Mobile ready hero images - why should you use them and how

Did you ever try to buy a shampoo online, and ended up trying to enlarge images to understand if you were really looking at a shampoo, what kind of hair was it for and the size? Then you can skip half of this article, because you already grasped the problem.

E-commerce is about simplicity and convenience for the shopper. And that starts by the way you present your product in the online store. You want to make sure that your product stands out clearly to the shopper, and its key features are easy to understand - in a shampoo, product category, brand, variant /  / benefit, size. You don't want a shopper to actually have to click on your product, then click again on the image, just to understand that was not the product they were looking for and having to do it again on a number of products until they find the one they want to buy - you know things don't work like that in the real world, and that somewhere in the process, you will lose the shopper, who will just decide to try a different brand. Hence, "hero images" is the two words you want to keep in your mind.

Now, let me make it a bit more difficult. 58% of global e-commerce purchases last year were done in a mobile device. Which means smaller screens and hence makes it even more difficult for a shopper to understand product features. So, "mobile ready hero images", that work as well in a mobile device as in computer screen are actually the four words you want to keep in mind - and use them in all your e-commerce related sites.

A mobile ready hero image is not a picture of the real product. It is an optimized version of such. It starts from a picture of the real product, but then you work it up. And it is not that different from working up single product packshots - the principle is to take off the unnessencial (no ingredients, no marketing claims,...) and highlight the key features of the product, the things the consumer really wants to know scoping a shelf - again, make the brand, the variant / benefit, size and (never forget) the product category ("is that thing a shampoo, a conditioner or a shower gel?" is a more frequent question than a marketer would like). Don't limit yourself use the packaging as a frame - put some of the essential information out of the pack frame, if needed. And zoom in the packaging. Remember, you want to make the shopper shelf scoping easier, to make your product stand out through clarity.

The results (always key): A/B testing points out to a 30 to 40% increase of sales of a product, when using mobile ready hero images. Which is typically a winning reasoning.