is a satisfying feeling, that will then encourage more people to click who otherwise might not have.
Feedback
A trick that seems to be lost from much web design these days, is giving buttons and links some form of feedback. This could mean that pressing the button creates a small animation, or that it creates a pleasing sound. Either way, the human mind enjoys seeing actions have immediate results and that can make your buttons much more ‘enjoyable’ to press. Doing so can even trigger a release of dopamine (the reward chemical in the brain) meaning that clicking the buttons can become almost addictive.
Where appropriate you can even ‘congratulate’ people for clicking your buttons. If you sell a product then, make sure that you congratulate or thank your customers whenever they click buy. This small good feeling can end up becoming associated with the act of clicking in their brains, so that they end up clicking more buttons to get the same positive feedback.
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Author Bio:
Jackson Mosby, the author of this article, works at Webfirm, a leading search engine optimization company. Jackson is a huge MMA fan and hits the local dojo on weekends.