Call To Action Colors?

A

Athens

New member
Yes, I'm in an inquisitive mood today. We all know what call to action words are, but is there such a thing as call to action colors? Colors that catch the readers' attention perhaps?
 
Call to actions have been studied countless times over the years, and continue to be improved upon.

There's any number of things that can affect a call to action, from the size and shape of a button to the words and colors used.

There's a lot of emotion that surrounds color. Many of us know not to use RED when replying to a user or using it as a background on a page - generally red infers anger, hate, danger etc. But depending on what the background color of the page is, Red can help make a button stand out. It wouldn't normally be my primary pick however.

Amazingly enough, if you want a button to stand out, generally you'll want to use a color that compliments other colors on the page. You would want to use Red with a Yellow background, or purple with an orange background. The colors should compliment each other and that will draw the eye as a result.

The most popular colors for call to actions are the Orange, Green and Blue buttons. One doesn't have to go too far to see an Orange button in action - amazon.com. While theirs is more yellow/orange than a deep orange, they are constantly testing. For a while, it was a deep orange, just like the text on their site.

For us personally, we have used the Orange, Blue and Green colors over the past decade and have found success with using each of them in different stages. We currently use Blue and Green on our Blue & Black website.
 
Orange and Green are used as call to action color for the buttons by many of the webmasters. As said by conor blue is also used in many sites. You may use any of these colors based on the page background color and check which works out.
 
Thanks for that info. I always knew that red was a high action color, but not blue or green. I always associated those with being calm.
 
The effectiveness of call-to-action colors depends as well on your demographic. There are cultural differences in how colors are perceived, so it's best to understand what drives your specific audience to buy.
 
Generally, color blind people know they are color blind and substitute the color themselves (at least that's what some of my friends have said about their own colorblindness).

I haven't seen any studies about the effectiveness of order buttons and the colorblind audience. Would be interesting to see the take on it though.
 
Also depends if they are totally color blind or not, because most people just see a slightly different color so it may not be quite the same. However, I've normally seen yellow, orange, green, and blue.
 
easyhostmedia said:
how would call to action colours be effective to someone that is colour blind
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Man, when you throw a monkey wrench into the works you don't mess around do you?:shocked:

People with handicaps like that typically learn how to work around them at an early age. In this case they would probably be de-sensitized to how they react to color and their senses would automatically be in tune with the words instead.

To be honest though, that was a good question.:thumbup:
 
Nightly said:
People with handicaps like that typically learn how to work around them at an early age. :
Click to expand...

Not everyone that is colour blind will have had this condition since birth. I work with a volunteer group and one of the other volunteers had no issues with colours until he was 37 when he woke up one morning and noticed that all the items around him had changed colour, the doctors could not find our any reason for his sudden colour blindness
 
I think we've all read studies that changing the color of the CTA button can improve your conversion rate by 20%... I just don't buy it. We've tried it. I don't think the color matters as much as making sure that it sticks out (don't make it gaudy), it fits with your site's theme and you don't use the button color a lot in your site.
 
handsonhosting said:
Call to actions have been studied countless times over the years, and continue to be improved upon.

There's any number of things that can affect a call to action, from the size and shape of a button to the words and colors used.

There's a lot of emotion that surrounds color. Many of us know not to use RED when replying to a user or using it as a background on a page - generally red infers anger, hate, danger etc. But depending on what the background color of the page is, Red can help make a button stand out. It wouldn't normally be my primary pick however.

Amazingly enough, if you want a button to stand out, generally you'll want to use a color that compliments other colors on the page. You would want to use Red with a Yellow background, or purple with an orange background. The colors should compliment each other and that will draw the eye as a result.

The most popular colors for call to actions are the Orange, Green and Blue buttons. One doesn't have to go too far to see an Orange button in action - amazon.com. While theirs is more yellow/orange than a deep orange, they are constantly testing. For a while, it was a deep orange, just like the text on their site.

For us personally, we have used the Orange, Blue and Green colors over the past decade and have found success with using each of them in different stages. We currently use Blue and Green on our Blue & Black website.
Click to expand...

Thank you for sharing these.
 
We all get influence from different triggers, I don't believe there is one answer that fits all. I think the content is a lot more important.
Granted 2 identical adds in different colours, typeface etc may produce different responses, but in the real world who will reply on colour I think its better to go neutral and style in-keeping with where the text is and above all content.
 
Usually it is best to use something that compliments the colors of your website without going over. So on a site like HostingDiscussion, that might be a different shade of blue or green, but not necessarily red. Make sense?
 
Depends on the audience in terms of demographics, if you want to get specific here are a couple of examples:

Dyslexics: will often have a hard time reading black on white, when a colour filter (normally yellow spectrum) is placed on the area it becomes clearer - highlighting areas where there is a call to action in a colored box can be brilliant for this audience.

Color Blind for example Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind and so chooses blue as a preference as he can see all of blue

I have a little breakdown of which colors I use for different emotions:
Yellow - optimism, clairty, warmth eg. Nikon, UPS, Macdonalds
Orange - Friendly, cheerful, confident - e.g. Nickelodeon, amazon, firefox
Red - Excitement, Youthful, bold e.g. Coca cola, lego, kellogs
Purple - creative, imaginative, wise e.g. cadbury, T-mobile and Hallmark
Blue - trust, dependable, strength e.g. DELL, HP and Oral B
Green - peaceful, growth, health e.g. Tropicana, animal planet and wholefoods
Grey - balance, calm and neutral e.g. apple, Mercedes, nike

There is also a cool infographic http://blog.bufferapp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Screen-Shot-2013-04-25-at-10.57.04-AM.png which tells you about how colour influences our buying behaviours!
 
The color of the call to action button woud obviously depend on the color scheme of your website. It is also important to make sure that you are using bright colors that catches the eyes of the visitors / customers who visit your website for better results.
 
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