How to Design a Homepage With Emotional Impact

No matter how rational we like to perceive ourselves, we humans are highly emotional beings. We tend to respond to emotional stimuli with an emotional response – even when we don’t actually perceive this to be happening.

This is a fact that designers and marketers have always been familiar with – and they have played on it from the very first TV ads all the way into the era of digital marketing.

In fact, emotional impact is one of the web design trends that has been huge this year.

Now, let’s explore how you can incorporate emotions into your own homepage design:

Start with Your Why

Before you actually begin designing anything, you need to be clear on the message you want to send.

While you may know that your main goal is to improve your conversions and boost sales, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for that. You need to think of your target audience, your brand and what it stands for, what the actual message is (for example, our products are fun and easy to use), and then think of the elements that will help this message come across.

Choose the Right Colors

Source: depositphotos.com

The colors you choose to use on your homepage will be incredibly important. There is an entire science devoted to examining the way different colors affect our thoughts and emotions, but suffice to say for now: you want to choose a color that is in line with your message.

You can read more about how each color and hue impact emotions, and then start aligning your color scheme with your message.

Make sure that the color you choose remains consistent throughout your website and all of your marketing assets. That way, you won’t be confusing leads and customers, and you will stay true to your brand identity.

Source: ultimatemealplans.com

A good example of the clever use of colors is the homepage of Ultimate Meal Plans, who have chosen to go green. The color has very natural associations with nature and health, which is what their brand is all about. Try to imagine the same website with orange accents, and you’ll notice it just does not work as well.

Choose the Right Images

Images have the power to invoke deeper emotions much more instantaneously than words. As such, you need to be very careful with the images you use, as they can inadvertently trigger an unwanted response. This brings us back to our initial point about choosing a message here – what are the images on your homepage meant to reflect?

Can you show your product or services in action? If yes, this is always a good choice. Show visitors what it is they are getting – but in the best possible light.

Source: fentybeauty.com

Here is an example from Fenty Beauty. They have plenty of images of their products on the homepage, but they are not just images – they are little bits of art. Each product flatlay is carefully considered and chosen as it shows the product in the best light. It just makes you want to try it.

On the other hand, if you don’t have a product you can show to elicit emotions, maybe you can show a representation of what you stand for and what you provide.

Source: capella.edu

Capella University features two very simple images of their students (or models standing in for their students) on their homepage. The images are stripped down and very minimalistic, but the emotion is certainly there, smiling at you from the screen.

When considering your images, also factor in everything you know about colors and how they impact emotions as well.

Even if you don’t have a product or service, the images you choose should be adequate representations. For example, Best Spy features images for each product category on their homepage. They have been carefully selected to spark a positive emotion. As you look at them, they inspire trust and a sense of calm (or playfulness, when you get to the pets section). All in all, the imagery is perfectly in line with their brand message – “reliable reviews you can trust.”

Source: bestspy.co.uk

Think of Solutions and Not Just the Problems

One of the main rules of marketing is to provide solutions as opposed to focusing on pain points and features. Don’t go into detail about what a product is – explain what it will do to make someone’s life easier, better, more enjoyable.

You can achieve the same effect with the design features of your homepage. If the page is easy on the eyes, if it provides all the necessary information in a simple and organized way, if the images you feature are in line with the solution – your entire page will exude the right emotion.

What this means in practice is:

• Focus on UX: That includes ease of navigation and plenty of negative space; don’t clutter any segment of the page with unnecessary copy or visual elements.
• Don’t try to do too much at once: While you might be tempted to throw plenty of information at your visitors, a better option is to keep your homepage minimal. You have other pages for adding value – the homepage is all about that instant connection.
• Don’t be too obvious: Eliciting an emotional response and banking on the fact that humans are emotional creatures is certainly your aim, but don’t make it too obvious. You don’t want to throw a bunch of cutesy images of babies and kittens on your homepage just so you can inspire an emotional reaction.

Here is a nice example from Heystack about the kind of design we have in mind. What they have on their homepage is neither cute nor particularly evocative of any pleasant emotions. However, the emotions are certainly there. First, you have a sense of bewilderment and confusion; then, when you click on the Make it simple button, you get a sense of relief and a smile – brilliantly executed and in line with their brand to the T.

Source: haystack.is

Alternatively, if you don’t want to go down that elaborate route, you can do something much simpler and achieve the same effect. 

Here is an example from Forms on Fire – they don’t actually show their product on the homepage, but they still play with emotion pretty well with the images of satisfied customers. The colors are neutral and the white space has been replaced by gray, but all the key elements of an emotive homepage design are certainly there. 

Source: formsonfire.com

To Sum It All Up

Human emotions are complex things, and they depend a lot on our own experiences and existing associations. As a business, you can never actually know what an individual’s responses will be, but what you can do is apply all of the best practices we’ve just outlined above.

