Designing Websites for Emotional Impact

Getting to the Heart of Website Conversion

Drive engagement and conversion on your website with content that elicit emotion. 

Yes, your website has a heart. Just like any personality it can evoke emotion that convert visitors. It doesn’t matter if it’s text, images, audio or visual in the form of a website. 

Websites can incorporate a personality with emotional marketing techniques. ​First, it is important to understand that there are different types of emotions.

Visceral: When something impacts at the subconscious level, we say that the reaction is visceral. Your content, website design should evoke the feelings that you visitors to feel without even thinking about it.

Behavioral: Emotions and behavior go hand in hand. When visitors come to visit your website, the feelings should elicit a behavioral response. For example, if a visitor comes to your website and feels frustrated with the navigation, their emotional feelings of frustration will elicit the response of leaving your website. Website user interface (UI) design can affect how users act in response. Similarly, an easy interface is welcoming and will funnel visitors to take the right action.

Reflective: Once visitors leave your website, it should stick with them enough to cause a response of some sort based on their feelings. They might answer the call-to-action (CTA), or share your information with others, or think about it for a while, before actually taking an action. This is why multi-touch point marketing and retargeting can be very effective.

Emotional Components
Emotional marketing is a powerful tool that you can use in all your marketing efforts. In order to accomplish it, you need to understand your audience completely so that you realize what their emotional needs are, and what emotions trigger action for them. 

You can learn this by surveying your audience, getting to know them more, and asking for  feedback from your website. Once you have this insight, you can apply the right solutions to the website, a sales page, funnels, a video and any other content visitors will see and interact with- all aspects of it should be considered, such as:

Words: Know what words trigger emotion and action in your audience. Visitors want to know what’s in it for them, not what’s in it for you. Use words to focus on the benefits your product or service offers. 

For example: Using trigger words like “Limited time offer…” or “Act now to completely change your life in the next 10 minutes…” get visitors to take action on the offer. You want to tell them exactly what their benefits are for acting now.

Images: Images of people tend to connect emotionally with people. Let the face of the person demonstrate the emotion that you want visitors to feel as they look at your website, watch the video or consume other content.

For example: If you’re writing about freedom and how your visitors can experience freedom, try using a picture of something that demonstrates freedom to your audience. Use a relatable image of a person to your audience, showing the emotional release they feel as they realize they have true freedom. People's natural empathy will evoke a connection and amplify the experience of the message in and of itself.

Colors: Some colors evoke different emotions based on culture, sex, and many other factors. It’s extra important to understand exactly who your audience is. You want the colors you choose to elicit the right emotions in your audience.

For example: If you want your audience to feel as if they should be excited and passionate about something, choose known passion colors like red and orange. If you want them to feel happy and free, choose a color like yellow to emulate the color of sunshine which makes people joyful. Do check to ensure that the culture you’re marketing to does not have a different idea.

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