It is quite easy to appeal to the senses of sight and sound on your website through text, audio, image, and video content. The sense of touch can also be appealed to and utilized via touchscreen technology or even by moving the cursor with a mouse/touchpad. Taste and smell are more difficult but not impossible to appeal to online.
No matter what products or services you are selling online, you should always try and appeal to the senses of your potential customers. As the senses are a basic human trait, appealing to them makes an instant and personal connection with people. But when it comes to appealing to the senses online, your website has to employ some specific techniques to successfully appeal to the senses of taste and smell. Restaurant websites or websites that sell the likes of perfume rely on these techniques to convey the attributes of their commodities to their online visitors.
How to appeal to the sense of taste online
This involves making the website visitor recall a taste they experienced in the past or for them to imagine what your product (i.e. food or drink) would taste like. The most effective way to do this is by being highly descriptive with both text and images. When done right, you curate a piece of content that is hard to resist and hard not to salivate over.
Describe your product with as many rich and descriptive words as possible. If it is a chocolate mousse, comment on the velvet texture of the milk-chocolate mousse and how it is topped with fresh pure white whipped cream served on a crunchy and chewy chocolate chip cookie base. This text accompanied by a high-quality photo provides your website visitors with a sensual piece of content to really imagine how this chocolate mousse will taste.
Due to the nature of this curated content, it would be advised to seek the expertise of both a professional copywriter and a professional photographer to achieve the desired result(s).
How to appeal to the sense of smell online
Appealing to the sense of smell also requires a degree of imagination and recall to be achieved. Similar to taste, description plays a big part in conveying the smell of perfumes, candles, skincare products, etc.
Buzzwords such as ‘fresh’, ‘zesty’, and ‘woody’ work best when paired with a similar smelling item for reference. So when explaining the fragrance of perfume, for example, you may state how the floral overtones are reminiscent of freshly bloomed lavender with a hint of lime-like zing in the background finally succumbing to the most subtle of vanilla bean bursts. Having a college or classily arranged background of images featuring lavender blooms, fresh limes, and vanilla bean pods drives this point home and tingle the nostrils that bit more.
Appealing to the senses of taste and smell may be a little trickier to do online via a website, but they are not impossible. If you require a professional digital agency to look after the trickier side of things when it comes to your website and online presence in general; look no further than Ireland Website Design. Our expert team contains the likes of copywriters, photographers, and graphic designers to work to drive sales to your business.