There is quite a bit more to website design than meets the eye. Ever been to a meeting only to find your guests distracted, averting eye contact or oblivious to your attempts at meaningful conversation? Whether they knew it or not, they were sending you psychological cues screaming “Don’t talk to me!” and you were probably less likely to reach out to them in the future because of that. Well, your website design works in much the same way.

The right psychological cues can lead customers to interact and engage with your brand in meaningful ways. The wrong ones can send them exiting faster than a slow loading page.

Everything from choosing the right colors to striking the right language can make or break your brand experience. Let’s take a look at how the psychology of your website design, layout and tone can help strengthen your brand’s appeal.

Set the Tone – Psychology and Persuasion

Aristotle, famous for establishing the fundamentals of persuasive language, gave us a few great guidelines to frame content for maximum impact:

• Be logical – Use information to educate.
• Be emotional – Elicit feeling.
• Be ethical – Appeal to morals.

Every brand should have a well-structured sales pitch to generate interest. Priming embeds critical associations to help customers see the value in your offering. Priming can be logical, emotional or ethical. A shoe retailer geared towards young women might use words like “Most Loved” and “Hot New Style” with images of striking products or a lifestyle photo to influence key user groups. Women see these associations and think, “yeah, that’s how I want to look.” Then the brand becomes associated with that outcome.

Emphasizing the exclusivity of your offering will help make your brand more appealing. Scarcity techniques give your customers the understanding that your offering is in high demand, so there’s a smaller window of time to make a purchase. A customer, afraid that they could miss out on a good thing, may be more inclined to see the value of your offering under these circumstances and take action.

The influence of friends, family and peers is another big factor in what people purchase. With 65% of American adults using social networking websites, people like to see and hear what others have to say about a brand. Display positive testimonials, comments, social shares, likes and re-tweets on your website to add incentive for customers to trust your brand.

Look & Feel – Persuasive Website Design

The Gestalt Principles and Color Theory may be pretty well known to web designers, but are you aware of how these visual approaches can impact your website’s psychology?

The Gestalt Principles are a way of visually perceiving elements as a whole. Applying these Principles make your website more cohesive, easier to navigate and user friendly. Based on ideas around symmetry, spacial placement and how our brains interpret figures and colors, The Gestalt Principles help customers gain a clearer idea of what you’re offering, why it benefits them and how to acquire it.

The psychology of Color Theory makes it easier for customers to read your website’s pages as well. You can use varying shades of color to signify transition or apply the 60-30-10 rule to distribute primary, secondary and accent colors in ways that will unify, create interest and refine your overall website design. Studies across the web also examine how color can appeal to different genders and human emotions. For example, people associate the color blue with trust; yellow with joy and happiness; and red with intensity.

Persuade with Value

The psychology of your website design can be a boon to its overall performance. Experienced website designers will have a grasp of the visual concepts that appeal to customers, but it’s helpful to plan your website with an understanding of what psychological cues will enhance brand messaging. This approach is by no means about manipulating customers into buying something they don’t want. Instead, it’s about showcasing the benefits of your brand in a way that can truly identify a solution to customer wants and needs.

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Why has minimalism and minimalist web design become such a fixture within today’s digital solutions? Driven largely by consumer experience, technology and design trends, minimalist web design has been embraced by several influential companies including Apple, Google and Microsoft. The less is more approach has become an aesthetically pleasing and functional way for businesses to communicate value proposition, products, services and even culture across web, print and mobile.

With so many other businesses vying for your customers’ attention and all the distraction of email, web and social, a minimalist website can be quite refreshing for a consumer that’s accustomed to or even immune to an over saturated digital approach.

Why Minimalism Works

Minimalism is a visual aesthetic characterized by its simplicity. Popularized in the mid-20th century by American artists like Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland, minimalism has become a staple of modern design. Since the early-2000s it has been an important part of graphic and digital design, often discussed in tandem with flat design.

Works of art at the Kenneth Noland exhibition

A minimalist web design focuses on what the consumer actually needs then clearly communicates solutions to those needs. By guiding consumers to pertinent information like what benefits your business can offer, its mission and goals and specific calls to action, you save your consumer valuable time which in turn makes it easier for them to  form a relationship with your brand.

Minimalist web design can benefit your SEO too. Google has offered businesses advice after releasing its Google Panda algorithm update in 2011. The advice is still valuable, since “Panda” is now a fixture of its search functionality. Basically Google’s algorithms are aimed at helping people find “high-quality” websites by reducing rankings of low quality content. So removing low quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages could eventually help the rankings of your higher quality content.

Minimalist web designs have great benefits and are also functional because they can:

• Optimize page load times, so consumers access content faster
• Function well across desktop and mobile channels—increasingly important as more consumers access online content through smartphones and wearables
• Streamline website updates and maintenance

What Does Minimalist Web Design Look Like?

