Why Bad Graphics Are Damaging Your Sales Conversions

If you’ve decided to take your business online, you’ll understand it takes time, hard work and money. You can have all of the information and technical details set up but ultimately, if the website doesn’t look good and has bad graphics, you’ll struggle to survive. This is particularly true for food or retail companies.

Don’t let poor quality images jeopardise your efforts. This post will help you to understand why bad graphics are one of the biggest turn-offs for customers looking to shop with you, in order to save your online reputation and increase your sales conversions.

What Makes A Good Website?

There are many aspects to what makes a good website. If your site doesn’t include the following, you’ll struggle to generate a great customer experience and inevitably conversions.

• Prominently display your contact information – make your details stand out and display them in a visible location for the user.
• Testimonials – it’s important to include reviews and supporting imagery of your work to highlight how great your services truly are.
• Include a company profile – this should contain ‘about us’ information with team pictures to show that your brand is friendly.
• Straight-forward navigation – your users should easily find goods and services within your site by having a simple and logical menu. Make the font easy to read and in a colour that everyone can distinguish.
• Be up to date – your blog and social channels should be up to date and active. You should also make sure your products are updated in terms of stock, price changes and constantly display high-quality imagery.

Each of the above relates back to having good graphics in some way. Whether its the font in the image, colours, size or the placement of the image, graphics play a crucial part in a great website and that’s why it’s so important to get them right.

After all, web visitors are coming to your store to learn about you and your products. In most cases, there’s no better way to learn than through images.

So, What Makes A Great Image?

This depends on what the image is portraying, who it’s for, why and how it’ll be used and where. Once you have catered for each of these factors, you’ll be able to create a great image.

Some generic things you must consider are the following:

• Image dimensions – are they the right dimensions for each social channel, your website banners, emails or other? You should alter the image accordingly for the correct channel.
• What device will users be accessing the image on? – although image size and quality shouldn’t change dramatically across mobile devices, from desktop to tablet to mobile, they can be quite different. Make your image suitable for all, though with mobile becoming more prominent, it’s important to focus your attention here.
• Are your colours accessible for all? – your images shouldn’t have colours that clash for those with poor eyesight or colour blindness.
• Tell a story – Your image should capture an emotion, iconic moment or activity and communicate with the reader. Ultimately, you need to tell a story.
• Does your image capture the product? – if the image contains a product it must be the main subject of the image. This means that any other colours should be muted in comparison so that they don’t overpower the design.

Now you understand some of the factors that make a great image, let’s take a look at some of the problems with bad imagery.

Though some may be obvious, we see too many sites that contain poor quality imagery. This is highly damaging to their brand – more so than they realise.

It’s important that you don’t just “chance it”. Instead, give your website the best possible chance to rank well on search engines, obtain good levels of traffic and ultimately, generate a sale.

Otherwise, you’re likely to come across the following 4 problems:

1: User Expectations Aren’t Met

Poorly shot product images are probably one of the biggest culprits for generating bad reviews and customer uncertainty.

If you think about it in terms of the sales funnel, customers that are in the first stage i.e. the “consideration” phase, will be browsing your products. They’ll already have a small degree of uncertainty with your brand because they’re choosing whether to buy from you or not.

New customers will try to establish a perception of your brand from your website, your product imagery and more. You won’t want to give them any extra reasons to doubt you. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself with a high bounce rate and low conversion rate.

Furthermore, if your customers create an inaccurate perception of your brand or worse, whether it generates a sale or not, it can end in disaster for your brand. This leads us on to our next point: death by bad reviews.

2: Death By Bad Reviews

It’s pretty obvious, but if your customers are expecting a cat sized remote control car (as that’s how it looks in your image) when a remote control car the size of a mug turns up, they’ll no doubt be pretty disappointed.

As many brands will know, this disappointment often leads to bad reviews that can spiral on social media and go viral. Sadly, the idea of “no such thing as bad press” can prove untrue and instead, hinder your brand.

It’s important that you give highly accurate descriptions as well as informative imagery to help support your descriptions. The image below is a good example:

The above example shows a product page on the retail website, ASOS. The page contains large product imagery of trainers from various angles with “zoom in” capabilities. The images alter from those capturing how the trainers look when on, as well as those without.

ASOS offer video content of the trainers so that you can not only see how it works but also how to style it – giving you additional information.

The image and video content are then supported by a quick, easy to read bullet point product description, information on how to look after them, brief details on the materials and the product code. You can also read about the brand and have links to their other items.

All in all, it pretty much has everything it needs to inform users and help the product sell.

3: Brand Value Is Lost

You may be the best seller on the market but if your images show customers otherwise, they’ll jump right over to a competitor website which delivers great graphics.

Though you might not think about it, graphics can include the buttons you have on your site, your font style and colour, the colour of your website background and more.

Inevitably, if the whole aesthetic of your website is mismatched, inconsistent or blurred, it’ll be hard to convince interested customers that you’re a professional, top-quality brand. Crappy logo, crappy brand. Right?

So, make sure your images look great across all platforms you exist on the web. That includes your social logo, social profile headers, website banners, in news articles both print and online and anywhere else!

4: Social Sharing Stops

If you source website traffic from social channels like Instagram, bad imagery can stop you from meeting user needs on the channel, which ultimately, is to see great imagery.

Instead of conveying the right message to your users, they’ll see you as a spam account providing unrecognisable, pixelated content that seems irrelevant to them – whether it is or isn’t.

Instead of people sharing your content, people will choose to unfollow you. This decreases your reach and chances of generating store clicks and inevitably, the number of people buying your goods. What’s more, they can share how bad your content is and you can go viral for the wrong reasons.

Social sites are similar to your online store. They’re a place users get information about you, browse your products and thanks to the newly added business features, now even buy your products.

To summarise

To lower your chances of facing the above problems, it’s important that you allocate the correct resources and time to create great graphics.