Do your research thoroughly, analyze the emotions and responses you wish to achieve, and think about the core message your stand behind. The additional effort will make adding that emotional value to your design much easier.

by Nick Loggie

How To Create A Website That Generates Leads?

A website has become a crucial part of digital marketing. In today's technological age, every business needs a lead-generating website to stay at the forefront. But not everyone knows how to create this type of online presence. Your website is the center of your brand's online presence and you need to make sure that it's appealing to your target audience. A lead-generating website is crucial to sustaining long term success for your brand. 

How do you create an eye-catching website, appealing, and lead-generating? In this article, we'll be taking a look at how to create a website that generates leads. Learn some of the tips that make the top websites in the world function as effectively as they do. I spent a long time taking a look at some of the websites with thousands of users and noted what they all did right.

Create many landing pages

A highly specialized landing page is crucial to generating more leads for your brand or business website. According to research by Hubspot, websites with 30 or more landing pages generate about seven times more leads than regular websites. 

À great landing page usually keeps it simple. If you're able to determine where the traffic is coming from, you can create content that appeals to a subset of your target audience. Make sure that you're as clear as possible about the problems you can solve and it should include a way to reach out to you - call to action button, contact information or a simple form would do the trick.

Nowadays, landing pages are filled with so much information that could confuse potential customers about the capabilities of the brand. When customers come across this, they get scared and run to your competitors who have done it better.

Let visitors have some contact info and reach out to you.

When a visitor comes to your website and goes through what is there, he/she may be interested in learning more information about they saw. This is what makes the keeping of contact info on your website appealing. Visitors on your website also want to have a way to reach out to you, to let you know their special demands and what they would like your business to do for them. Website owners should be interested in utilizing strategic techniques on where and how you reach out to visitors. 

The first part of reaching out is by putting forms on the page that gets visited the most. These forms have to be well-structures and only ask for a few pieces of information. Forms that ask for too much usually appear fraudulent for visitors and will scare them off. The forms you create must be related to the information found on that webpage. There should also be valid contact info which users can easily use to contact you for more inquiries. You may decide to include your phone number, email, or develop a chat function for the website. No user wants to have to search around the numerous pages of the website to find your contact info.

Personalise For Your Audiences

Don't forget to personalise for your audiences. As data privacy regulations tighten, marketers are facing rising expectations for personalisation. Consider adding translation services to your website to cater to visitors from other countries. Customising headlines and banners is another way to personalise website content based on demographic information in order to display information most relevant to audience segments from specific regions. Finally, featured posts on your website can be personalised to appeal to certain consumer markets relatively easily. All of these strategies can be used to allow your website to target unique customers according to your product or service offering.

You need a homepage with an eye-catching CTA 

While you'll like to have landing pages with content that's specifically tailored for your audience, you'll also want to have a homepage with a general CTA that appeals to anyone who might be interested in your brand or business.

This call to action shouldn't be targeted at a particular group or set of people. Do not forget that you'll be adding it to the home page, and this is a page that every visitor to your website would see. So, you don't want to single out any of your potential customers. The home page should offer detailed information about who you are and what you offer. A CTA that asks potential customers to enjoy a free trial of your product or service or subscribe to your newsletter is sure to catch the attention of almost every visitor.

When they begin to explore the website, then you can determine their specific interests and target them with unique offers by adopting audience segmentation and email marketing.

Make it easy to find.

The first part of designing a lead-generating website is by creating a website that is easy to find. You're not going to generate any leads from a website that no one knows about.

The first step is to pick a domain name that suits your business. If you're unable to secure the domain name of choice, what are the possible alternatives? Pick a catchy domain name that can be related to your business and reminds people about the services of your company. After this, you should monitor your website. By monitoring you, you can identify where all your traffic is coming from and the activity of people on the website. 

Never forget about the use of SEO on your website. If your website isn't ranking well on Search Engine Result Pages, you're failing to stay visible. Make sure you do some critical keyword research because it will make it easier to identify your target audience. You'll also need to check the SEO of your website to ensure that it's not in shambles and hurting your ranking. I want you to take note of the high visibility of the Amazon website. If you're searching for products on most search engines, you're likely to find a link that directs you to purchase the product from the Amazon website. They have managed to do this by adopting impressive SEO techniques and identifying the top keywords.

Post great content

A website with rich, valuable information will keep prospects glued to your website. They will have no choice but to come back for more. To do this, you'll need to take a step further from just telling the customer what you're capable of. You have to be able to provide in-depth information on topics in the niche. Doing this will establish you as an authority in that niche and make potential customers trust you.

You'll need a reasonable content strategy to create rich content and share it regularly. I'll recommend a strategy that creates content based on themes. If you pick a specific area of interest and create numerous topics on related topics, you're adding value to your customer and growing your business at the same time.

A poorly designed business will not do a good job of attracting leads to your business. For your website to do well, you have to think strategically about its elements; SEO, keyword search, blog content, and call to action. When you have all this covered, you can build a lead-generating website for your brand or business. 

by Nick Loggie