Why Mobile Image Optimisation Is Essential For Your Sales Post-Covid-19
Is your e-Commerce imagery working for your customers?
Mobile image optimisation is the optimisation of your images for viewing on small format digital devices. It recognises that your product imagery has multiple viewing platforms, and as such requires multiple faces to show itself off best to consumers.
“Whereas a true-to-pack render may be fine for use on your desktop site, that kind of imagery is failing to thrive when it is used on a mobile or tablet screen.”
A pack that is busy with information such as weight, size, USPs and nutritional information is great in your hands, or viewed on a laptop screen, but shrink down that same pack image to a thumbnail on a screen in your palm, and suddenly it takes a lot more mental decoding before wary consumers decide to add it to their virtual baskets.
Image optimisation – not just for Amazon
Online shopping is nothing new, as of 2019 it was estimated that 4 billion people regularly access the internet, and of that figure, 95% had made at least one purchase online. But despite such huge numbers, mobile optimised imagery, or eCommerce imagery as it is sometimes referred to, had really only gained traction with the online powerhouses such as Amazon and Alibaba. As online-only businesses, they were unfettered by the worry that pack imagery should have a one-size-fits-all approach to cover bricks and mortar placement as well as digital shelves and were able early on to optimise their imagery to suit their only arena – screens. Companies who saw online sales as a companion revenue to their retail outlets had considered image optimisation as a ‘nice to have’, or a long-term background project. And perhaps it would have remained a passing concern to those brands, but as with nearly every facet of life – 2020 has changed that.
When the world moved online
The ramifications of the Coronavirus pandemic have been felt across the globe, in every sector, through every company and, most importantly, through every home.
“During lockdown, eCommerce sales skyrocketed – in May, it accounted for 33.4% of all retail transactions in Britain.”
Those people sheltering from the outside world turned to laptops, screens, tablets and mobiles to access the shopping experiences that less than six weeks ago they took for granted. In March 2020, almost every British retail brand became an ‘online-only’ retailer. The consumer journey of product placement and pack information hierarchy took a back seat when customers were forced into squinting at their phone screens to do their weekly shops via mobile apps, buying from cluttered and busy thumbnail images that weren’t up to the task and made for a less than satisfactory customer experience. And as lockdown went on, people turned to eCommerce channels to satisfy more than just hunger pangs. A recent Retail Times report has estimated that the Covid-19 pandemic has added £5.3bn to the UK’s annual eCommerce sales, with Amazon, who have long taken image optimisation seriously, claiming a monumental £2bn of that figure.
Embracing a new normal
Even as the world relaxes, the legacy of this period remains in the form of a pressing need to address and optimise the online experience for consumers, specifically to optimise product imagery for viewing on mobile sites to enrich the consumer journey and promote confident buying practices and stabilised sales.
“In a recent study of eCommerce practices during the pandemic, Nielsen reported that up to 24% of people who had not previously used online shopping platforms would continue to buy their fresh goods online.”
That increased to 26% for packaged foods, and 27% for beverages. In this light, considering your company’s mobile image optimisation strategy is less of a knee-jerk reaction and more a long-overdue reckoning. A number of retailers are waking up to the fact that their vast library of images may actually be unsuited to the task; it’s a sobering thought – but it doesn’t have to be.
What are your options?
Mobile image optimisation is, at heart, a simple enough task, but due to the nature of the creative industry, it requires a skillset which rarely sits under the same roof. You need the eye of a designer to ensure that a stripped-back pack still retains brand identity and a triumvirate of key information, a CGI artist’s skill to create quality renders in fast turnaround times, and a manager’s discipline to keep the flow of images moving to deliver back to the client with minimal disruption. At WK360, we’ve always believed in the strength of our 360 end-to-end approach. For us, outsourcing is outdated. Using the best talent, and the most up-to-the-minute infrastructure in the form of our render management system, we can undertake your mobile image optimisation project from start to finish, without it ever leaving the building.
If the upheaval and uncertainty of the first half of 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we need to move with the times. We need to make strong choices and bold moves to ensure the survival of our brands, companies, staff and livelihoods. Even as we embrace a change of pace and a reordering of priorities in our personal lives, in business we should be learning that complacency is potentially fatal, and that we need to be agile and informed to react to changing trends.
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