How Colours Affect Conversion
Have you ever wondered what easy-to-implement marketing techniques you’ve been overlooking that would improve your customer conversion rates?
The customer journey can be complex. As marketers, we usually spend a lot of time going into granular levels of detail on all the things that make the difference between your target audience choosing you or opting to go with a competitor instead.
But sometimes, the answer is less complicated than you think.
Colours are an incredibly powerful tool and are just one example of how minor tweaks to your marketing can make a big difference.
Using them in the right way can impact how your audience makes decisions, and so in the world of marketing, a strategic approach to colour could be what you’re missing out on.
This article explores why using colour in digital marketing can be so powerful when it comes to optimising customer conversion. Let’s take a look!
The data
If you think it’s the visual aspects of marketing that make all the difference, you’d be right. Studies have found that 92.6% of people say that it’s the visual aspects that are the top influencing factor affecting their purchasing decisions.
Visuals are important because they influence the snap judgment your audience will inevitably make about your brand. A product assessment takes just 90 seconds, and up to 90% of that assessment is based on colour alone.
In fact, colour can be the make or break reason behind why a potential customer chooses to invest in your offering or not, as 2/3 of consumers won’t buy a large appliance unless it comes in their preferred colour.
But what if you want to leave the colour out of your marketing altogether? This isn’t really an option for most, with one study finding that magazine readers recognise full-colour ads 26% more often than black and white ads.
Overall, the data clearly indicates that colour is important in your marketing- but what difference can one colour over another really make to a campaign? Let’s take a look at the case studies.
Case studies
Case studies on how colours affect conversion are great tools for highlighting the importance of which ones you choose in your marketing. Let’s take a look at what brands have benefitted from embracing the power of colour.
- Hubspot owned brand, Performable, changed its call to action (CTA) buttons from green to red, resulting in a 21% increase in customer conversions on its site.
- Clothing brand RIPT Apparel changed their CTA buttons from green to yellow (as well as tweaking the button’s copy), which led to a 6.3% increase in sales.
- In a marketing experiment, Heinz changed the colour of their signature ketchup from red to green and sold over 10 million bottles in the first seven months, resulting in $23 million in sales. At the time, it was the highest sales increase in the brand’s history.
While these case studies showcase the huge impact one small colour scheme change can have on your business, they also show that what works for one company might not work for another.
The takeaway? Don’t generalise.
You should start by asking yourself what colours will influence your target market the most and then test those colours on your website to see which your audience responds to best.
Applications
You’ll probably encounter thousands of different colours as you browse through various websites, but it’s also good to be aware of aspects like accessibility when choosing a colour scheme.
For example, red and green are the colours obscured the most for those with colour-vision deficiency, while blue is a colour that pretty much everyone can see clearly. The choice of blue for the hyperlinks that you’ll often see on websites was a happy accident for this reason.
Demographic differences
So now you know how colours affect conversion, but which ones should you consider trying out for yourself?
From completing in-depth customer research, you should know your target audience better than anyone. This should give you a good idea of what kind of aesthetic they’d respond well to on your site, but it’s not always easy to anticipate.
If you’re not sure where to start, have a look at the demographic differences below between genders for a little inspiration.
Targeting women:
Colours women love the most
- Blue
- Purple
- Green
Colours women hate the most
- Orange
- Brown
- Grey
Targeting men:
Colours men love the most:
- Blue
- Green
- Black
Colours men hate the most
- Brown
- Orange
- Purple
While these differences are a good place to start in considering what colours to prioritise, they are generalised, and so when it comes to your audience research, you could find that your market segment expects something different.
What does it all mean?
So there you have it, colour really does make a difference to your marketing efforts.
This doesn’t mean that you necessarily need to overhaul your brand’s entire colour scheme to achieve more conversions- it could be a case of making small changes like updating the CTA buttons that you really want to draw attention to on your site.
And if you do choose to make these adjustments, just make sure that you’re able to track what difference it makes to ensure the changes you’re implementing are the right ones.
If you would like to see the facts and figures covered in this article in infographic form, check out Neil Patel’s article here.
If you want to benefit from more advice on how to improve your customer conversion rate with some simple strategic tweaks to your marketing, book your free 30-minute marketing review here.
