Brian MorrisMarketers and graphic designers have long known that color plays a major role in the success of any marketing campaign. Specific colors tend to stir certain emotions in customers, thus creating brand relevance and motivating purchases. The following lists 10 colors that increase sales, along with the specific emotions they evoke.
1. Red
Red is the color of power. It gets people’s attention and it holds it, which is why it’s the most popular color for marketing. Just don’t overdo it!
2. Blue
When you want to be viewed as trustworthy and cool, blue is the color for you. Mix blue with complimentary colors for best results.
3. Pink
Vying for the attention of a young female demographic? You can’t go wrong with pink. It’s fun, frilly and totally female.
4. Yellow
Yellow is a powerful color, but it is also the most dangerous hue. Use yellow to command your audience’s attention, and let them know you’re confident in your abilities.
5. Green
Green is a versatile color. It is warm and inviting, lending customers a pleasing feeling. Second, it denotes health, environment and goodwill. Finally, green is the color of money, so it creates thoughts of wealth.
6. Purple
Purple is the color of royalty, which makes it perfect for lending a touch of elegance and prestige to your marketing materials.
7. Gold
Gold is likewise elegant and prestigious, but adds an element of power purple can’t match. In combination with purple or green, gold is a powerful color that symbolizes wealth and pedigree.
8. Orange
Orange is energy. It has powerful attention-getting properties, it’s fun and cool, and it makes customers feel as though they’re dealing with a cutting-edge company.
9. Brown
Brown, an earthy tone, is known as a comfort color, lending relaxation to customers.
10. Black
Black is another highly versatile color. It can be modern or traditional, exciting or relaxing. Used as a contrasting color, black most often adds drama to whatever mood you want to cast.
I love the color orange. We use it the most and it just adds this attention grabbing factor when up against a white background.
I’ve always viewed colors to have some way of inducing emotions and reactions out of people. It’s great to know that there are people who share this vision and affirm that colors do indeed mean something to your website and company.
Always love designs that used orange! Did not know that red was the most popular colour for marketing. Thanks for the great insight!
We love learning how and why colors work for sales! We recently did a post on how to pick the right colors for a trade show booth: http://bit.ly/R6paWN
I opted to mix blue and green in the design of my website. Do not know if this will increase my sales, but I like it!
Blue and Green – Never seen… an old saying that warns of the clashes these two produce, especially if both are the bright colours like Royal Blue and Emerald Green. If you really must have the two colours, I’d suggest making one darker (like Bottle Green or Navy Blue) with the other a paler shade (like Sky Blue or Pale Mint Green). My favourites are the colours that BT spent a fortune researching… a soft petrol blue with a rich ruby red, and I also used cyan and magenta splashes on a black background on my site. Hope this helps.
Having a generic-looking website without color just makes you look boring to people who are browsing.
Adding a bit of color here and there helps to catch their attention and will make them want to click your links.
Thanks for the info given… It would be very helpful if we could get the view % for the same…
Thank you all for sharing your thoughts and feedback.
Personally I love the shades of blue specially on website with “minimalist” design. @GoodTrader, I’m also not sure if blue will increase your sale but it might help if you have a good call to action on your site.
Wow, this is spooky. I was struggling with colors for my website for nearly 2 weeks now. Although I do not like the main color on my site, I was uncertain which color to change it to, so I got stuck. So, this is really handy for me, thank you very much!
thanks for the information, i may use some of this information on my new website.
Thank you for this “valuable” information. As all these colours have merit I’m going to re-brand as a harlequin
Seems as if the only colors missing are white and gray/silver….
I was wondering what white mixed with yellow and neon green invokes to you. I am also starting a business in 3 months on the internet and need colors that really go together. Do you have any suggestions.
Colors play a very important role in marketing, indeed! For my website and blog, I chose blue and white, as they are both clean colors.
Thank you for the article!
Fascinating article! It’s interesting to learn about these colors from a marketing point of view. Not knowing this about colors, I chose green and purple for my business colors. For what I wanted my business to portray, I have chosen some good colors. Also, I laughed when I learned that purple is the color of royalty…my maiden name is King!
Ditto your reply, Kristen! – Only instead of purple, I chose Fuscia to brighten and blend nicely with my “earthy” colors of pine green alongside a soft green. It’s very interesting to take note of what colors people you know tend to wear…
This is a very interesting topic. We have many debates about the effectiveness of colours in our office. Is there any research to back this up? I’d love to be able back this up when talking to clients. Thanks.
Hi Pardeep,
Here’s a good article on the study of color from NYTImes, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/science/06color.html?_r=0
In that article you’ll also see links to further studies.
HTH!
We use orange as fitness is about energy which works for us and gives us great stand out.
Excellent info. i will definitely use orange , red and green.
Thanks for this info Brian!People are always attracted to these colors and using it to market your product will have a very good result. This colors also looks great in designing our websites,it can easily attract the attention of every viewer.
Excellent info, Brian. We should all memorize this!
[Shout out to Kris The Scribbler…”green & purple”…nice!]
Hi Everyone,
Thanks for your feedback, I enjoyed reading them.
@Victoria, I agree with you!
Very informative Brian. This made me think, “Am I using the right colors on my website http://www.womenchampiononline.com to attract my target audience and convey my message”?
I previously said that I liked orange. I also like blue though, quite cool on the eyes. But I find that blue colored text in blog posts and articles just looks so plain since it’s the normal color that linked text is given.
I also find red quite appealing, but for some reason I think it’s too commanding of a color… also quite intimidating in my opinion.
Based on your color analysis, I think it is clear that the 49’ers will win the Super Bowl.
