Color Psychology In Marketing: What Colors Make People Want to Buy?

Color psychology plays a critical role in website design and marketing campaigns for your eCommerce store. Images and words can’t match color’s ability to generate emotional persuasion and create a positive or negative customer experience.

In his report, “Impact of Color on Marketing,” Satyendra Singh found that shoppers make an initial judgment about a product or website within 90 seconds and that 62%-90% of this is based just on color. Similarly, a Statista report found that 42% of women say color is an important consideration when making a clothing purchase.

Understanding color psychology can do much more than just make your eCommerce store look good; understanding which colors make people buy can seriously boost your sales.

The psychological effects of color determine what emotional reactions potential customers have to your online store; if you fail to deploy the right colors, you could shoot your business in the foot. Therefore, color psychology marketing should be at the center of your online marketing strategy to help generate leads and increase conversion.

Additionally, ensuring your color choices reinforce your brand identity can contribute to a higher conversion rate. In this article, we are going to explore the idea of color psychology as it relates to eCommerce and how you can choose the right color schemes to drive more sales.

Understanding Color Psychology

Understanding the theory of color psychology is essential to developing a unique perspective on your customers - and could help you increase conversions on your online store. Understanding how people react to different colors will give you an edge in the eCommerce space.

Color psychology can be defined as the understanding of how different hues determine human behavior. Using this to create an effective color scheme for your store can help you increase positive reactions to your marketing messages, call-to-action buttons, and links. The color psychology chart below will give you a good understanding of what emotions different colors can trigger.

As you can see, the connection between colors and emotion is huge; therefore, with color psychology theories, you can use the right colors to elicit certain emotions in your customers and encourage them to take specific steps.

Understanding the psychological effects of color, and what emotions they trigger or inspire can help you create a brand logo, call-to-action-buttons, links, and email copy that enhance your shoppers' experiences and boosts sales.

Don’t forget that branding also extends to the post-purchase experience; this is a chance for you to solidify your brand's identity by correctly deploying color psychology.

Easyship can help you with this endeavor by providing customized tracking emails and packing slips that are in line with your brand identity and offer your customers a holistic post-purchase experience.

The Use of Color Psychology in Marketing

Color psychology marketing aims to create brand relevance and motivate customers to make purchases by provoking certain emotions. Here is a breakdown of colors that are proven to increase sales, along with the specific emotions they evoke and the product categories in which they work best.

1. Red

Red is a useful color when it comes to color psychology marketing. It’s known for evoking feelings of urgency and excitement, so it can boost feelings of hunger, love, and fun. Many fast-food chains and brands - among them Coca-Cola, KFC, and McDonald’s - have found success by incorporating copious amounts of red in their branding, including in their logos and marketing materials.

Shades of red (and other related colors) work well for building a niche online store for kitchen supplies because they’re associated with good moods, appetite, trust, and coziness. Red also works well for impulse purchases and is a common choice for the “buy” button on eCommerce stores. It’s also often used to attract notice for various actionable items and calls-to-action, such as special announcements, notifications, links to emails, and errors.

Red is also commonly used to denote sales prices since it attracts people’s notice to the lower prices. Because of all this, red is one of the most useful colors that make people buy.

2. Blue

The psychological effects of the color blue is productivity, trust, peace, and stability. Unlike red, which triggers urgency and anxiety, blue quells anxiety. It stands out as a great color for background and conversion elements on eCommerce sites that deal with things like insurance, medicine, and finances.

Color psychology theory states that dark blue gives a sense of intelligence, gravitas, and tradition; lighter blue is associated with freedom and security. All shades of blue will also suit educational toys and sports to stimulate a sense of concentration, seriousness, and brain function.

Blue is a useful color to use as a conversion element for websites that deal with “scary” topics such as insurance. Because it’s intrinsically associated with trust and security, it can alleviate fears and make people more confident about using the site. On an eCommerce site, blue can be used in things like payment gateways - just think of PayPal and the Verified by Visa logo that often comes up when making an online purchase - both are blue.

3. Green

Green lends customers a pleasing feeling of warmth and invitation. It also evokes feelings of goodwill, health, and environmental responsibility. Green is also known to be the color of money and provokes thoughts of wealth.

If you’re looking at deploying green in your brand identity, you should remember that color psychology means that the color will work for an eCommerce store dealing with equipment for outdoor activities, as well as sports items as it inspires people to be on the move outside. It will also work well in the health and wellness niche. Green ranks second as a solid “buy” button and call-to-action choice.

Easyship client Tropicfeel produces a range of sustainable, versatile sneakers. To underscore the eco-friendly nature of its products, the website features plenty of soothing green shades, including its logo, feedback and notice bars, and most importantly, for talking about the benefits of its sustainable shoes.

