How Visual Graphics Can Increase Conversions
Written by Toonimo
Even today, content remains king of the internet. While content is the dominant force online, it's being chased by strong visual graphics. In fact, often a solid picture can boost and tell an engaging story better than an entire product description.
In the world of conversion rate optimization, content and carefully crafted calls to action are the main focus for many marketing professionals. Unfortunately, the graphic element of any campaign is not given the attention that it deserves.
While we've discussed many aspects of conversion rate optimization from perspective of text, in this post we'll be covering the image based and visually engaging components necessary to increase conversion rates.
While we can't state enough that testing is the most important aspect of any conversion rate campaign, here are our favorite image-based ideas to increase conversion efforts.
1. Justifying Images
As we mentioned, graphics should only be used as a way to persuade consumers to purchase faster than a body of text.
The best example of selling with visuals over words can be the travel industry. Often, travel companies or tourist destinations use graphics to sell the attractive sites and relaxing nature of the location. A few words are used to compliment the image.
Why does the image sell so well?
Simple. Because the sandy beaches of Hawaii or the amazing sunset in Aruba speak for themselves. Any consumer could easily imagine themselves there. No paragraph of text could do a better job.
While many landing pages understand the value of visuals, they seem to forget that consumer attention span is very low. Asking readers to spend precious time deciphering text or navigating beyond one page, will cause high rates of abandonment.
Beyond being engaging, graphics and visuals can often highlight the product value in a more compelling way than words.
Using pictures can impact the consumer purchase decisions and should be used sparingly and strategically.
A great example of a visual describing and clearly defining its product value is Dropbox. The simplest design all the value and the landing page is clean and concise.
The intelligent use of visuals does a better job than any text could do. Don't you think?
2. Effective Images?
Conversion rate optimization is tricky, especially in the e-commerce space.
In the e-commerce space, convincing a customer to purchase is difficult but the quality of an image and its position on a page and how it is presented in context is critical to the conversion. Especially in such a highly visual digital marketing space, images are often more successful in converting customers. Sure, product descriptions need to be solid and well written, but no product will sell without a good picture.
In e-commerce, pictures are the only way a brand can sell a product. Treat each image with care and be deliberate about its quality and placement.
3. Living Color
Many brands attempt to remain true to the research about the psychology of colors and the famous associations between certain colors and consumer emotions. While all of this research does make a convincing argument, any color can be used to depict a strong brand sale. Imagine selling chocolate ice cream. The brown could be displayed as decadent. But that same chocolate brown could be used to sell a wallet. So while the color psychology is important, each brand should create value in the graphics it chooses by understanding all aspects of the image from color to unique selling proposition.
While color does play a role in purchase decision, consumer reactions to color vary based on culture, context and environment.
How have graphics and colors impacted your conversion rates?
