How to Use Illustrations to Improve Your Website Conversion Rates

The look and feel of your website can have a huge impact on whether or not a potential customer converts. Learn how to enhance the images on your website in order to increase your conversion rate. 

Images don’t just make your website come to life, they can also help to raise your conversion rates and keep visitors browsing for longer. By taking the time to explore what works for your site, the right use of illustrations can become a driving force in maximizing your revenue streams. 

Although the act of keeping customers engaged for longer is important, it’s also vital that your choice in images resonate with your target audience. While you may be capable of finding engaging images, are they having the desired effect on your pages? 

Despite most decision makers in business agreeing that images can play an important role in retaining traffic on web pages for longer, few can capitalize on this point with impactful illustrations. 

According to VWO, brands that use visual content have conversion rates that are 7 times higher than those that do not. 

With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look at some ways that website owners can drive more on-site conversions through the use of carefully selected images: 

  1. Abandon your reliance on stock images
  2. Use larger images
  3. Utilize user-generated content 
  4. Provide a 360-Degree View of Products

Looking to enhance the look and feel of your website? Check out leading web design agencies on Top Design Firms. 

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Abandon Your Reliance on Stock Images

One of the biggest traps for website owners to fall into stems from an overreliance on overly simple stock photos to support their pages. While these images can be a good way of easing the strain of long text passages, stock photos can be clichéd and too commonplace. 

Because it can be costly to bring in web designers, it can be useful to take to digital platforms that host a range of expertly designed and relevant illustrations that can suit your needs. 

One of the leading resources for quality illustrations online is Poweredtemplate.com, which houses many of the internet’s professionally created images that can be used for free or bought with a premium subscription. 

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From landing page illustrations to supporting icons and backgrounds, it’s possible to create a vibrant website that boasts plenty of engaging content without overwhelming the visitor. 

Other alternative platforms include Freepik and Envato

It’s important to make sure that stock images are not overused too much and focus on adding graphs, charts, and interactive visuals. Traditionally, these tend to drive more attention than generic stock imagery.

Use Larger Images 

Generally speaking, larger images can leverage better conversion rates for a website. For instance, Ecommerce Platforms data has shown that during A/B tests, two online stores, Skinner Auctions and MALL.CZ experienced 63% more click-throughs and 9.46% greater sales, respectively, through blowing up their product images. 

When selling products online, larger images can make prospective customers feel more familiar with the items they’re interested in buying. However, this doesn’t have to be limited to online catalogs, and larger images can generate better website engagement and fewer bounce backs compared to more blank space or vast quantities of text across pages. 

It’s important to ensure that images are not too small to read and understand. That said, larger images may increase your website’s load time, which would negatively impact your conversion rates

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Therefore, it’s vital to ensure the size is balanced.

Utilize User-Generated Content 

The beauty of User-Generated Content (UGC) is that it requires very little effort to curate and can help to provide brands with high-quality, relevant, and royalty-free images of products or related photos. 

CrowdRiff data suggests that 90% of people claim that UGC helps them to make purchasing decisions and that websites adopting this approach can see a 20% uptick in recurring visitors, too. 

The reason for this is that UGC acts as an excellent social proof. While customers are more suspicious of the content and claims made by brands, they’re more trusting of other customers. This means that positive content generated by happy users of products or services is bound to resonate more with visitors.

There are many ways that you can welcome UGC onto your pages. For instance, you could run a competition on social media that encourages users to take the best picture of your product, or to share their best photo that’s related to your brand. 

However, note that not all forms of UGC are helpful - if images are not made personally by your community, it could be challenging to ensure that appropriate image licensing is in place. 

Additional reading, ‘How User-Generated Content Helps Businesses Thrive’ and ‘4 Ways to Encourage Consumer Generated Marketing Content.’ 

Provide a 360-Degree View of Products

Following on from the notion of making relevant illustrations larger for audiences, it’s also worth generating 360-degree images of products. These are multiple still images from different angles, and are photographed in a sequence to create a 360-degree turntable that rotates so that all angles can be covered. 

Although this part of the process may seem tricky for those who haven’t tried the approach, it can be a great way for customers to get up close and personal with your products and to feel as though they know exactly what they’re getting despite shopping online. 

As mentioned above, 360-degree view of products would generally be heavier on the server, which may slow down your website, adversely affecting your conversion rates. 

For brands that want to maximize their conversion potential, optimizing your on-site images and illustrations is an essential tool to capitalize on interest and convert it into intent. Through the right blend of professionally designed illustrations and large, high-resolution images, it’s possible to win more sales and lower bounce rates among new visitors. 

Enhance Illustrations and See the Results 

Using visuals and illustrations can greatly improve your website conversion rate if used in an appropriate manner. However, heavy stock images can sometimes hurt your website and compromise its speed and performance. Therefore, when selecting visuals, go for something unique, light, easy to process and engaging. These will surely benefit your website’s conversion rare.

Additional Reading: 

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