Design is often the last thing that marketers look at when it comes to optimizing their sales. Often the focus is put on the headline, sales copy, offer, traffic source, or product image.
But every little aspect of your design from the color, font, formatting, CTA button, user interface, and general user experience on the bottom line. It’s undeniable that design has a strong impact on the psychology of sales. Let’s look at the various ways it factors into sales numbers.
The Impact of Color in Marketing
Color is always one of the vague aspects of designing to increase sales. We know that color has an impact on the user’s emotions. For example, the color red can inject emotions like danger, anger, excitement, and scarcity. As a result, colors can be used in your digital marketing campaigns in clever ways to attract more attention and incite more action.
But to say that using a certain color will increase sales is an oversimplification. The use of colors become complicated when considering other factors like the brand colors, industry, and the target audience. A balance should be sought to represent your brand and appeal to an audience. The best ways to use colors is to sparingly use it throughout the sales copy to influence the reader in various ways.
Improving Readability with Text and Formatting
We live in an age where almost everyone has a mobile device that can access the Internet. Unfortunately, many websites forget this fact and do not put in the effort to use font and styling that is easily readable. Readability is very important on smaller screens where it’s harder to keep the user engaged to your website.
However, it’s also important in desktop devices. Too many websites present their content in large blocks of text, making it hard for users to understand and consume the content. Short paragraphs, clean alignment, regular breaks, sub-heads, and variations in font sizes/styles are necessary to keep users glued to your site.
Visual Hierarchy and Focal Points
Do you have a strong idea of what you want your users to focus on first?
If so, you need to design using visual hierarchy. You want your most important message to be presented on the left-hand side of the page and near the top of the page. The reason why is because this is how Internet users scan websites.
This might mean that you’ll have to break up your paragraph to give an important message its own space. Without the use of visual hierarchy, your most important message will lose impact and often get lost in the large block of text.
Remember, you can use many other design elements to establish visual hierarchy like formatting, drop caps, different font sizes, and text bolding. You also want to use focal points in your message if you need to capture the attention of your reader.
This can be anything from related images, data charts, and visual cues (arrows, icons, toolbars, etc.). The idea here is to ensure that you convey your most important points and maintain the reader’s attention until the very end.
User Interface and User Experience
User interface and user experience is an often overlooked aspect of design in digital marketing. This is a shame when it has such a large impact on sales. Poor UI and UX design often lead to higher abandonment rates which hurt sales conversions. Here are some of the things you need to optimize.
Starting with the user interface, you want to make sure that your navigation is easy to click on, especially on smaller mobile devices. They should also collapse without any problems and should be organized in a logical manner so that users can find what they want without any problems.
Then there’s the overall user experience of your website. There are so many user experience problems that websites can have. The most common one is the loading speed. There are studies that show each second of extra loading results in a seven percent decrease in conversions. That’s why you want to do whatever you can to ensure that your site’s loading speed is the lowest it can possibly be.
Next is the functionality of your site. You have to understand that different segments of your visitors come to your site for different reasons. You need to make sure that your website provides them a focused and structured navigation path in order to maximize the value of every visitor.
For example, a guitar eCommerce site may want to provide two primary navigation paths – one for electric guitar players and one for acoustic guitar players. A fitness site may want to separate their website’s presentation by gender or even by the goal of the user (muscle gain or fat loss).
Visual Presentation of the Site
A visual presentation is an often overlooked aspect of design. Many websites choose to simplify their visual presentation in order to eliminate risks. But with an innovative visual presentation, you can do many things from impressing new visitors, establishing credibility, creating strong market positioning, to communicating the benefits of your products or service.
Just take a look at this landing page. The visual design of the landing page communicates the function, value, relevance, and uniqueness of the app. You cannot make this kind of impact by using your average text driven landing page.
Sometimes, you need to step outside normal design standards and test an innovative design presentation to break your sales records. This may mean that you’ll have to deal with a lot of failures. If you take measures to track your results and test different elements, you’ll be able to come up with a design that really hits the mark with your target audience.
In conclusion, there are many ways that design impacts sales. There’s a strong psychological impact that cannot be denied. As mentioned earlier, many companies dismiss design until the very end or only treat it as something used to make a strong visual impact with their target customers. In reality, it should be used as a project that can help improve and facilitate your sales.
As a copywriter for legitlocal.com, Matt spends time finding ways of improving customer and brand relationships throughout the entire lifetime of a product. He helps develop strategies that businesses can implement immediately for real-time results.