Employing Color and Graphics to Stimulate Sales
Web Commerce Today, Issue 31, February 15, 2000
A chief problem in online stores is the high incidence of deserted shopping carts. They were filled but never checked out. They linger in aisles, owners long gone. If you can figure out how to get customers to the checkout stand, your business could make a substantial up-tic in the conversion rate. I believe that a careful use of color and graphics is important to the process.
Colors create reactions and moods
As I surveyed the online literature about the effect of colors, I came to three conclusions:
- Color makes a substantial difference in the mood of a site.
- Color can make a noticeable difference in human motivation in a particular setting.
- Color is perceived differently by different kinds of people. There are no hard and fast rules.
For example, some fast food chains use a lot of orange to stimulate hunger. (Yes, it actually works.) Red, yellow, and orange are perceived as warm colors. Red can be perceived as a negative and cause tension, while blue, green and violet are cool, and used to open up tight spaces, and to suggest elegance and cleanliness. Blue is the favorite color, and is considered calm, cool, and positive. However, people in different countries invest color with different meanings. In the US, white signifies purity and cleanliness, while in some cultures it represents death.
In one BannerTips.com analysis of click-through rates, the following background colors were effective in decreasing order: orange, green, red, blue, black, purple. Does that mean all online stores should be orange? I hope not! But with this particular banner, given a particular color of lettering, the colors made a difference in how the viewer responded.
The first lesson here is that your website needs to be a pleasing, comfortable place to spend time. The more jarring it is, the more it puts your visitors on edge, the less they'll enjoy visiting and spending time on your site. And the time they spend on your site is the biggest predictor there is with regard to conversion rate.
Look at the orange-purple combination at ONElist.com (as it was in February 2000., http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct3/images/onelist-purple-orange.gif) Orange and purple are both bright, bold colors, and since they're opposite each other on the color wheel, they cause a "vibration," something like red and green, blue and yellow. Sure, you can have sites with these colors, but they won't feel restful. Try cooler colors for the main site colors, with highlights of warmth.
Colors motivate and demotivate
But there is a place for reds and oranges and purples -- on your order button. Red motivates to action; beige or gray don't. When you want your shopper to go somewhere or take an action, guide their eye and motivate their mouse with color.
I've experimented some with animating order buttons. I've tried buttons that pulsate slightly, but only slightly. You don't want to make it annoying, but provide just enough movement to draw the eye. I experimented once with two 468x60 pixel banners -- exactly the same, but the simulated "Submit" button on one of the banners had a tiny yellow dot that flicked on and then off for just a fraction of a second. You wouldn't notice it unless you were looking directly at it. But the banner with the yellow dot had a 20% higher click-through rate than its plain-Jane sister. The point is not to trick people into buying, but draw their attention to what they need to do to order.
Don't hide the "finalize order" button!
One of my pet peeves is e-commerce sites that don't tell you how to check out. If you're on the shopping cart page, there's usually a clear path to check out -- and you need to make the "Finalize Order" button clear and bold, to help carry your shopper on to completing the order.
But what if she goes back to your online catalog to shop some more? How does she find her way to the checkout stand? Make sure you place a "Finalize Order" button (or whatever wording you use) on every page of your store. I typically put one in the left-side menu near the top where it's easy to see.
Get the sale!
Your goal, ultimately, is not to design a beautiful site. Your goal is to make your store a visually comfortable environment where your customer likes to come and spend time browsing. But once he's in the store -- and especially when he's placed a set of golf clubs in his shopping cart -- your job now is to herd him gently, encourage him subtly, nudge him surely to the check-out stand. Use color and graphics to increase the number you ring up at the register every day!
Resources on Use of Color
Bill Gallagher, "Winning Colors and Shapes for Your Company," The Weekly Guerrilla, June 10, 1996. http://www.gmarketing.com/tactics/weekly_29.html
Rebecca Piirto Heath, "The Wonderful World of Color," Marketing Tools, October 1997. http://www.demographics.com/publications/mt/97_mt/9710_mt/mt971022.htm
BannerTips, #16, October 1999. http://www.bannertips.com/bannerTips1999-10.shtml
