For businesses to remain competitive in the digital space, a large number of resources should be put towards building, designing, and optimizing a website. Your website will act as the first introduction to your brand and it’s important to focus on building a brand message that showcases your product or service value.
Building a website requires a lot of research! Before you even start with your website design you need to have a clear understanding of your niche. Then, you would focus on designing your website using targeted keywords that describe your product or service. Lastly, once your website is up and running, you would test the subpages to ensure everything loads properly, right? Wrong!
The truth is that the colors used on your website have a big impact on customer engagement. Many businesses fail to consider the effects that different color combinations have on users’ buying decisions and brand value. Using colors is the best way to convey emotions, grab users’ attention and portray hierarchy.
Understanding the basics of color psychology will help you predict how your target audience will respond to the different sections of your website. With this in mind, incorporating color psychology into your website design is a great way to help you boost your engagement.
What Is Color Psychology?
Color psychology is the study of how different colors affect human behavior. Studies conducted have shown that color has a way of affecting people’s perceptions, emotions, and values.
Understanding color psychology is crucial for effective digital marketing as different colors can influence how people perceive your call-to-action (CTA), marketing message, images, and more.
Using color in marketing is considered to be an imperfect science as not every individual will respond to color the same way. The perception of color can vary between culture, age groups, gender, industry, and more. Nonetheless, there are a few key principles to help you understand how color can help influence a user’s decision in the marketing and sales process.
Benefits Of Using Color In Website Design
Let’s take a look at a few benefits of using color in your website design:
Increase Brand Recognition
Building a brand is a long and hard process, and a big part of branding is color! Let’s try a little exercise as an example – if you look at the colors below, could you tell me what brand that is?
If you thought of Starbucks, you are right!
Businesses use color to help build their image and influence user perception. Color is such an important factor in brand recognition that companies like Louis Vuitton have even trademarked different shades of red to further protect their brand.
A study conducted by the University Of Loyola shows that color increases brand recognition by 80%. With this in mind, selecting your brand color is far more complicated than just using a combination of colors that you like.
When building your website, make sure to incorporate your brand colors into the different elements of the design. This will ensure that when visitors land on your website they know exactly who you are and what you do.
Helps Draw Attention
This one may seem like a bit of an obvious one, but using color is a great way to draw attention to certain sections of your website. The main sections you should use color in are:
CTA: Using color on your CTA is a great way to highlight the action that you would like your user to take. When selecting the color of your CTA, focus on selecting a color that contrasts the rest of the colors on your website to ensure it stands out.
Subsections: Contrasting colors can also be used on subsections on your website. This will help divert users’ attention to the important information you would like to highlight on your website.
Impacts Users Emotions
As mentioned above, color has the ability to impact how users feel about your website as it affects their perception. A study conducted by the Institue Of Color Research confirmed that people make subconscious assumptions about a product, person, and their environment within the first 90 seconds of being exposed to it.
The study also highlighted that 60% to 90% of the participants expressed that their assumptions were made based on color. It is hard to argue with those numbers and one thing that has become very clear is that color has the ability to influence a user’s impression and either increase or decrease trust toward a brand.
With this in mind, when a user first hits your website make sure the colors used help build trust with the user, convince them to stay on the website, and lastly lure them to your CTA.
Colors And Their Impact On Perception
Let’s take a look at how our popular primary colors can impact a user’s perception:
- Red: The color red is used to portray passion, urgency, emergency, survival, aggressiveness, and courage. It’s important to note that different shades of red can also be perceived differently. Bright red colors indicate excitement and energy, while a dark red color indicates luxury and authority. Red is good for brands that sell food, beverage, and high-priced luxury items.
- Blue: The color blue is used to portray productivity, trust, and calmness. A lighter blue color can be used to promote creativity, while a dark blue color is perfect to highlight intelligence and trustworthiness. Blue is a good color for healthcare, financial, and government institutions.
- Green: The color green is used to portray balance, calmness, and equilibrium. Green is an extremely versatile color and can be used in any variation. Wellness companies and companies who try to promote the environment use the color green to highlight how the brand’s values are tied with nature and balance.
- Yellow: The color yellow is used to portray excitement, optimism, and growth. Yellow is the perfect color for any brand that is trying to emphasize friendliness and joy. Yellow is a good color for travel agencies and toy stores.
- Orange: The color orange is used to portray durability and confidence. Orange is the perfect color to express urgency.
- Purple: The color purple is used to portray luxury and sophistication. A light purple color expresses sophistication and class and is used by many beauty and jewelry brands. While a darker purple color highlights mystery as well as luxury.
- Black: The color black can be used to appeal to a wealthier clientele. Black highlights luxury at its finest! Black is the perfect color to make a statement as it can create a high level of contrast on your website.
- White: The color white is perfect to convey sophistication, creativity, and class. White is portrayed as a very friendly and inviting color. Using white is a great way to create a minimalistic and modern feel if paired with stronger colors.
Make Your Changes…
Now that you have a better understanding of how color can influence user perception, think about what changes you can make to your website to help you increase your engagement. Knowing more about color psychology does not mean you have to update the whole design of your website but, rather focus on A/B testing subtle color changes. The key is to record the performance of your tests to ensure you can always improve your results!
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