The Power of Color in Marketing Your Website
Do colors really matter in web design?
Spoiler alert: Absolutely!
Your website needs to accomplish multiple tasks at once. It must be attractive. It must ensure that the website’s navigation is easy to understand. It must be able to keep an online user’s interest for as long as possible. Additionally, it must subtly encourage the user to do whatever action the site’s owners want them to in order to go down the conversion funnel.
More and more designers are turning to the psychology of color to aid in the creation of websites because the online design needs to have an impact on people’s behavior. To imply trust, urgency, or mystery to the target audience, they can make use of cultural references.
Understanding color psychology is essential for optimizing the web design of your site. Choosing the appropriate colors can encourage your clients to act by influencing their state of mind. By attracting clients’ attention and inspiring the proper feelings that lead to purchases, color has the capacity to increase conversion rates.
Colors frequently determine how the public perceives your brand and your values. The crucial question, however, is still unresolved: Which color is best for my company’s image? What shade should I pick for the biggest impact?
It’s critical to realize that color psychology affects persuasion significantly. Remember that convincing someone is not the same as coercing, tricking, or being aggressive. Instead, it’s about bringing about the mental shift required to motivate clients to act. A conversion or buy would be the action in this scenario.
What’s a conversion? It’s whatever task you want your website visitors to take in order to change them from a visitor to paying customers.
Conversions Through Color
The relationship between product color and the desire to buy has been demonstrated by science. The hypothalamus in your brain undergoes a series of reactions each time you perceive color. Your thyroid releases hormones, which cause emotions that have an impact on your behavior. In actuality, colors influence 62% to 90% of buying decisions! Therefore, learning more about the psychology of color can greatly increase those difficult conversions for your website.
The colors you choose can sometimes be subtle and understated, yet they still have an impact. The main areas where you need to exercise caution are:
· Buttons (specifically call to action)
· Hero Graphics or Banners
· Headlines
· Background
· Borders
· Pop-Ups
· Images
The type of audience that your website caters to will influence the colors you choose for these prominent areas.
Brightness and Contrast
Additionally, brightness is essential to the success of your website. It is generally accepted that men like brighter colors while women favor softer hues.
Another crucial color element that affects the readability of the webpage is contrast. Nobody likes having to strain their eyes to read the text on your call-to-action button or any other page of the website. It is practically forbidden to mix extremely dark or light fonts with text. Visualize a light black background with a black “Buy Now” button. It most likely wouldn’t be detected at all.
The color palette of your website will certainly affect usability and accessibility. How do you determine the color palette at all? Simple. We typically use the colors in the logo as a starting point and pair these colors with associated matching colors.
From there, we look at the best ways to use these colors in places like the navigation, the background, the images, the header and footer, the call-to-action buttons, and more.
There’s an entire science to the colors we select when building your website.
Colors From A Digital Marketing Expert’s Perspective
Based on the psychology of color, we’ve developed a list of colors and the feelings they arouse below. These colors, when applied correctly, can really help to give your website the personality it needs to increase conversion rates.
Blue
Blue conveys trust and a feeling of coolness. This hue might work well for a website that offers online medications, medical services, financial transactions, insurance, or any other niche that demands dependability and trust.
Red
Red is the most attention-grabbing color. It is regarded as the color that calls for action the best. The color red is energizing and lively. It is linked to ardor, strength, and even anger. It can be used to convey caution or danger, but it can also imply tenacity, resolve, and audacity.
Red is the color to choose when designing the “buy now” button or your primary call to action (CTA). In studies done between sites with green CTAs and red CTAs, the red buttons were clicked on much more often. Why? Think of traffic rules. Green means go, or in the case of your CTA, go “on past it” while red means stop or “Stop and look at this call to action!”
That’s not to say that all CTAs need to be red, but it’s rarely a bad idea.
Reds that are stronger and more reassuring, like brick or maroon, are appropriate for locations that want to convey the enduring attributes of a brick wall. Younger websites that aim to convey enthusiasm and a desire to leap before they look benefit greatly from using brighter reds like real red.
With web design, you want to limit red to highlight colors since it can be overwhelming or off-putting to use with large backgrounds, so it’s important to use this color properly.
Black
Black is adaptable and complements every other color effectively. It works best when contrasted with the other colors used on the website.
It’s a color that often indicates luxury, but it can also help add mystery elegance or even authority in some cases. Obviously, black can also carry a negative connotation, so it’s important to use this color on your site wisely.
For example, you wouldn’t want to use a lot of black backgrounds on a window washer’s site or a commercial cleaning company’s website for obvious reasons.