This is very interesting. I just looked at two blog designs that used a mix of bright orange and lighter shade of green and I really liked it. What do you think of that combination?
Cheers for this article. I’d been meaning to look into the subject of how colour can help sales for a while but never got round to it. Then I eventually found this post by chance via twitter.
Anyway, I think ‘fun and cool’ is the audience I’m aiming for, so orange will probably be the most useful colour for me given my target audience. Now I just have to figure out how best to work it into my blog and book covers.
Very nice and unique article. I have also chosen a blue color for my blog.
I’ve always enjoyed the “emotion of colors” types of posts. I’ve read a few in the past about how they use colors to portray how comic superheros are drawn/colored. Great stuff!
Great Articles, I like the color red, orange and green. Definitely logo around that color scheme will send out a vibrant signal!
Our company (chatmeter.com) colors are blue and orange. Seems like a great combo according to this list!
Awesome! My favorites are Red, Blue and orange. Well, red grabs the attention, Blue is cool and orange is fun. Yes, it’s better not to over do the red color. Thanks for sharing and tweeted :)
I love Red and Yellow, Orange and Blue and of course Green. But as a good number are colour blind some of these will not be appealing to them?
Red to the Chinese denotes joy and is the prominent color during the Chinese New Year.
Interesting article. One question, does this apply globally or limited to the US or North America. Red in some cultures can have meanings other than power for example.
Great post. I use Purple & Gold the most as I always thought they stood out above the rest of the colors. I felt that red was too strong and seemed like it was wrong as we always grew up with our homework and papers marked up in red.
Great article! I find mixing orange and blue best to portray trust and increase sales.
I’m a Digital Strategist / Design Director with more than 15yrs experience in the field of interaction design and did write my master thesis about the influence of color psychology in design. Please keep in mind that for a higher conversion on your webpage; it’s important to use contrasty colors. If your site is all green; your call to action buttons should NOT be green… Make them better noticeable. However, in color psychology; users associate ‘RED’ with danger, and ‘error’. A green button converts 25%+ better than a red one. It might be wiser to change the contrast of the surroundings (give the object more white space around itself for example) than to just solely focus on the color of the button itself. Another aspect might be the text used. A good text on the buttons will have enormous impact. A lousy text will kill the conversion of a well chosen colored button… If you like more tips/advice about how to improve the user experience design / and boost conversion (ROI) of your corporate website, e-commerce store etc.; please do not hesitate to contact me. The best way is to always use A/B testing to test the differences between positioning, button-types, colours, and chosen texts. Good luck all. :)
wow that’s great article share about how to marketing with different colors …really it’s useful to me…
I already knew that its important to choose the right color for your CI, but I don’t get what’s so dangerous about yellow…
Anyway thank’s for the summary.
I thought yellow was a color for cowards, maybe that’s why yellow is considered dangerous.
You pretty much just named off every color on the wheel and gave out a general description – GREAT JOB MAN!
Thanks for great post. For my business I choose light purple and I’d choose it again and again :)
Great reference. I would just take precaution when creating international sites as some of these colors may not have the same meaning.
I think you’re in dangerous territory with pink. Some women avoid pink products because marketing with that color can come across as patronizing or pandering toward women. And lots of moms avoid it for their daughters because they want to avoid gender stereotyping.
Not to mention all the people who avoid pink products now because they want to avoid associating themselves with the pink products of the Susan G. Komen Foundation.
This is such a cop-out! You named every color.
orange is eye catchy, I often use to point out essential features for the client. darker tones make perfect background
We use green and pretty good results its generating. As of now, I had little-to-no idea what other colors could do for people. it’s all cleared to me now!
Thank you for the info, I always ask exactly what colors go when it comes to certain meeting,…. Closings, interviews, or just walking door to door to get business for my line of work.
Awesome information! For my business I chose green, white and black. I love the contrast.
this is indeed wonderful, o look forward to becoming a very professional graphic artist/brand consultant, i love it
few pointers –
Green is #5 and yet its a money colour only in states. Red and Gold are the most powerful colours in Asia, And i mean in Asia not just china or India.
I think this research is based only for States. And it doesn’t stand for rest of the world.
Thanks for sharing but there are plenty of other colors which you can use in branding and marketing. I’ve few branding themes in which you can easily identify the power of other unique colors.
as a young female, I am actually turned off when pink is used to brand “feminine” marketing material.
Many people who have commented have missed your article’s point re Increased Sales! In that respect, especially for e-commerce sites, colour is a very important factor.
Neil
http://goo.gl/UvTRUc
So basically what you’re saying is any color will increase sales. It would have been more helpful if you’d shown real statistics – “red sales pages get more sales than blue, unless it’s a financial site then green…” Instead of just describing a bunch of colors. The whole article reeks of filler material.
Nice article. Curious to know how you derived this conclusion/ justify this?
Ugh, another article on colors.
Who knows for sure which color is best.
I just stick with semi-dark red, different shade of blue, teal and gray.
Done.
Don’t overthink this, folks.
Love the post, Black, Red and Gold is what i’ll be going with.
I understand this is an old article however, I’m hoping to get some expert advice from Brian, or anyone that may know….. What are the best colors on a flyer to reach our senior citizens?
This is a great help for blog begginers. It will help them in choosing the right color for their blog or website to attract viewers. This post is not for the begginers only but also for some who have some websites or blogs already, they can get some ideas here if they want to find more auience for their site.
We should understand the colour psychology because it plays strong game in digital marketing. You can’t ignore this.
Well you just list all the color!
nice!
Maybe these colors are good for attract men. But . The most selling color for women is PINK!