What’s more interesting to us than the psychology of color is how you can use this psychology to “guide” on-site behavior while the visitor is on your web page. Can we use specific colors to influence user actions?
The most obvious target for this is, of course, your website’s CTAs (call-to-action areas or buttons).
Do CTA colors matter?
As the gatekeeper of conversion, the call-to-action is a prime target for optimization—and its color is no exception. There are different schools of thought behind this issue: Is it better to use bold colors that encourage attention? Or is it better to use cool, soothing colors that give users confidence in their decisions?
HubSpot did an experiment on this topic. They compared the impact of a green CTA to a red CTA; the psychology of “Go” versus “Stop,” as they put it. They found that a red CTA outperformed the green option by 21%. Not bad for a color palette change that only takes a few seconds…
Create contrast
There aren’t many universal truths in web design, but there is at least one: your CTAs should stand out. They should be visible at a glance and can’t be the same color as your background layout. Choose a color for your CTA that will make it immediately stand out on the page. If you have a busy background with a lot of images, you can even use a dull gray to make this distinction – check out Opus Grows for an example. We can’t call it an elegant design, but it gets the job done.
Source: Opus Grows
Play to the crowd
One area where color matters is how you speak to your market, especially for brands that cater exclusively to women or men. Research on color preference by gender shows that women prefer blues, purples, and greens. Men also enjoy blue, but they don’t dislike purple either. Furthermore, while both sexes have a strong aversion to browns, women dislike oranges by a much greater margin than men.
Based on this research, it would make sense for a cosmetics company to stick primarily to cooler tones – and avoid an orange CTA at all costs! It’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s worth keeping in mind.
Don’t assume anything.
While it’s important to tailor your design to your audience, don’t assume that certain colors will elicit the response you think they will. The color associations above may be true for Western audiences, but research suggests that international audiences may make completely different associations for each hue. For example, the color white telegram database suggests purity and cleanliness in the West—but in Chinese culture , it’s associated with death and mourning.
Distinctions like these have become important for online brands entering international markets, so do your research ahead of time!
Source: Nations Online
Test your audience’s response.
With so many possible reactions from your audience, what do social media management services include? the only way to know for sure which colors will work best for CTAs on a website is to test, test, bookyourlist and test again.
Regular A/B testing of CTAs should be an integral part of your web optimization efforts anyway, so it’s easy enough to incorporate color styles into the mix. Do as HubSpot did.