Believe it or not, but most customers (92%) attribute the visual aspect of an ad or product to their purchasing decision. That's huge! Additionally, 90% of customers will make a purchase decision within the first 90 seconds of landing on your page, and up to 90% of that decision will be based on colors. Do colors affect purchases? It would be hard to argue otherwise.
Color Is Important For Conversions
I've been experimenting with different color “buy now” buttons to see if it would yeild better results, and while I haven't had anything tangible yet, I can see from the infographic below (created by Kissmetrics), that others have had great results.
Just changing a CTA from green to red, or green to yellow was able to increase sales dramatically. I guess green is too passive a button!
Another interesting fact is which colors appeal to which people.
Colors For Selling To Men
Men tend to love green, blue and black, but hate purple, orange and brown.
Colors For Selling To Women
Women on the other hand tend to love purple, blue, and green, and hate brown, orange, and gray.
So basically, try to avoid orange and brown on your site, and utilize green and blue if you want to sell to everybody. It seems I got lucky when I chose a kind of blue/green colorscheme for my site, I had no idea that color was so important when I first started designing Humanproofdesigns.com!
Here's the infographic from Kissmetrics to explain more.
++ Click Image to Enlarge ++
Source: How Colors Affect Conversions – Infographic
Testing Color
Have you ever played around with color on your site? I can tell you that it can often be a bit of a pandora's box. How do you know where to start? How can you keep your site looking good and not mess with branding in the process?
Start with what's measurable, such as call-to-action buttons (Buy Now etc) and banners. You can measure how many clicks you get before the change and then measure how many you get afterwards. Something like changing your entire site's color scheme or background color is going to be tricky and will mostly come down to personal preference anyway. Besides, as long as your site doesn't look ugly, and has a simple, clean, easy to navigate feel, then changing it up won't affect it a great deal.
There are always a lot of metrics to test and pay attention to, so focus on the key ones first…sales, subscribers, and to a lesser extent clicks.
Quick question, what's your favorite color?
The Hidden Persuaders (author Vance Packard), a marketing book first published in 1957, is an absolute must-read for anyone creating ads even today. The book reports many intriguing color studies conducted by the Color Research Institute.
One such study involved different detergent packaging. In this study, 3 different boxes filled with the same detergent were given to “housewives” (the book’s wording, not mine). These boxes were colored either predominantly yellow, blue or a mix of yellow and blue.
Housewives who tried the yellow-packaged detergent reported that the detergent was too strong and even ruined their clothes in some cases. The blue-packaged detergent was reported to leave clothes “dirty looking.” The yellow and blue-packaged detergent, meanwhile, received “favorable responses…the women used such words as ‘fine’ and ‘wonderful’ in describing the effect the detergent in that box had on their clothes.”
All the same detergent.
I’ve heard similar reports before about packaging regarding brands but not exclusively colors. Really interesting stuff! I’ll have to check out that book, sounds like a good complement to Cialdini.