What Does Color Do for You? —

We have all been using color printers for years.  Have you ever stopped to ask why we do this?  We all have a “gut feel” that color documents work better for marketing, but what proof is there?  Maybe you don’t have a color copier, or even a color printer at your office so you are thinking you should get color in your next copier.  What are some of the reasons color is worth getting?  Xerox published a document called the 20 benefits of using color in business documents, and I thought I would look at it and highlight some of the keys.

• When doing newsletters or pamphlets, a decision to read is made in 2.5 seconds.  Color improves the look and professionalism of a newsletter, therefore increasing its chance of being read.
• Color Increases the attention span and recall of a reader by 82%
• Telephone listings printed in color can increase responses by 44%.  I saw this one and I thought that was because color was standing out.  If the whole phone book were color and black and white were 1 ad, you could probably argue not using color increases responses.  It seems that the human eye is excellent at catching incongruity…  so I take this one with a grain of salt…
• 55% of people will pick up a full color mail piece first.  Again, I would argue this is because most people don’t print full color because it’s more expensive…  This is still good to know because your Black and Whites are probably hitting the trash before they are even opened.
• Color reduces errors by 80% … That is good to know because this could affect a lot of the internal business processes.  The less people are making mistakes, the better.
• Color helps to sell 80% more …  now that is powerful.  In fact, I put those words in color to prove the point that people do pay attention to color when it is there for a reason.
• Color helps increase brand recognition by 80%.  This is important if you are in a situation where a consumer has options and you want to be remembered.

So, there are a lot of reasons to be using color.  The key is to make sure the costs of color are making it worthwhile to use it.  You can pay so much for a useful tool that it becomes cost prohibitive. Make sure to check out the Dirty Little Secrets page before running out to buy a color copier!