Color Psychology: The Influence of Color in Direct Mail Advertising
Initiating communication and speaking to customers is something direct mail marketers strive to achieve. Experts and direct mail advertisers discuss the importance of color psychology and its impact on direct mail marketing success in the digitalized customer landscape. Amidst the fierce competition among businesses targeting the inbox, there’s still a lot of scope for direct mail in the digital world.
The right color schemes in direct mail advertising campaigns can help businesses connect with customers on a personal level. 90% of direct mail marketers feel colors can attract new customers. Whereas 92% believe that color can represent the quality of the brand. According to the research conducted by Xerox Corporation and International Communications, 76% believe that color makes their business appear larger and 83% believe it can lead to success.
Psychology of Colors in Direct Mail
If you are a big believer of color psychology, you need to understand that color has always been referred to as an emotional outbreak. It’s a channel that enables a dialogue with a potential audience. Having said that, combining the right colors needs to be a top-of-mind factor for marketers.
Marketers focus on using colors to elicit the right emotions, sustain customer relationships, and create loyalty for the brand. However, if used in the wrong way, color has the potential to damage the brand identity and ruin marketing efforts.
One way to advance your color schemes and personalization strategy is by using different colors in your direct mail marketing campaign. This means you will have to know how color psychology can affect your marketing efforts.
8 Color Choices to Encourage Your Direct Mail Recipients to Take Action
Colors are descriptive; they are a powerful communication tool. They bring sensory experience. Undoubtedly, they are an important aspect of every direct mail campaign. Whether you’re going for Direct mail printing services in San Diego or in Boston or anywhere in the US, colors can influence your potential audience everywhere.
1) Green: This color is mostly associated with nature; hence, the recipients can easily sense freshness, serenity, and health. Most suitable for food and healthcare industry, green promises your customers to let them live freely, get along with nature, and offer them abundant health and happiness.
2) Blue: Build trust with blue, a color that dictates a sense of loyalty, security, dependency, and integrity. You may come across blue in advertisements from firms in banking and insurance, investment, lifestyle, and technology sectors. Choose blue to promote businesses that connect with everyday lives — from laundry to retirement savings.
3) Red: You’ve definitely seen red in a lot of marketing materials. Interestingly, it is a tricky color for marketers. Associated with extreme emotions such as anger, danger, excitement, and attention, it also symbolizes passion. This is suitable for companies that want to stand out and make a loud impact.
4) Purple: Purple is a regal color, which is not often seen in marketing materials. Marketers can use it to demonstrate passion, luxury, and independence. Send the communication in a creative and imaginative way that portrays your business offerings.
5) Orange: Orange is bright, self-promoting, and communicates affordability. Getting customer’s attention on travel brochures, adventure products, and clothing catalogs is easy with your marketing material designed in orange. It represents success, hard work, and achievement.
6) Yellow: Sending your direct mail communication in yellow creates an optimistic environment. Yellow is bright enough to grab the customer’s attention. Most commonly used in food, retail and restaurant businesses, it brings a sense of satisfaction. This joyful and warm color is a popular choice among businesses looking to get a better response.
7) Pink: Often, pink represents feminism, romance, and evokes feelings of fun and youthfulness. You can create your ad using different shades of pink if you’re looking to attract the attention of women and girls.
8) Gray: This color reflects professionalism, transparency, and versatility. It can be used to convey status, reliability, and sophistication. Gray has a positive connotation and is a great choice to create visually-promising print material.
How to Use Colors to Improve Direct Mail Response Rate
The colors used in a direct mail piece convey a great deal about the brand to customers. It is, therefore necessary to get this aspect right.
With the following methods, you can create colorful direct mail advertisements that will impress your customers with minimal efforts:
• In Graphics and Images: It can be challenging for marketers to create thousands of graphics and images, but incorporating something unexpected can help the direct mail piece stand out. Using contrasting colors work well. Try pitting yellow and blue or pink and purple against each other to create interest. Black-and-white images are great if you want to make your piece look dated.
• In the Company Logo: It is important to create strong brand awareness among customers if you want to establish the brand. Include the company logo in the design to register the brand’s identity. Solid colors such as navy blue, brown, gray and black reflect professionalism and may be great for your logo.
• In Banners: Direct mail marketing efforts are straightforward and centered around understanding color schemes. Choose banners according to the industry, products or services you offer. For example, food industry banners often use yellow and red to build excitement around their offerings.
• In Backgrounds: Using an impactful color in the background of your printed material is likely to get a positive response from your audience. Choose white, teal, brown, grey, silver, gold or pink in the background to create exciting templates. Make sure the background color and the text color do not clash.
Conclusion
When choosing colors for your direct mail, do it with a purpose. Choose colors that are appropriate for your target audience and help convey your message correctly. Like it or not, you will have to bear in mind the principles of color psychology. Regardless of the type of direct mail advertising campaign you design, using the right colors can certainly help boost the response rate.
