The sites referenced in the post have changed since 2014, yet I stand by the recommendation: Tie your offers and calls-to-action to what your visitors want.
An interesting one is from Cloudflare, they have a call-to-action in their main menu: “Under attack?”
> I do appreciate the relative consistency with "Sign Up". Because it's de facto standard, I know what to expect when I click that button. Sometimes I want to create an account and seeing a button like "Start Drawing" doesn't tell me what to expect.
I wonder whether it might be advantageous to include the same option twice in a menu, once as "Sign Up" and once as whatever you prefer.
Though in the CloudFlare example, I'd tend to expect "sign up" to link to a page that was mostly about pricing, and "under attack?" to link to a page that was mostly about how CloudFlare helps with that.
In their case Sign Up goes to an account creation page, and Under Attack? goes to a sales form that (presumably) will page a sales development rep (SDR) to wake up, qualify the lead, and fetch a solutions engineer and sales exec duo.
In any case, the implied lesson in the article is to A/B test different ideas and see what works, rather than sticking to the default.
I think the button coloring makes up for that. I've signed up for loads of services in the last month and the primary colored bright button being the CTA has been consistent enough for me.
In any case, the numbers are the numbers. Whatever gets most people into an account is what it is. Many guys just fail that part: fill in a thing and we'll contact you. Yeah, no thanks. It's a $200 / mo product not a mortgage. Spare me.
Correct. It is a response to the idea of the two different links to two different places. In practice, I see one as brightly coloured and "Read the Whitepaper" as secondary coloured.
An interesting one is from Cloudflare, they have a call-to-action in their main menu: “Under attack?”