In today’s visually-driven digital world, images are no longer just for aesthetics — they are the reason why people buy. Customers rarely make time to read lengthy text. With attention spans shortening and information overload growing, leaders who harness the power of visual communication gain distinct advantages. Indeed, images are money.
Studies show that visual processing of complex objects in the brain typically takes place within a range of 0-500 milliseconds, highlighting the importance of investing in premium visuals as they draw attention quickly and communicate messages more effectively. From enhancing executive presence and simplifying complex strategies to driving measurable business results, strategic visual media has evolved from a nice-to-have into a critical business competency.
Integrating well-chosen and properly formatted visuals into content can help reach audiences at every point in the sales funnel, from grabbing initial attention that brings people into your conversation all the way to affecting customer behaviors. In a collaborative study with Google, Deloitte found that a 0.1s (one-tenth of a second) improvement in load time can influence every step of the user journey. In e-commerce, this means an increase of 8.4% in conversions and 9.2% in average order value.
The Business Impact of Exceptional Visual Media
Here’s what great visual media can do for your business:
- Capture Attention: Captivating images, engaging videos, and interactive graphics — particularly those including motion — are shown to slow a user’s scroll and draw them into your conversation and your content.
- Communicate Quickly: Due to the speed at which the human brain processes images versus text, visual media is the best way to communicate your message at a glance. Because time is more of a commodity than ever, viewers also appreciate and more readily recall messages with imagery they can process without spending too much time or mental energy.
- Reinforce Your Brand With Great Designs: Integrated logos, icons, and on-brand graphics serve your company’s brand recognition, affinity, and loyalty. In fact, studies about web page design and user engagement found that 94% of the feedback from test participants was about the design of a website. In comparison, only 6% of feedback was related to the website’s content.
- Boost SEO: Websites with optimized visuals experience lower bounce rates and longer dwell times, which indicates to search engines like Google that their content is valuable. This positive user experience enhances SEO rankings, boosting visibility and organic traffic to your site. Additionally, image load times have a direct impact on Core Web Vitals, which is one of the measures used by Google to determine your page ranking.
How Visuals Drive Consumer Engagement and Action
Research shows that consumers are more likely to engage with and remember content that includes compelling visuals, ultimately taking them from engagement within the page to action outside of it. Here are some consumer actions that are fueled by strong visuals:
- Shareability: As mentioned, content with strong visuals is more likely to be shared, spreading your brand’s organic word-of-mouth reach.
- Conversions: Content enriched with relevant visuals increases engagement and enhances conversions both on- and offline, which can significantly boost sales.
- Purchasing Decisions: Visuals play a crucial role in influencing purchasing decisions by evoking emotions that create desire. For some marketing, visuals highlighting product features and functionality can help consumers feel more confident about hitting the “buy” button.
Top Strategies for Optimizing Visuals in E-Commerce
There are some key actions e-commerce businesses can use to optimize their visuals. Here are the top four:
1. Optimize Page Weight for Faster Load Times
Reducing page weight is essential for improving load times, especially as images often comprise most of a web page’s data. Shinola, a Detroit-based lifestyle brand, was able to produce a 50% reduction in page weight across the board due to smaller image sizes. This resulted in a 10% to 15% reduction in time-to-render for most images on the site, averaging savings of a full second shaved from page load times.
2. Prioritize Mobile Image Optimization
A recent study reports that around 54% of overall web traffic comes from mobile devices, so it’s vital to prioritize mobile-first image optimization. By optimizing their images for mobile, Zadig&Voltaire, a French luxury fashion brand, improved its page speed by 66%.
3. Leverage Next-Gen Formats for Smaller File Sizes
Next-generation image formats like AVIF and WebP offer significant advantages over traditional formats like JPEG and PNG. These new formats provide superior compression, allowing smaller file sizes without compromising image quality.
Nikkei, one of the world’s largest financial news websites, leveraged these formats to reduce image file sizes by up to 38%.
4. Automate Image Processes for Efficiency
For businesses that handle large volumes of images, automation is key to maintaining efficiency and freeing up valuable resources. Queensmith, a U.K. company that offers premium jewelry, such as ethically made engagement and wedding rings, at a fair price, has a website that serves around 180,000 images, with 25 million image requests monthly.
By automating some time-consuming functions, Queensmith has successfully transformed its image process, ensuring a seamless and responsive experience for its customers. Instead of doing the tedious image cropping and resizing, the Queensmith content team can now create a single high-resolution version for each image and dynamically reformat and resize it for different user environments.
Final Thoughts on Visual Media’s Impact
It takes about 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion about your website that determines if they like it and, therefore, whether they’ll stay or leave. So, as common as it is to say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” when it comes to your web pages, you’re absolutely being judged by your visuals.