Green
The color green represents nature, tranquility, and peace. It can make consumers feel at ease, refreshed, wealthy, and upbeat. Darker colors are more associated with money, thus websites that aim to convey wealth, expansion, and stability frequently employ such colors.
Websites that seek to represent leisure, freshness, and honesty frequently employ lighter colors because they are more linked with spring and growth. Green should therefore be the primary background color on your website if it promotes an important environmental cause or sells organic goods.
Yellow
Yellow is used in marketing to represent a clear mind free of anxieties and pessimistic thoughts. It works best for online shops that sell goods like toys and clothing for children. Another meaning of this color is caution. The color yellow is frequently thought to be the most energetic.
Yellow relates to warmth and happiness because people learn to associate it with the sun from an early age. Bright yellow is therefore ideal for kid-friendly websites since it attracts their attention. The connections of yellow are more complicated for subtler tints. Darker hues can imply antiquity and parchment that has aged. As a result, it can also be linked to knowledge and curiosity. As a result, it works well for websites that aim to project an air of authority and intellect.
Orange
Orange can also be considered sophisticated while also being eye-catching. Compared to red, orange is a more harmonious and subdued color. It’s perfect for designs that require motion and energy because it’s vibrant, energizing, pleasant, and welcoming.
Because orange is distinctive and lively while still having the feel of a warm color, websites that wish to display their ingenuity frequently employ it. For tech businesses or websites that deal with electronics, this hue makes a great background.
Gold
Gold is a metallic color that denotes strength and status. It goes nicely with other colors associated with elegance, such as purple and green, but it works better in print than it does online.
Because there’s a wide difference in screen monitors, phone screens, and tablets, gold often looks more like yellow and isn’t a color that tends to display consistently on a website.
Purple
Elegant and sophisticated, purple exudes both. This shade is perfect for a website that sells specialized, luxury goods.
Purple is also a primary color you see during Mardi Gras. Because of this, there is a festive aspect to this color.
Brown
The color brown inspires serenity and tranquility. For websites that focus on natural things, like landscaping, plants, etc., this color can be ideal. Creams are an excellent backdrop color for a website that aims to convey a feeling of heritage since they are serene, elegant, and pure.
Tans are traditional and suggest respect. They are perfect for a site that doesn’t want to be too daring or crazy because they can be drab but also comforting. Dark brown has a solid, trustworthy quality to it, just like a loaf of bread. It is connected to comfort and warmth. Websites that wish to convey knowledge and assurance frequently utilize brown.
Pink
Pink is a wonderful hue for you if the majority of your target market is women. The color is thought to evoke feelings of romance and joy. Pink has a very strong association with vibrant femininity. It is lighthearted and evokes childhood innocence and bubble gum. It is perfect for websites that have a vintage feel to them or that cater to a female audience in particular.
An Example Of Bad Color In Web Design
Make It Loud has been building websites for businesses since 2004, so we’ve encountered our fair share of nightmare stories around web design.
For example, a few years ago, we had a very proud UGA veterinarian school graduate come to us with a request to redo her first website. Her current site had the obligatory red and black colors in both the logo and throughout the site.
The problem was that her red and black logo looked downright sinister and with black backgrounds on the home page, her veterinarian site looked more like a funeral parlor.
We asked, “So, are you married to this logo?” because it genuinely looked as if it was bleeding. She insisted that she was, and when we broached the subject of her color scheme, we talked about how great her school spirit was, but we suggested that red and black weren’t as advantageous to her career as a vet as she might think. We explained that as her site was now, the colors were more suggestive of bleeding and death rather than pet health and healing.
As it was, the colors on her site not so subtly said, “Hey, bring your pet here to die!”
We love UGA as much as the next guy, but when it comes to your website, your livelihood takes precedence over school loyalty.
In Conclusion
Every website has trust issues.
The reality is that we give most websites 3-5 seconds to assess whether we trust what we’re seeing or not. The color scheme of the site plays a huge role in helping us decide whether to stay and read more or bounce away to the next site.
In fact, the improper color choice for a website might cause significant bounce rates since it conveys unprofessionalism, untrustworthiness, or lack of competence. Users can tell a website is reliable and understands its specialty if they get the appropriate impression of it. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that site designers will continue to pay close attention to color psychology.
The world is getting smaller and more varied nowadays. Recall that different cultures use different colors. What is positive in one culture could be viewed negatively in another. For instance, white is a hue often worn by brides in Christian nations despite being connected with death in China. Although most nations view purple as feminine, Brazil also associates it with death. To choose a color scheme that best suits your potential clients, you must take into account all facets of your audience.
If you’re struggling with the use of colors on your website, give us a call. We’re happy to help you with that or any aspect of your digital marketing.
