Unfortunately it is very difficult to say which font is absolutely right for which message. In short, there is no one font that is ideal for convincing teachers who have come to your website to buy your product.
But the fact that different fonts carry different connotations does mean that you should occasionally change the font that you use, first to meet the prejudices of certain readers, and second to give you insight into the effect different fonts can have.
Indeed recent research reported by the British Psychological Society suggests that some particular fonts can also carry some political connotations too. You may find that whether you use font a) or font b) you get exactly the same response rate on a landing page.
But those responses may come from different schools or different people within the school. Teacher A might be much more inclined to respond to text in Font X, while Teacher B might be more inclined to respond to text in Font Z.
Thus by changing which page you direct people towards from time to time, you open up your offer to more teachers.
What this research suggests is that certain fonts carry “personality traits.” The findings suggest that sans serif fonts are generally seen as more liberal than serif fonts such as Times New Roman, Garamond, and Georgia, which are generally perceived as more conservative. That finding held up irrespective of whether the message had any political implications or not.
A further implication is that if you are advertising a product or service as offering a new way of working or a new way of solving problems then a liberal type font is helpful.
Sans-serif fonts like Arial, Arial Black, Geneva, Helvetica, Lucida Sans, Tahoma, and Verdana are most commonly used on web pages.
For headlines many people particularly like Verdana. But when it comes to the text of the message Georgia is considered by many to bring in better results. This is because it is easier to read a paragraph of text with a serif font.
But there has been a problem over the years with Gmail not reading all fonts properly, and as a result many people have stuck to a small range of fonts, such as Arial. Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman and Courier. But then you have the problem of your messages looking like everyone else’s messages.
However, if you are writing to teachers at their school address, they are unlikely to be reading the email via Gmail, and therefore this becomes less of a concern.
In the end the best way forward is to experiment and a really good place to start is by having two landing pages on your website for a single product.
To begin, make those landing pages exactly the same, except that they each have a different font. You should be able to track which of those two landing pages gets the most sales per number of visits, and that will tell you which font should dominate your whole website.
This may lead onto the notion of changing the illustrations and design. Or it may convince you of the need to test one landing page against another to see how many conversions there are from visiting the landing page to taking an order.
Indeed it is at this final stage of the process that most potential orders seem to get lost. Visitors make it to the landing page, but then don’t go on and place the order.
Now many companies simply record this as a “failed campaign”, because they don’t look at the number of visitors that landing page had. But quite often it is not the whole campaign that has failed; merely that the landing page is not doing its job of translating visitors into buyers.
If you would like us to look at your landing page and offer our thoughts, without any charge at all, please do get in touch. We’re always pleased to help. Please phone 01604 880 927 or email Stephen@schools.co.uk
