The phrase “Seeing is believing” still rings true in the digital world. When a website uses images to bring their content to life, it also makes their products more appealing. High-quality images have value beyond making a web page vibrant—you can also increase your website conversion rate using images. Increasing your conversion rate leads to increasing your profits.
While most marketers understand the significance of digital marketing, they often fail to realize that they can use images to boost their websites’ conversion rates, as well.
Potential consumers have a desire to both see and experience a product before making a purchase. Incorporating images into your web pages allows visitors to engage and interface with your product more effectively. By choosing the right photos, and carefully considering their dimension, format, content and appropriate placement, you can dramatically impact your conversions.
Today, we’re here to share our top seven tips to increase your website conversion rate using images.
1. Target Consumers’ Emotions Using Images
Studies have confirmed that marketers target their audiences’ emotions, leading them to be more likely to make a desired choice. In the digital world, integrating images helps the audience to engage their senses and imagine their experience with the products you’re offering. By evoking peoples’ imaginations, your potential customers suddenly see themselves making an upgrade to their lives with your product.
Suddenly, the product isn’t just a massage chair, for example. It’s been reframed into a change that will ripple through their entire life, leaving them comfortable, rejuvenated, and relaxed, better prepared to take on life’s challenges. What was just an ordinary item becomes a symbol of luxury in a potential customer’s mind, leading them to an internal conversation that might sound something like “Maybe I should treat myself to this chair—I’m worth it!”
What does this type of image usage look like in action? Consider the image below used by Human Touch, a company that sells wellness products.
Depicting a sense of comfort and ease when using the massage chair triggers positive emotions in the audience, enticing them to get more details about the product. When you use emotions positively, the chances of visitors making a purchase also increase. Tapping into emotions is a great way to increase website conversion rates using images.
2. Avoid Irrelevant Stock Images
The digital media landscape is anything but static: It’s constantly shifting and evolving. Staying updated to current trends is a sure way to attract more customers.
The “web 1.0” era is a distant memory, and customers stopped finding bad stock photos enticing long ago. Analyze your stock photo selections carefully, ensuring they help contribute to building a positive image for your brand.
We’d definitely steer you away from using stock images that are overused and irrelevant to your content.
The best option is always to take your own photos, or to hire a professional photographer. We understand that not everyone has the time or budget to make that happen, however. Ultimately, you should be using original pictures of your products. You can consider purchasing stock images to complement your product photos, as well. It’s always possible to modify these images to better fit your products, and to target the audiences’ emotions positively.
3. Larger Images Work Better
Larger-than-life images have a striking effect on audiences, compared to low-quality images. Think about the last time you saw a movie in a theatre, and how when you watched it again at home, it felt smaller and a little lackluster. The same effect is true in marketing.
When sharing images of your products, share more than a single image. Incorporate images taken from different angles, providing potential buyers with a 360-degree view of your products. Integrate a feature that allows users to zoom in on the picture, and to view it from all angles.
Be vigilant when using larger images—they should be enticing, not pushed into viewers’ faces. The idea is to sell a product without it feeling forced. A case study showed that when Skinner Auctions began using larger images in their online catalogue, 63% more users were enticed to click on listings and initiate the bidding process.
Despite enlarged images pushing the content down, the results were still remarkable.
4. Integrate a Human Touch
Another way to increase your websites’ conversion rates is by incorporating human faces into your content. Why is this effective? Simply put, no matter how far technology advances, there is no replacing the impact of human touch. Human faces in images make content both real and relatable for audiences.
One example you’re likely familiar with is KFC. KFC keeps its founder Colonel Sanders’ face as its mascot. He’s globally recognizable as KFC’s brand identity.
Worldwide, people can tell that the chicken in a bucket with Sanders’ face is from KFC.
5. Use Customers’ Testimonials with Their Image
Testimonials with a customer’s image were shown in a study to increase sales by 34%.
Today, customers are savvy, and well aware of marketing tactics. Nonetheless, they find other customers’ reviews believable. Consider asking your customers for a photo along with their testimonials to mirror these sales increases.
Your customers’ positive reviews should be shared to strengthen your credibility and bolster your reputation! Post them with their photos. Reviews are strong social proof that your product or service is useful, and delivers on what it promises to do.
6. Use High-Quality Images
Quality often comes at a price. Sure, you may find a relevant photo for free. Its quality could drastically impact your website’s conversion rate, however.
Ensure that the images you’re using are high-resolution, captured using appropriate lighting. Engaging images can’t look staged, and should give the illusion of a real-life situation.
When you use images that audiences can perceive as believable, it can have a positive impact on your website’s conversion rate.
Relevant, high-quality images convey messages precisely, and succeed in engaging customers’ emotions.
McDonald’s burgers and fries look fresh and temptingly delicious in their photographs, and succeed in conveying their appeal even through online marketing.
7. Bring Attention to the Products
A smartly-used image can draw attention directly to the products themselves. Proper lighting and product placement can either draw attention to or away from what you’re seeking to highlight.
Conclusion
Websites without images come across as dull, and fail to create audience engagement. While many marketers believe that image integration is just about using pictures in context, there’s a little more to the story.
High-quality images can change the game of website rankings, and improve their performance. The internet has an incredible array of pictures available for just about anything you could think of. Marketers can either choose from the images that are already available, or lean into their creative side and take their own product photos.
Ultimately, by integrating the tips we discussed here, you can increase your website conversion rate by using pictures strategically and with care.
