Pretty Pictures: Why Product Photos are Essential to Ecommerce Sales

If a single picture is worth a thousand words, then using the right product photo could be the difference between record profits and record losses for your ecommerce business.

The question is, why?

Below, I’ve looked at why product photos are so important to your customers and why they are absolutely essential to closing ecommerce sales. Read on to make sure your business is doing everything it can to hit record levels of revenue.

Product Photos Get Your Message Across Quickly

The average attention span of your customers is 6-8 seconds. That means you only have seconds to grab a new customer’s attention.

With speed at such a premium for your business, it’s important you sell the benefits of your products in the quickest possible way.

Images are your customers’ favorite way to absorb information and they are processed 60,000 times faster than text. As a result, product photos are critical to ensuring that people notice and get excited about your products—even before they arrive at your online store.

Search Engines Love Product Photos

Search for almost any item on Google and you’ll be hit by images of the product at the top and bottom of your SERPs (Search Engine Results Page). See this example for a search for “sneakers”.

Not only are most image searches made via Google, around a third of all searches made on Google are through Google Images. As a result, if you don’t have great product photos, you don’t have a great chance of ranking well in Google’s SERPs. This can significantly cut down your chances of getting people to visit your site.

The end result of ranking well on Google is that your customers click-through to your online store, where you’ll be able to entice them into making a purchase from your business.

Now, admittedly, you can cheat the system a bit by paying to rank well on Google with Google Shopping—but you’ll still need beautiful images to get clicks. However, by combining high quality product photos with PPC management that works, you can make sure the money you invest into product listing ads delivers a profitable return on your investment.

Pretty Pictures Engage Customers

Around a third of the world’s total population have a social media account. With such a large user base, social media is an ideal tool for measuring the engagement levels of your customers.

A social media post that includes an image is far more likely to receive engagement than one which doesn’t. In fact, nearly all of Facebook’s most engaging posts are image based.

You can bet that your customers all have a Facebook account and that they are engaging regularly with the platform. This makes targeting your audience on Facebook a brilliant way to make most out of your advertising budget and boost your company revenue.

Customer engagement is crucial to increasing sales revenue, with fully engaged customers offering a 23% premium to your business. So if you want your business to get maximum value from your customers, it’s crucial that—once you’ve got their attention—you get them fully engaged. Images are the best way to do this.

Good Image Placement Increases Sales

Unfortunately, it’s not enough just to have pretty pictures, you need to think about where you put your product photos on your online store because a poorly placed image will cut the chances of you closing sales.

Don’t believe me? Then trust the findings of advertising legend David Ogilvy.

Ogilvy conducted research into the impact of images on buyer behavior. He discovered that if you put your image above a headline you increase the chances of your customers reading your headline by 10%.

So, if you aren’t putting your product photos in the right place, you could be losing 10% of your sales!

Great Product Photos Evoke Emotion

Taking image placement a step further, you can increase sales by using emotional design to create images that create the most profitable connection between your customers and your products. The most important place to do this is with the CTA (call-to-action) images you use for your business.

Incorporating emotional design into your CTA by including verbal directions on the right hand side of your CTA, increases your chances of getting your customers to make a purchase. This is because your customers intuitively trust words on the right of CTA images.

There are plenty of tools available to design and add a CTA to your business and it’s important you select one with the right functionality. Here’s a quick video by ProCodes on how a CTA can help your business close more sales.

ProCodes has been developed by the renowned Mint Design Company and your business can add it to your online storefront for free to help you create great product photo CTAs.

Pretty Pictures = Pretty Big Impact

No matter where you place your image, how you design your CTA or if you’re making Google and Facebook happy, your customers won’t be convinced to give you their business if the product photos you’re using to sell your brand don’t look the part.

To put it simply, your customers want to see pretty pictures.

In order to get maximum engagement from your customers and have the best chance of closing the sale, I recommend that you employ a professional photographer for the images you use on your online store.

If, however, your budget doesn’t stretch to this then you can source images from your customers, as UGC (User-Generated-Content) has a high-level of engagement. You can then supplement this by using business stock photos to add a professional touch.

Conclusion

Pretty pictures are important to your customers and that makes them essential to your business. By using the right product photos in the right way, you’ll increase the engagement levels of your customers and guarantee that your business will close more sales.

So, take the tips from this article, review the images your business is using, and see if you can make your pictures prettier, your customers happier, and your company bank account healthier.