How To Drive Sales Online With Effective Photography

February 26th, 2019 | Updated on September 27th, 2022

When you actually put a little thought to it, running a store that is online is not really that different from say, running a shop that is made of bricks and walls.

You need to provide the customers with what they want and be there for them when they have any queries or questions. Also, you might not want to forget about the awesome customer service that is required in both these stores.

However, there is just one small difference. It is in the execution of the entire marketing process, and this difference is specifically seen in the case of the merchandise. Don’t quite get what we are trying to say?

Well, what we want to tell you is that you might want to invest a little bit more on the photographs and the images of the products that you have on the online store so that you can catch the eye of the viewers.

You see, with a brick-and-mortar store, the products are already displayed there for the people to see and analyze everything. However, this is something that doesn’t happen at the online stores.

So, what do the customers rely on then? Well, the images and the description, of course, what else? With the help of proper images, the store will be able to please the customers and boost the sales of their online store.

Quite naturally, if you have great images for your products on the online store with great descriptions, the people would certainly want to buy the products. So, doesn’t that seem to be quite an important thing? Why do you think famous online store owners invest so much money in hiring professionals to take pictures of their products? It is of course, due to this reason.

But how does one make sure that the quality of the photos is great or not? There are many professional photo editing services that use professional tools such as Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom that can help you in making your images appealing, vibrant to drive the sales effectively.

However, some other factors need to be considered. Well, this is where we come to help. With the help of these tips mentioned below, you can work on the quality of the images and the descriptions to make sure that they are engaging and eye-catching to those who see it.

Tips To Help You Out

Here are some of the tips that would help you in increasing the appeal of the images and help you boost sales for the online store of yours.

1. Improve Your Images With High-Resolution Touches

When we talk about the high quality of the pictures, it could mean different things for sure. Let us focus on one point: the pixels. So, how do you make the images pixel perfect in the first place? Well, you need to make sure that the images are all ‘retina-ready’. That means they need to be pleasing to the eye.

You can easily make sure of that by adding sharpness to the images. This way the images will seem a little bit clearer to the eye. So, using a high-resolution camera would be great. You need to get those DSLRs in the house for that. Apart from that, adding a little bit of that WordPress theme would really be a help in bringing out the glam in the photos.

Getting the perfect resolution is absolutely essential when it comes to the product images for an online store. So, no slacking there, people. You could also hire some professional photographers with expensive equipment to do the job for you. However, you do need to fork out some cash for that.

2. Optimize Your Images For Search Filters

Have you ever heard of that teensy little term known as SEO? Well, the word might seem teensy but it certainly occupies an enormous position when it comes to making the images appear on the screens of the people. Search Engine Optimization is the thing that will get your photos on the map.

They are just as important as having those written descriptions as well. So, you need to make sure that you provide a proper name to the file or photo when you are uploading it. This name should be descriptive of the picture that you are uploading.

However, just uploading the file name isn’t going to do the trick. You also need to provide a proper description of the product image that you have as well. Use keywords as they are going to be a great help it the process. You might not know it yet, but these keywords are the things that are going to help people view the images that you have for them.
Content Should Be Optimized As Well

Well, if you think that the descriptive photos are just going to do the trick for you, there is some news for you. These are nearly not enough if they don’t have the content to back it up. The content is the thing that will provide the story about the images to the customers that you have.

So, needless to say, the content also holds a very important position when it comes to the photos and images. Make sure that you use the relevant keywords on the description of the images that you provide. These keywords will help the photos pop up when the people make relevant searches.

Optimization of the content is one of the most important things that you can do. So, make sure that you don’t miss any of it, people.

2. Create A Sitemap For The Images

In order to make sure that you are channeling the power of the product images in the right way, we would like to say that you need to provide the sitemap for the images as well. To complicated to understand? Well, the sitemap is basically an XML file that you submit in the search engines.

This sitemap will let the search engines know all about the content that you have on your website. Most of the famous websites with images have this particular sitemap that provides all the indexed information and the pages to the search engines.

