The best two word call-to-action I’ve ever seen

I regret not having a camera or camera-phone handy when I saw a great marketing sign.

I was parked in a loading area with lots of other vehicles as we waited for a ferry. To keep people from getting totally bored, a number of food and gift stands were built in the immediate area.

As I strolled around, I came across a food stand that had a small, whiteboard sign on the sidewalk that simply said, “Popcorn. Buy some!”

I was immediately struck by the beauty of that message. It got right to the heart of things, didn’t it?

One word to tell you what the product was. Two words to make it clear what you needed to do. There was no confusion on either point.

Of course, in the world I deal with – direct market layout and design – a two word call-to-action rarely cuts it. But there’s still a valuable lesson to be learned.

I’ve seen more than a few promotions where the call-to-action wasn’t as clear as it could have been. Companies sometimes make the mistake of not looking at their promotion from the viewpoint of someone who knows nothing about the company, or at least nothing about a particular product.

If you’ve been working on a promotion for some weeks, the call-to-action is clear for you… you’ve been living with the thing day after day.

But when it pops into the mailbox of your customers/prospects, it’s likely the first time for them. They don’t know all the discussions and arguments that have gone on prior to your piece mailing.

In other words, what is painfully clear to you might not be to them.

I learned this lesson myself when I first started my freelance career. I was talking to a website specialist and he asked, “What do you want people to do when they get to your website?”

To be honest, I just kind of assumed if people liked what they saw, they’d contact me. Typical rookie mistake. To try to ease my embarrassment at not having really thought things through, I said I wanted people to call or e-mail me to talk about their upcoming projects.

The specialist said, “Then why don’t you tell them that? And why do you make them go to some Contact page instead of having that info right on your homepage?”

Point taken.

For your magalog or other promotional piece, it might not be so simple. But I would urge you to pay particular attention to your order form and evaluate whether it has a clear call-to-action that makes sense to the reader.

The typical problem I see with order form copy is far too much information needing to be crammed into far too little space. This is especially prevalent when you have multiple price points or extra options that the reader can choose beyond the product itself. The order form turns into a solid wall of copy, usually at a small font size that just compounds the problem.

One technique we have for dealing with this is numbering the steps to help walk the reader through the order form process. In other cases we might consider spreading the order form over two pages. But that can’t always make up for poorly-written copy, or too much copy for the page.

Here’s one idea to consider. It’s common for a company to distribute a PDF proof of the design internally so everyone can comment. But we’re back to the situation of the people looking at the proof being overly familiar with it. They may not spot things people outside the company would notice. So distribute it outside the company.

You don’t need to mail it to people, just give the PDF to spouses or friends of your staff. They’re more likely to spot problems, especially on the order form, that everyone else inside the company is missing because they’re subconsciously filling in information that might be missing or isn’t clear.

Fixing these potential problems before mailing leads to more success after the piece is mailed.