Effect of Emotion on Marketing Landing Page Conversion

Abstract

Web users make decisions to click or not to click, to buy or not to buy, every day. The emotional impact of an invitation plays a key role in these decisions. When business goals align with the potential customer’s expectations and desires, conversion is more likely. Therefore, designing the landing page for a marketing campaign to elicit positive emotions from consumers is the natural step to ensure the success of digital marketing campaigns. However, the perfect landing page is only crafted when designers can successfully elicit these positive emotions. User testing that measures users’ emotional response can help designers understand the effects of their design choices. This experiment tests an emotional design model and measures the effect of emotion on landing page conversion, using physiological instruments to measure emotional arousal and a self-reported tool to measure emotional valence. Twenty-eight adult participants (both sexes) living in Peru, and randomly selected within the community of singles looking for a long-term relationship of Mi Media Manzana mobile app, were exposed to two landing pages. The relationship between their emotional response and their conversion decisions was measured. The data provide strong support for the hypothesis that marketing campaign landing pages with strong emotional appeals generate more conversions. The experiment also suggests that some methods for measuring emotional response to marketing landing pages are more reliable than others.