Affiliate Tips: How to Increase Your Conversions with Colour
05-04-2017
Persuasion is the art of convincing the other party by appealing to their ethos, pathos, and logos. When it comes to B2C marketing, however, pathos works best. Pathos is the appeal to our emotions, and when it comes to design, nothing appeals to the emotions quite like the strategic use of colour.
A study from Live Science tells us that people associate different colours with different moods. Happy, healthy individuals chose bright yellow and light blue as the main visual representations of their moods, whereas anxious and depressed individuals mostly chose dark, muted tones. If colour affects our moods, then it can be used to persuade us into signing up for a product. In leads generation and sales, colours are crucial for CTA buttons and text. Before we dive into how you can optimise colourful designs to increase your conversion rates, we’ll give you a better understanding of the consumer psychology.
Affiliate Tips: The Psychology of Colour
Colours have played an integral part of our existence, being used for centuries in literature and performance art as a way to express deep emotions. In Shakespearean works, red represented blood and passion. In Gothic literature, black represented death and fear. Now we understand that it’s because our brains associate certain shades with meaningful recollections. The fact that the anxious and depressed surveyors chose muted, grey tones as their mood colour reflects our melancholic moods during a dark and gloomy day. Bright colours, such as yellow or light blue, reminds us of sunshine and clear skies. Our meaningful attributions to these colours says a lot more about how our brains interpret them rather than the actual colours itself. This begs two questions:
- How has companies been using colours to persuade us into purchasing their products?
- How can we do the same for our platforms?
- To answer these questions, we’ll have to do a little bit of researching.
Affiliate Tips: The Persuasiveness of Colour
First, start a spreadsheet of all your top competitors. Label your columns: Domain, CTA Colour, Headline Colour, Background Colour, Heat Map Activities. In the CTA Colour column, list the colour of their call-to-action buttons. This will most likely impact their website heat map activities. The headline colours and background colours are there to create a contrast with the main CTA.
Once you’ve collected this information, find out the activity levels on your competitors’ websites using free website heat map detectors, such as Ptengine and Mockingfish. Record your observations on your spreadsheet. You’ve now conducted your own study on the persuasiveness of colour (amongst other important website attributes, such as intriguing headlines and content hierarchy). With all of this important data at hand, you can now fully assess these websites and create your own optimised landing pages. It’s now time to run some fun split tests!
Affiliate Tips: Split Testing
Split testing, otherwise known as A/B testing, is a personal case study employed by businesses and marketers worldwide to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns. In your split tests, pick the top three best performing domains (based on your well-researched spreadsheet) and use their colour schemes. If their CTA buttons are red, blue, and green, so will yours be. During the split testing process, it’s important that you don’t change anything else about your landing pages other than its colours. You want colour to be the only distinguishing factor between these tests so that your results will be as accurate as possible.
While doing these split tests, you might notice that the best performing websites all have CTA buttons that are high contrast, have short copy, and are in plain sight. These are optimised designs that have passed the squint test with flying colours. Simply squint your eyes when you look at your own landing pages. Can you see your CTA despite the fuzzy vision? If so, it has passed the squint test.
Conclusion
Colours play an incredibly significant role in traffic conversions, but it’s often undermined in leads generation. We usually talk a lot about content optimization and even images, but colours also contribute to a website’s success more often than we think. Imagine an Affiliate landing page that’s either completely bland or has too much colour. Both can be quite confusing for the average visitor, since colours also guide our eyes on where to look next. The importance of finding the right colours that work for your design isn’t easy, but it’s a process that shouldn’t be ignored. The more you test with different colours, the better you’ll be at converting your leads!
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