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They say you can’t judge a book by it’s cover…
I’m here to tell you that people do. In fact it’s been proven that a well designed ebook cover can and does increase your sales by 200% or more.
People make their buying decisions based on emotion, the emotions are then justified by the features.
What makes you feel good? An example of this was when a friend of mine bought a Porsche, I asked him why and he said he liked the leather seats. Of course the real reason was the way driving the car made him feel.
I know a Porsche isn’t quite an ebook but I’m sure you get the idea.
When you buy a book at your local bookshop what’s the first thing that catches your eye?
It’s all in the presentation
With me it’s the design, the way it looks, what it’s saying to me without reading the words. Only then do I absorb the words and take in the meaning, finally picking it off the shelf if everything it says matches what I’m looking for.
The same is true online when looking at a website. I’m sure the same is true with you…. am I right?
The first impression is the lasting impression, one that can be hard to change.
If your web sites and your graphics look amateurish at first glance what does that say about you and what you’re selling?
Can you see where this is all leading?
Is your website communicating the right message?
When I visit your website tomorrow the first thing I’ll notice is the feeling I get from the design of your site. The most important part of this will be the colors you’ve used and how you’ve used them.
If you want to tell people you’re serious about what you do and you can be trusted then blues work well. If you want to grab my attention and make me take action then red’s and oranges work well. You have to be very careful with your choice of colors so it’s well worth doing some research to learn how people react to them.
A guaranteed way to grab attention After the color comes the images you’ve used. I find using people’s faces work well. Making eye contact is a great technique to holding people’s attention, just look at a majority of the magazines that use people on their covers.
People like to see people.
In cyberspace it’s very easy to put unnecessary barriers up, after all no one can actually see you presenting your website.
Is your website greater than the sum of it’s parts?
If you’re selling something that doesn’t even have a physical form but only exists in a pixellated world it’s even more important to get your visual presentation “just right”.
Without a shadow of a doubt a well designed and “real looking” 3 dimensional version of your ebook or software product is what you need.
The good the bad and the down right ugly!
There are many levels to what people call “well designed”. I’ve been around long enough to have seen the “good the bad and ugly” online, all passing for professionally designed 3 dimensional covers.
Whilst some may say having a 3d cover is better than having none at all I firmly believe an amateurish cover will actually “hurt” your sales. Purely because it creates the wrong first impression.
So how do you get people to take you more seriously and hand over more of their hard earnt money for what you have to offer?
There are 2 things you can do:
1. Get a professional designer to do the work for you or 2. Do it yourself.
If you do it yourself it you can still look professional just by following a few simple design rules:
- The most important thing is to keep your design simple and not get carried away with fancy graphical effects.
- Keep your graphical elements to no more than 3. Don’t ask me why, 3 elements per design always words well.
- Use no more than 2 types of fonts, sans serif fonts like Helvetica and Impact work well together as headlines and body text. Simple font designs are easier to read online, especially if your design will be used at small sizes.
- Use complimentary colors to strike a balance between harmony and impact. Complimentary colors are like blue and orange look good online.
- Create an invisible underlying grid to design your cover, keeping everything under control. The best grids are those that are made of 3 sections, each section using one third of the space. You can do this horizontally and vertically depending on what you’re creating.
- Contrast the use of your graphical elements, the bigger the contrast the better the flow of movement around the design. For example you could have one large picture, a group of large text for your heading and a group of smaller text as a subheading.
All these things when used in the right way will play a major part in improving your sales.
Above all keep your design simple and clean, an “over cooked” design with too many things going on will make it harder to read and harder for your potential customer to understand.
All these things when used in the right way will play a major part in improving your website sales.
Just go for it!
Of course there’s no substitute for using a professional designer who has the training and expertise to get your image just right. At the end of the day if you’ve got the time and money to learn the graphics programs, as well as the time to experiment then I say go for it!
When you’re done send me your design and I’ll tell you what I think.
Increase your website sales by 275% or more...
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Your post brought back some old memories. Back in the days when I was learning the ropes of copywriting and devouring just about anything that had the C word I used to download randomly. Now I realise most of it was because I was sold at the cover phase itself. As a marketing copywriter I have learned at least one rope though: never judge an ebook by it’s cover.