Conversion Hack: Why Colors Can Increase Sales

It has never been as easy as it is now to capture the attention of huge crowds of people. With the boom of the digital era, marketers’ jobs have become even more increasingly difficult considering the growing number of promotional channels that keep popping up. These channels are being used by competing brands, your consumers, and essentially the world. Billboards, phone calls, and direct mailers seem primitive and virtually obsolete, but that is not the case and is a whole different type of post. The point of this is to let you in on industry secrets. Big brands like Walmart, Sprint, Target know these secrets and have developed entire brands on these simple principles. When developing the next big thing, hottest new product, amazing service, or any other object, idea, or invention you want to market, there are pages upon pages of things to consider, but we will center our attention on one: COLORS.

Coloring Your Marketing Efforts

Many of us never consider the effect colors have on our cognitive thinking abilities. However, this is a critical concept to consider for any marketer whose client needs to develop a brand, recognition, resonation, and other relationships with the world.

In a study, just under 95% of consumers admitted to buying products based on their visual presence. The remaining base their decisions on feel, smell, and sound. What this means for us who have something to sell is that we need more than just powerful words in order to create that ledge to send the average shopper into a consumer. Sit and think about all of your purchases that you have ever made… Okay, now think about why you purchased it. What about that product made you choose it over a competing brand? Was it the packaging that drove you to buy? Did the product’s color lure you to open your wallet? These are things we do not think about, even when sitting down and trying to think about. It happens subconsciously and turns out there is a REAL psychology behind colors and sales. Over 80% of consumers say they made purchases of certain products based on its color.

What Colors Are Saying About Your Brand

Creating brand recognition is a direct way to build consumer confidence and your brand’s colors can improve recognition by nearly 80%.

Painting the Consumer’s Image

The use of colors is an extremely powerful technique of psychological marketing and while it does not completely make or break a brand, it does hold an influential strength of buying power over consumer considerations. A common misconception is that colors are universal. If you believe this, then you are doomed! There are factorial variants that play a part. For instance, persuasive colors in the States are completely different than those in Germany or France for the matter. Let’s see how the US shopping experience is affected by consumer-color correlation:

Yellow: is often used to quickly advert attention to something. Effectively used for window shoppers and is a sign of youthfulness and optimism.

Red: promotes an increase in heart rate and energy. Provides clear deadlines and demands urgent attention. Effectively used for clearance sales, sections, and promotions.

Blue: is know to provide feelings of security. Often times it associates itself with trust instills a calming mood. Effectively used with banks and businesses.

Green: most commonly identified with nature., wealth, vitality, and is known as a color that is easy for the eyes to view. Effectively used for creating relaxed environments.

Orange: The “Call to Action” color creates the aggressive bread n’ butter for subscribing/buying/selling promotions. Effectively used to create high energy and quick decisions

Purple: is a color that associates heavily with beauty industries and is a symbol of beauty. It is known to invoke soothing effects.

Black: a demanding color that shouts sleekness and power. Effectively used in marketing luxury products.

What Colors are Attracting What Types of Consumers

Another ‘color concept’ that plays a role in what kinds of consumers are going to purchase what types of products and how it changes moods and behaviors. For simplicity, we will break consumers into two types. Impulse and Traditional (budget-conscious) shoppers.

Impulse Consumers: These consumers drive the most results fast foods, males, clearance stores, and other quick buy venues. Colors that identify with impulse consumers are red, orange, black, and royal blue.

Traditional Consumers: These consumers are routine shoppers and usually adhere to a budget and oftentimes-frequent large department or clothing stores and banks. Colors that identify with traditional consumers are sky blue, navy blue teal, pink, rose.

It is a no brainer that there are other factors that also persuade consumers to buy one product over another, like convenience, copy, and creative design.

Purchase Timing

Most people are aware of how fast and busy life has become in the growing years. Information is instantaneous, competition is everywhere, and a lot of choices are based on convenience. Shoppers are willing to only go out of their way so far. For the digital world, this is critical. Owning a website, whether or not you operate it or have it contracted out to a digital agency, optimization is important. If your site is even a few seconds slower than a competitor’s then you have already lost a potential prospect. According to 47% of internet users, believe a web page should load within 2 seconds. Time matters! If your site is slow, you are losing customers.

Designing Your Customer’s Opinion

On the World Wide Web, site quality and the user experience is everything, which is why your website’s design will have a detrimental effect on how your traffic will convert. 42% of consumers claim to turn down buying a particular product, service, or subscription because of the user experience of the web design. Many of those will not return. Do not fall victim to poor design.

Ultimate Conversion Comes in Strong Copy

On the internet, consumers can not pick your product up, try on your clothing line, or do any physical interaction with your brand. This is why it is important to make sure the words on your site that header your pages, describe your products, pop-up in your email campaign, must be inspirationally powerful and moving. These are referred to in the marketing world as ‘power words’ and they are most effective at sparking an emotional response in targeted shoppers. Optimal usage of these power words is proven to be a deciding difference between purchasing of similar products. What does your copy say about your brand? The two most used power words in my opinion that actually convert are: SALE/SALES and GUARANTEE/GUARANTEED. These words drive traffic and build product trust during the purchasing phases.

Wrapping it All the Way Back Around to Colors

Regardless of your design, copy, and brand, colors are a variable to test. There are numerous ways to perform testing and several platforms that offer A/B testing to see how well your pages convert under different color variations. Branding, communication, design, copy, and colors are only a handful of things to consider, but there are psychological responses that are associated with colors.

So..What Now?

I know it’s pretty amazing, right? Are you Inspired to do something new to your marketing campaign now? Contact us and find out how marketing growth hacks can take your company to the next level.

Image: Pixabay