The Weird Truth About “Green” – And How It Can Hypnotically Boost Sales
Did you know that human beings can see more shades of GREEN than any other colour?
It’s a clever evolutionary trick that helped us survive – as individuals, and as a species.
PLUS it provides a valuable insight that you can use to make your sales and marketing materials (like your website) more effective.
Why We See So Many Shades Of Green
The likely reason why we came to see so many more shades of green than any other colour is because it provided us with an evolutionary advantage.
In the forest, plains and jungles, being able to see the contrast between our leafy backgrounds and potential threats or opportunities helped us to survive.
If we couldn’t see a hidden predator in the bushes – it might eat us!
If we overlooked fruit hiding in a tree – we might go hungry!
And if we missed a venomous spider or snake in the bushes or undergrowth – we might be bitten and poisoned!
Being able to see these opportunities and threats in stark contrast to their surroundings helped us to survive far better in a predominantly green environment.
And it shows an important trigger for the brain – and a pathway that you can exploit to make sure your sales message gets noticed.
The Pathway To Action
Human beings are hard-wired to find things that contrast with their surroundings. There are predictable triggers for this pathway that can lead to action.
Contrasts in our environment get our attention. And attention is a key element of any sales or marketing strategy.
Attention -> Attraction -> Action
Attention is necessary to create attraction; attraction is necessary to create action; and action is the essential ingredient in any commitment.
This pathway is relatively easy to exploit:
ATTENTION: Monkey sees a banana.
ATTRACTION: The banana is something that meets the monkey’s needs (hunger), and there are no threats to the monkey’s security, so the monkey is attracted by this opportunity.
ACTION: The monkey decides to grab the banana.
The sales goal of your webpage – the key conversion action that you want to attract people to (such as your purchase button, signup box, or telephone number) – should POP off the page and grab visitors’ attention.
And so should certain key sales messages.
Specifically, the messages that are most effective at tipping potential customers across the line. (Perhaps your satisfaction guarantee, star ratings, testimonials, or important features or benefits of your product.)
The way to make these elements pop, and capture the attention of sales prospects, is to make them big and bold and use bright colours.
These parts of your page then “frame” the sale around certain considerations.
Once you’ve gained the prospect’s attention, hopefully your sales messages are attractive enough to see them take action and buy.
Big, Bold and Bright
In the office, the shorthand way of explaining what we should do to certain elements of a website to make them pop off the screen are the words: Big, Bold and Bright.
The bigger something is, the more attention it receives.
And, if that element of the page has a positive effect on sales, then the added attention means added conversions or sales.
Like increasing the size of a “Submit” button on a webform – which led to a 137.1% increase in enquiries.
Or increasing the size of the product star ratings for a client’s ecommerce store – which resulted in a 20.35% increase in sales.
Boldness can be manufactured by playing with fonts, adding attention markers, or changing other graphical elements (although movement tends to have a negative impact on conversions on websites).
Brightness is obvious. Just changing the colour of the “Add To Cart” button of a webpage resulted in a 31.81% increase in sales.
In theory, these improvements are illogical, irrational, and just plain stupid.
We shouldn’t be more likely to buy a product simply because the “Add To Cart” button is brighter! …But the test results show we ARE more likely to buy.
This demonstrates how little of the sales process is driven by logical thought – and how much of it is driven by emotion and hard-wired patterns of thought that we evolved millennia ago.
WARNING: The Big Mistakes
Before you go out and make everything on your website Big, Bright and Bold, there’s are a few mistakes you should avoid.
These mistakes can DESTROY the good work you do on your website – killing your sales, and turning your website from a valuable sales tool into a pile of junk pixels.
In Part 3 of this series on colour and its effect on sales, I’ll be showing you these mistakes – how to avoid them, and why our brains are hard-wired to stop buying when we see them.
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