Should you use questions in CTAs?
Don't ask questions you don't actually want the answer to.
This one came up on a live critique* I did recently. Calls-to-action (or the sentence right before a CTA) are often posed as questions. Take: "Want a consultation call with me?" as an example.
If its the first CTA on your homepage, after just a couple of lines of copy, are your ideal clients likely to answer "Yes" or "No"? Unless they already know you and have come to your homepage to book a consultation, they're probably not itching to get on a call.
Of course, that's not to say that you should never use questions as part of your CTAs. They can be very effective — if they're genuinely likely to elicit the 'right' answer from your ideal clients, and move them towards taking action.
This depends on two things that have to work hand-in-hand:
Priming the reader to actually want the thing you're offering. If somebody has just landed on your homepage, the answer to "Want a consultation call with me?" is probably "No," because they're not ready for that level of commitment yet. Even if you know that a consultation call is exactly what your reader needs — do they know that? Which leads me to:
Offering something the reader actually wants (that's why I prefer CTVs (calls-to-value) over CTAs). How many people do you know who are get super-excited to hop on consultation calls? The consultation call is just the packaging — your CTA question needs to sell the results. The answer to "want a consultation call with me?" might be "No", but you could get a "Yes" to:
Want to make [ISSUE THEY ARE HAVING THAT YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CAN RESOLVE] easier?
Want to [POSITIVE OUTCOME YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE CAN PROVIDE]?
Want to find out how to [RESOLVE AN ISSUE THEY MAY BE HAVING] with [ME/SERVICE/PRODUCT]?
How can you use it right now?
Check your high-traffic pages (Home, About, etc.) for question-based CTAs.
If you have CTA questions: ask yourself honestly what the answer is likely to be — and whether that's the answer you want.
If you don't have CTA questions: Think about whether a question might make an effective CTA for you — you could even test question CTAs in a social media post.
If you are using CTA questions, align them with outcomes your ideal customers actually want, then prepare your ideal customers to realise they want it before asking the question.