The Color of Money

Red beats blue.  Green beats light blue.  But light blue beats red and green. 

What?!

Marketing Sherpa wrote up a useful piece on office label maker Dymo and their efforts to study button characteristics and how they drive conversions.

While highly specific to Dymo's site, you can use their approach to conduct experiments for color, text narrative and button size.

If you knew that simply changing the color of a button increased conversions by 4 percent, would you do it?  Please say yes, or I'll worry about you.

Some lovely bits:

Amazingly, a larger 'Proceed to Checkout' button lifted conversions 44.11% over the existing 'Add to Cart' one. Of course, the design team scrambled to make the permanent switch. On the cross-sell page test, the words 'Proceed to Cart' beat 'Add to Cart' by 21.8% -- and, therefore, replaced it across the site.

With the cross-sell page, they were pleasantly surprised to see that expediting the shopping experience by removing the cross-sell step actually reduced conversions by 15%. "That finding doesn't exactly fit all of the prevailing school of thought on the huge importance of speed either," Klazema says.

Use this for your site. 

If you're a merchant -- especially if you're in the SMB range -- you really need to look at this.  It's relatively simple to track these sorts of things and if you're not doing it, then you're not going to understand how your customers react to your site.

Written by Scott Hurff -- scott.hurff at channeladvisor (dot com).