Nielsen Norman Group, a market research firm specializing in user experience, conducted a study that evaluated more than 100 minimalist websites. This is what they had in common:

• Functionality and design stripped to its bare necessities
• Less emphasis on skeuomorphic design techniques like raised, sunken or hollow textures
• Limited or purely monochromatic color palettes
• More white (negative) space
• Marked use of typography or images

Minimalist Web Design Tips

While minimalist web design offers a lot of advantages to today’s consumers, there can be challenges if not implemented correctly. Minimalist web design and interfaces are more likely to eschew common cues like blue underlined text normally associated with clickable hyperlinks, in favor of other creative aesthetics. You can offset potential confusion by aiding consumers with features that help them understand how to use your website. Strategic use of color or interactive functionality that responds to cursor or mouse movement can show there is more content to access.

Your website needs to function well and provide value. Spend time learning what people want from your business, whether that means pouring over website analytics or surveying the market. Use that insight as a guiding point to develop a website that simplifies brand messaging and focuses on content that matters most to consumers. With nearly 30% of smartphone users switching to another website or mobile app if it doesn’t satisfy their needs, a minimalist approach to your web design may in fact help you craft a more successful customer-focused approach to branding and your most critical marketing tool.

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Mind The Habits

Understanding your customer’s buying habits is essential in successfully leveraging the sales power of a seasonal event. Knowing how those habits change in relation to a particular event is also a must – sales cycles and purchasing funnels expand and ebb significantly depending on the holiday or event in question. For example, Halloween and Valentine’s Day shoppers are more likely to make last-minute purchases than back-to-school shoppers, who tend to buy school supplies a few weeks ahead of time.

By understanding these sales windows and buying preferences, savvy marketers can begin planning a marketing campaign with enough lead time to be effective – and segment approaches to appeal to the customers who’ll be most interested.

Tailored Content and SEO

Once you’ve identified your key seasonal dates and the customers you want to reach, this data can be used to update your specific tactics accordingly. A PPC campaign with a seasonal focus is a simple, efficient way to direct users to your site. Make the most of click-through traffic by directing these users not to your standard home page, but to a specially tailored landing page with a seasonal focus. This page can be a simple  product page for a B2C company or even a detailed micro site for a B2B firm.

Given that much ad-driven click-through traffic will be new customers, aim to collect new customer details through campaigns such as giveaways, gift-themed newsletters or special discounts – doing so will allow you to undertake remarketing campaigns as a specific holiday or event grows nearer. Gearing blog posts or articles toward seasonally relevant topics also works well. For example, a tech site might prepare content relating to recommended purchases to take advantage of, or develop a shopping list of computer peripherals and accessories that would make affordable holiday season gift ideas. Similarly, update your store content categories or listings to reflect seasonal relevance – and don’t forget to rewrite your product listing information accordingly.

Formulate Strategy

Sales funnels used to be relatively streamlined and linear, allowing marketers to focus their efforts on pushing customers down a particular buying pathway. But in a multi-device world, there are a myriad of ways in which a customer might go from beginning their research about a product to making an eventual purchase.  Even with scores of analytics data at your fingertips, the very real limitations of time and resources mean that it’s difficult to anticipate a customer’s exact buying funnel. Address this uncertainty by ensuring your business website is strategized from the ground up, so that users are gently guided along an optimal user flow once on your website and regardless of landing page.

Ensure that your online store is as easy to use from a mobile device as from a desktop computer – responsive design is a requirement. Leverage social media channels to get the word out about your products and services, create a targeted email campaign to kick off well ahead of the event, and take advantage of in-app purchasing functionality, such as Twitter’s “in-tweet” purchases. In doing the above, however, it’s essential to take a cross-channel marketing approach.

Taking a cross-channel marketing approach means implementing a cohesive online marketing plan that also capitalizes on the nuances and strengths of each identified marketing channel.

Plan Ahead

Your sales uptick doesn’t need to end when a major calendar event does. Stretch out your seasonal event with a re-targeting program that will encourage shoppers to return to your store, or refocus your sights on the next event – because there’s always a next event. Strategies to entice customers back can be as simple as including a limited-time discount offer as part of your product offering. Or you can leverage a customer’s personal and purchasing data to offer individualized deals. A customer who has purchased jewelry as a Christmas gift may be a great candidate for a Valentine’s Day offer on a complementary item. And someone who has bought a new cell phone or electronic gadget, might be interested in the numerous accessories related to those purchases.

Planning ahead is at the heart of any successful online marketing strategy. And with a slew of major seasonal events quickly coming up on the annual calendar, it’s time to begin – or even finalize – your seasonal eCommerce marketing approach.

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