We all know that a picture is worth a thousand words, and when you’re running an eCommerce store, it should go without saying that images are vital to selling your products.
After all, without images, your customers won’t have any idea what the product looks like or just what shade of blue it’s supposed to come in. Still, there’s a lot more power that images can bring to your website than just for product imagery. The images you choose should reflect your company story and capture your brand image.
Doing More With Images
According to Jerome Butler, a psychologist at New York University, people only remember about 10 percent of what they hear and around 20 percent of what they read. A whopping 80 percent of what they see and do, however, is kept alive in memory for another day. What this means for marketers is that images carry a lot of power — and the ones you choose for your marketing material, as well as how you use them, are vital.
Here are some tips for doing more with your website images:
Set a scene. Use your images as a way of visually representing your business. If you’re a high-end luxury website, represent yourself with large, visually stunning images. Sites that focus on value should opt for something professional, but less expensive. The imagery itself should reflect your company’s brand, too, so make sure to choose images that are appropriate. For example, if your web store is family-focused, images of families using your products are sure to ring true for your customers.
Less can be more. Although you want to use plenty of images to show what your products look like for accurate order fulfillment, when it comes to your marketing materials, you should design pages to focus primarily on just one or two visual elements. Too many images and the page will look cluttered and be very difficult for visitors to navigate. Layers of images on the same page can also distract from the message you’re trying to relay.
Be fashion forward. eCommerce order management is one of the least fashionable things most people can think of, but when it comes to web images, there is definitely a fashionable undercurrent. Instead of recycling the same old image content every year or digging up freebies from an ancient archive, keep up with the times and choose images that look more like what your customers want to see today.
Images are vital to selling anything on your eCommerce website, but they can be used to sell more than products — they can sell your entire brand. Keep these tips in mind as you expand from your web store into social media and other marketing mediums.
