Desmond Ekeh
“Perception is reality” is an age-old cliché. Philosophers believe that perception or appearance is not reality. To them, reality has to correspond to the fact. It has to be evidential. But in psychology, and by extension marketing, perception plays a great role in understanding reality. In fact, for marketers, appearance is reality. Perception is how people see things. The way people perceive things creates their worldviews, and they act based on their perception. Perception creates the frames through which people see reality. One aspect of that frame is images or visuals – whether photos or videos.
Images produce specific forms of perception. On how people view a website, the CXL Institute affirms the Poynter study on “Eye Tracking” which reveals that people view websites based on certain perceptions. For instance, the study states that the top left corner of an e-commerce website gets the visitor’s attention first. The website is like a book, magazine, or newspaper. The reader’s eyes pan from the top left corner, and moves on towards the top right corner, back to the lower-left corner, and finally terminates at the lower right corner.
| Human eyes span from the top left of the web site… | To the top right of the web site… | ||
| Then to the lower right of the website… | And finally terminates at the lower right of the website. | ||
Table 1: Tabular representation of how people view the website
How People View Your Website
Based on the scientific insight graphically capture by table 1 above, the marketer should ensure she optimizes the web page by placing the most important information of the site at the very top left portion of the page, followed by the second most important information placed at the top right corner, and then the call to action, CTA, should be placed at the terminal point, which is the bottom right corner of the page. This idea is not necessarily universal but has been tested by several studies.
Some scholars posit that most people read in F patterns, such that, they do not actually read, but scan through the pages. Eye visualization report indicates that only 28% of people read the text, as very often, users read website texts in an F pattern.
To optimize the web page for conversion, marketers should also try to use visibly bigger introductory headlines and paragraphs to grab the reader’s attention. However, the paragraph length should be kept short and in a single column. Most people who do search queries do not go past the first two search engine result pages, SERP. You will lose out if your site is not among the first two on the SERP.
Many elements come together to make for the construction of a great and profitable website – product, price, content, look, and feel. The visual perception of a product page creates the users’ or visitor’s value perception of that product. This is an important point when it comes to the look and feel of an e-commerce site. If an e-commerce page is shoddy and unattractive, it creates a poor representation of the product in the perception of the prospective customers who visit the page and invariably affects their perception of the products displayed on that web page.
Image Size and Value Perception
To optimize an e-commerce page for conversion, the marketer needs to use bigger images of the product on the site page. The images should be sharp, expressive, and appropriately located, to visually attract the attention of the visitor. Images, says Roger Montti, are a powerful way to communicate the message that makes a site visitor happy. Remember that a visitor’s mood, according to the “After Heuristic” cognitive bias, affects his or her response to the site. Quality and the corresponding image is a way to enable the visitors to see themselves using and experiencing whatever it is they want to achieve with your product or services. For instance, if your typical visitor is a sportsman or woman, it will be helpful to use clear images of dashing and admirable sportspersons in their sports gear that reflects the aspiration of the visitor.
A globally recognized conversion optimization expert Peep Laja of the CXL Institute puts it this way, “If I had to pick one thing that would sell a product online, it’s images.” This statement is a sound bite on the power of images for e-commerce products marketing. He further adduced that, one of the original tactics to boost e-commerce conversion is to use high-quality photos of your products.
The image should speak to the visitor with a promise. The tag and description of the image should interact with the visitor.
Ties.com got it right.
Here, ties.com got it right – with this colourful piece of red tie – which speaks to the young, dashing, and upwardly mobile professional. This is a take away for the man of style and class. The product copy and or description should bear witness to the product by specifying who the product is for, what it will do, and why it is good. It should support the image with complete information; with clarity. Copy should not be ‘selly,’ hype, or overbearing marketing, – for “clarity beats persuasion” – says Laja. Remember that, though the image should be advisedly large, it should however not be out of proportion of the tie in reality. Also bear in mind that images are not only photos, they include videos too.
Images, Cognitive Fluency and Web Site
As discussed above, images help to clarify and simplify messages. Cognitive Fluency bias is the human tendency to prefer things that are familiar and easy to understand. “Our brain prefers to think about things that are easy to think about.” To enable conversion optimization of an e-commerce site a marketer would need to simplify his messages and support the message with attractive and appealing images. Research has proven that companies whose names are easier to pronounce and remember significantly outperform those with hard to pronounce names. This writer uses the 9Mobile network in Nigeria. There are other packages that appear to be more valuable, but the trouble of going through some rigor to understand alternative packages would not allow this writer to try out another network such as MTN, Glo, etc. This is also the case with many other subscribers.
To effectively optimize the e-commerce web page the marketer should make his/her messages easy to read and easy to navigate. When people read something in a difficult to understand language or even type font, they transfer that sense of difficulty to the topic they are reading about. The same goes for purchases.
In a research study titled “Preference Fluency in Choice” conducted by Nathan Novemsky and his colleagues, they discovered that easy-to-read fonts doubled the number of people willing to purchase that product. Cognitive fluency could be the reason some people, just like this writer, stick with brands and service providers they are familiar with. The thinking is that one has tried the product and it works, so you don’t want to take the pain of researching an alternative.
Conclusion
The e-commerce web page is the nucleus of the online business. Its content, arrangement of products, easy navigation, look, and feel are very essential to the success of the business. Above all, the images used on the e-commerce web page bear a strong influence on how visitors perceive the page and how they perceive the products displayed on the page. Marketers should try to use images more appropriately as a systematic way to aid conversion optimization of the page.
Desmond Ekeh, is a PR consultant, digital marketing professional, and researcher in media and communication.
