OK, that is not really a fair question because attention span is not a good judge of intelligence.
However, since the year 2000, the average attention span of a human has shrunk from 12 seconds to 8.25 seconds. And the average attention span of a goldfish is apparently 9 seconds.
What is more worrying is it will only take 3 seconds before a prospective customer decides whether to continue reading your leaflet or consign it to the recycling bin?
This would not be a problem if goldfish were your target audience, but it is the fleeting glance of a human whose attention you must capture.
So how can you achieve this?
There are the time honoured methods such as an eye catching headline and reader friendly fonts, a good sales message and an urgent call to action.
Some copy writers will say a drop capital letter at the beginning of the sales message is another good way to encourage your prospect to keep reading.
However, I saw a vlog recently of a young American lady who claimed there was another way to influence prospects without spending a fortune on cutting your leaflet to shape, foil blocking or other expensive extras.
This young lady was explaining that the use of colours can be an effective way of influencing prospects to view your leaflet in a positive way. According to this enthusiastic young lady, various colours can evoke certain instantaneous reactions and emotions.
Below are five quick tips for harnessing colour psychology
The study of colour psychology is an incredibly advanced field and one that you could spend weeks upon weeks studying and still not have the complete picture when it comes to putting the science into action. The following five tips eradicate the need for this time-consuming task and get straight to the point when it comes to making the most of colour psychology.
1. Call the customer to action with orange
The colour orange has a tendency to make people act with haste-like actions and do things like buying a product on impulse. The exact reasons for this are unknown.
2. Use bright, colours for other calls to action so they stand out
Using dull colours, such as black, dark grey, brown, or purple, is useless for converting customers, as well as grabbing their attention. To boost sales to an audience that is more engaged, opt for bright primary and secondary colours such as red, green, orange or yellow.
3. Are you targeting men?
If you’re targeting the male audience you should avoid purple, orange, and brown. Instead, you should opt for colours like blue, green, or black. One ground breaking study by Patel, as reported on by Kissmetrics, found that there were clear splits in preference for certain colours between men and women. Of the colours listed above, it was blue that led the way in terms of number one preference for men.
4. Are you targeting women?
If you’re targeting women you should avoid grey, orange, and brown and push for blue, purple, and green. This is based on the same research which also found that females preferred and disliked colours in a contrasting manner.
5. Don’t neglect the use of white
White can play an important role in the design of your leaflet. It stands out on a darker background and can be used to instantly draw the attention to the part of your leaflet you want the reader to see.
To sum up
Now there are some people who will dismiss this as typical American psychobabble and not relevant to door drop leaflets. But some phycologists and most interior designers claim that rooms decorated in certain colours can affect people’s moods. I mean who could really feel comfortable and at ease in a room where all the walls have been painted black.
Whilst colour psychology makes for a fascinating realm of marketing, it’s no substitute for knowing your audience, and for good-old fashioned market research. To this end, the key to making the most of the principals of this field is to customise it to your industry, your brand and your audience – and continually trial various designs through unbiased testing to gain feedback from consumers and find out what performs the best for you.
Using certain colours can make a prospective buyer look at your leaflet in a positive way that captures their attention and makes them read and respond to the call to action (CTA), perhaps it is worth considering.
If you are looking for advice on how to make your leaflet stand out with cut through on the doormat, then why not get in touch with us? We have many years of experience in designing leaflets that will catch your reader’s eye and keep them reading and responding positively to your CTA; unless of course, your target audience are gold fish.