But then, you have a site that totally relies on the individual products that you have, right? Well, you can easily improve the images by getting these images to rank properly in the search engines too. Doesn’t that sound like something that would be interesting to experiment with?

3. Provide Proper Importance To The Speed

The attention span that the customers have often keep on changing every now and then. However, as a rough estimate, we would like to say that it is apparently 8 seconds now.

So, if you have a slow-moving website that often lags a lot, then you might as well stop trying. These slow times of loading can seriously hurt the conversion rates that you have.

There are many different tools available that can help you in picking up the slacking times. However, you definitely should focus on making improvements yourself.

Make sure that the images that you have don’t take too long to load otherwise your customers might say goodbye to your website and hop on the next one. This is something that is very important so you need to be particular about that.

4. Make Sure To Use A File Format That Is Reliable

There are different file formats available for the images. But you already know that don’t you? However, do you know which file formats are the ones that can improve the product images that you have? Well, no right? That is why we are here to tell you exactly that.

Well, you might want to know that the.JPG or the.PNG file formats are the ones that help in the improvement of the images that you have. There is some considerable amount of difference that comes in the size.

However, when you want to see the actual difference, you need to check the background transparency. When you have a site that uses the background colors, you need to make sure that you choose the.PNG format.

5. Don’t You Go On Resizing

If you don’t want to harm the quality of the images, then you should definitely avoid the resizing of the photographs. Now people would say that using the software options to resize the images might be a good idea for the images. But that is definitely not true, people.

You need to make sure that you focus completely on the design and the quality of the images. Resizing the images will definitely degrade the quality that they have. Surely you don’t want that for your images, right?

There are many images that can drain out the entire space that is available in the server due to the large proportions that they have.

The solution to this problem is using the particular image optimization plugin that will provide the images with the perfect resolution that they require. Plus, you will not be harming the quality of the photos as well. Doesn’t that sound like something amazing, people? We are pretty sure that you should try it out to see the best results.

6. Offer Different Angles

This is something that is very important for all the websites that have product images on them. You see, the thing with the online stores is that people are not really about the feel the products with their own hands. Hence, the texture of the product is something that you don’t get to provide.

So, how on earth will someone learn about different things such as texture, durability, material and other things? Well, what you can do in such cases is provide shots from different angles to make sure that the people get the full view of the product that you have.

7. Put Some Videos If Necessary

Now, this is not really something that you have to do. But we would recommend that you do it anyways. The problem with the online stores, as we discussed on the point above is that the customers aren’t able to get the full feel of the products.

So, apart from providing detailed and angled shots of the product, you could also throw in a little video showing all the aspects of the product that you have. This is another one of the ways that would boost the sales because then people will actually be able to see the product from all the different angles.

8. Consider The Color Of The Image

You might want to have a little consideration of the color of the image. Now, this could mean different things. We could be talking about the product’s color or the color that the background has. You need to ensure that the colors are all flattering enough to make the image look prettier.

When it comes to an online store, the more pleasing your product image is, the chances are higher of people buying it. So, why not focus a little bit on that?

9. Go Minimal In Case Of The Other Things

When it comes to image optimization, just making the pictures look nice will not do the trick. You need to make sure that the other things that are surrounding the image are proper as well.

You don’t want people to lose focus from the product image, right? So, you need to have a minimalistic approach towards everything else. This will make sure that the people are only concentrating on the image of the product and not anything else on the background.

So, don’t use anything flashy on the background when you are using a product image.

Conclusion

When it comes to the improvement of the product images, there are different factors that need to be tested.

For those who want to ensure that they get the best results for the images and get maximum conversions, they need to make sure that the testing is absolute for their images. There are different benefits that come with that.

Not only are you able to see the images that you need to use in the future but you also get an insight into the needs and the requirements of the customers when it comes to the merchandise.

We hope that these tips helped you in finding the right path for your product images. So, what are you waiting for, people? Go ahead and make these amazing tweaks in your product images and description to see what works for you and what doesn’t. All the very best for you.

Author Bio

Nayan Chowdhury, copywriter and graphic designer. Best known for his work in image editing and photography. He is keen to mingle with retailers and photographers.

Image Source: unsplash.com