Colour has been known for many years to be important in the attraction/persuasion process but in the realm of online shopping, your ability to grab the attention of a visitor and keep them on page is a process measured in milli-seconds.

In recent surveys,
• 93% of respondents place colour as crucial to their purchase
• 85% shoppers place colour as the primary reason for a purchase
• 80% customers said the colour recognition of the brand links directly with consumer confidence

The colour of Buy Buttons

Research has shown that in Nr America, the behaviour of online buyers can be strongly influenced by colour of the “buy button”.

Colour is also used to attract specific types of shoppers and change their buying behaviour.

Colour isn’t everything however. The products unique benefits, its design, its buzz words, price, availability and convenience are also key to the whole persuasion package.

The right words

Using the right words can drive emotional responses in consumers and can mean the difference between a sale and a no sale. Certain words almost always deliver better buying performance:
• “Sale” can mean an increase of 52% in your footfall (on and offline)
• “Guaranteed” will generate 60% more consumers as they trust offers that use it.

When your words are wrapped in appealing colours and design elements then these numbers can increase further.

The three Kings - speed, efficiency and convenience

Speed, efficiency and convenience rule online shopping.

Ensuring your ecommerce website conforms to these three kings, is ever more important as internet retail sales continue to grow strongly while offline sales become far less predictable.

Amazon has found that every 0.1 second increase in load time decreases sales by 1%. 64% online shoppers will not purchase from a slow website.

A slow website can cost your business serious money as the traffic switches easily to your competitors (see article on Shopzilla).

Takeaway

Your ability to generate better sales is strongly influenced by the colours and words you use.
Your ability to define your offer clearly, is more important than reams of “sales oriented” persuasive copy.

If you’re thinking about what colours might work better with your online business then why not call us on 0845 0740068 or email us at sem@e-xanthos.co.uk

Source:  KissMetrics Blog / colour psychology.

100,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens, looking out into the distance over the plains of Africa, learnt how to decide whether a beast was worth the effort to hunt or let pass. The hunter developed cognitive skills using brain and eye co-ordination to make an instant survival judgement to engage now or wait.

These cognitive skills have been honed over the centuries to the point where brain/eye judgements have become learnt behaviours, with the “first impression” carrying an enduring influence.

In today’s hectic world, first impressions determine what you think as soon as an interviewee enters the room; when a doctor makes an instant diagnosis or an online visitor looks at your web pages for the first time.

Recent research shows visitors can asses a web page in under 50 milliseconds - that’s the blink of an eye - and because people like being right, they’ll reinforce their first impression from then on. So web designers have learnt to “play safe” with page elements and positioning, because familiarity is a strong reinforcement factor.

Take a look at the heat map of the advert below. When it comes to getting attention, nothing works better than a face. The strongest feature of a face is the eyes and it has been shown (from heat maps) that aligning promotional text with the eyes on the face will produce a better first impression and ultimately, a higher conversion rate.

An advert like this has been designed with this specific purpose in mind. As the babies face is the most scanned element on the page, visitors are more likely to absorb close promotional messages at the same time.

It has to be remembered that it is necessary to get visitors to the website in the first place through “warming up” your visitors’ expectations which should marry appropriate search terms with landing page copy, indicating to visitors they have come to the right place.

For a social media site like Facebook, success is more holistic. While social media is about building longer term relationships through visitor engagement, Facebook pages still need quick and powerful ways to create that first impression to show visitors their investment in the page is worthwhile. Again, faces and eyes draw the viewer into the message.

The instant someone lands on your website or Facebook page is a pivotal moment but the first impression is not an isolated moment but has a before and after to create the opportunity then reinforce the decision.

Think about:
1. Where visitors may have come from and what are they expecting to see
2. What visual clues will draw their eye into the page and across your key proposition
3. Make any interaction as uncomplicated (and as uncluttered) as possible without obscuring your call to action while reinforcing the first impression.

100,000 years ago, first impressions mattered to man’s survival. They are equally relevant to your business survival today.

Source:Evan Gerber, Secrets behind website landing pages, iMediaConnection, May 2011
Gitte Lindgaard, Carleton University in Ottawa, Behaviour and Information Technology

Like a star that’s losing its brightness at the centre of its solar system, your website may be losing its sparkle as the hub of your marketing universe.

Why? Because your audience is interacting with you in many different places on different platforms; in a more personal way; much earlier in the engagement process.

Online marketing is now a mass of opportunities for interaction and your website may stop being the principle way people learn about you or find you -  and it is the general public and not business who are driving this change. Business has to learn, adapt and follow.

You may have wondered why so many marketers have been banging on about the importance of sites like Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter. It is precisely for this reason. The internet map has changed. New ways and marketing practices have become main stream business opportunities.

Okay, not all websites may lose their sparkle. Those involved in ecommerce will remain the centre for online transacting but when you look at these from the wider perspective of business-customer engagement, transaction comes pretty near the bottom of the sales funnel.

It is when you move further up the funnel that the most dramatic changes in business-customer engagement are occurring in almost big bang proportions.

Further up the funnel, customers are more than ever pre-selecting their choice of actions through social media or blogging, mobile or preference emailing, to compare offerings, read reviews, listen to mates’ advice and talk directly to brands.

When you meet your audience on a personal level, higher up the funnel and you build trust there, it will reduce the onus on your website to be the sole place to display your value proposition. And the higher up the funnel you truly engage with them the more likely you are to convert them.

And social media gets five times the traffic that Google search receives!

The ROI from social media can be difficult to pin down and while social analytics is still developing, not doing social media for this reason misses the point and power your customers are bringing to the changing face of digital marketing.

Planning your marketing has never been more challenging or complex. Understanding your audience and modifying your marketing actions goes hand in hand with usability issues to ensure your message is apposite for accessing burgeoning markets like mobile and Apps.

Your main content and value proposition don’t just now reside on your website but in multiple and quite different places than you have been used to - and may not involve your website to the extent it has previously been accustomed to.