4. Gold and Purple

In terms of the psychological effects of color, these two colors are all about status, prestige, and wealth. Purple is a color that lends your marketing materials a touch of elegance and prestige because it’s traditionally associated with royalty. Similarly, gold is also considered prestigious and elegant but outshines purple with an element of power; it’s a symbol of wealth and pedigree.

As you would expect, these colors will work well for jewelry and fashion products as they represent wealth and luxury. Silver will also work well in this niche. It’s also a good choice for financial organizations and educational businesses that want to give off a sense of status.

In eCommerce, though, purple should be used judiciously. It can be good for branding and conversion elements but should be used alongside neutral colors like cream, brown, white, and blue. Greeting card maker Hallmark is a good example of this - purple and gold are their brand colors, but they’re used carefully alongside neutral colors on their website.

5. Black and White

Black is a versatile color. More correctly, black is an absence of color, which means that it can be used in a multitude of ways if you’re considering color psychology in your site’s color schemes. It’s associated with dominance, power, and strength. It sends a message of confidence to potential buyers when used in eCommerce.

It’s commonly used in luxury brands that retail mainly to male audiences and works well in the niches of fashion and accessories. If you’re dealing with technology, electronic devices, computer supplies, or any other tech products, then black and white, along with metallic colors will work well for you. When combined, these colors are associated with high-tech products and the future.

In designing your online store, black and white are best used as background elements that allow other, more converting colors to stand out. The Rolls-Royce site, for example, uses black text on a primarily white background to allow its grand images to stand out properly.

6. Orange

Orange arouses feelings of ambition and energy and is powerful when it comes to grabbing shoppers' attention. It makes them feel as if they are dealing with a cutting-edge brand. It also symbolizes originality, passion, and a fresh beginning.

It works well with other warm colors such as red and yellow, and can be especially useful in any baby-related stores. Orange also works well for conversion elements in a clean, simple-looking eCommerce store as it stands out from other color schemes and customers feel positive about it.

Orange is another popular choice for conversion elements, but mostly on sites that have an otherwise clean, simple design. This allows the orange-hued conversion element to really stand out. Penguin Books, a segment of the Random House publishing company, uses orange in their logo and incorporates this into elements like the shopping cart and attention-grabbing header bar on their site.

7. Pink

Pink is closely associated with feelings of love, kindheartedness, and romance. Though it can appeal to males, it’s commonly associated with femininity and works well to offset more aggressive colors such as red, orange, and black with its soothing effect. Pink is frivolous, fun, and feminine, and if you are vying for the attention of young females with your beauty products, you can't go wrong with pink.

Pink can be a versatile color for your eCommerce store, but you should think about your audience when deciding how to use it. For example, Victoria’s Secret is a feminine, women-focused brand dealing in lingerie and beauty products; their website features a lot of pink, in line with their branding. Conversely, while NastyGal is a clothing retailer geared towards women, its audience is somewhat different; they use pink, but mainly as an accent.

8. Yellow

Yellow is associated with confidence, cheerfulness, and playfulness, and can work well when you want to command your customers' attention and show them that you are confident in your abilities. However, yellow has the most dangerous hue and can scare customers away if not used carefully.

Hues of yellow, orange, and other warm colors evoke feelings of tenderness, love, positive attitude, cheerfulness, and playfulness and can work well in pet supplies and accessories. For an eCommerce store, yellow is a good accent color to get different parts of your site to stand out, for example, it’s good for small chunks of text that contain important information, but it’s less useful for conversion elements. The site for First Sip Brew Box is a good example of this.

9. Brown

Brown is an earthy tone and is known in the psychological effects of color to create feelings of comfort and relaxation. If you want to create a cozy, friendly, welcoming, and comfortable atmosphere that will make your customers feel relaxed and comfortable, then this warm and quiet color won't let you down. This is especially true if you are dealing with products in home décor.

However, brown will work best on a website whose branding already uses the color. The website for Hotel Garda Golf uses cream as a background color and a deep, rich brown for accents and calls-to-actions.

This works mainly because the Garda Golf logo uses these colors too, and the hotel’s rooms and public spaces are rendered in earthy tones, so the photos work well with the site design. However, brown is not necessarily good for conversion rates as it is not really considered one of the colors that make people buy.

How to Drive Sales with Color Psychology and Marketing

Different colors trigger different feelings in online shoppers, so it’s important you understand the psychological effects of color. Having a working knowledge of color psychology can help you choose colors that make people buy, and which resonate well with your brand’s identity, improve conversion rate, and drive more sales.

The right branding colors on your marketing materials, seasoned with great customer service, pricing, and discounts are all you need to kill it with your eCommerce store and stay ahead of the competition.

Don't forget that branding is equally important in the post-purchase experience and Easyship can help with that. As well as giving you access to over 250 affordable courier services, we offer a streamlined end-to-end shipping service that enables you to deliver customized shipping experiences to your customers.