Not all product reviews are created equal: why visual reviews are a must for your Shopify store in 2019
Fifteen seconds.
According to time.com, that is all the time you have to capture a visitor’s attention. Fail to do that – and you’ve lost them forever.
As getting people to your store is getting more and more expensive every quarter, what can a Shopify entrepreneur like you do to get ahead of the curve?
You’ve probably realized by now that your store’s design has an effect on the perceived credibility and quality of your eCommerce business. Online stores are subject to an extreme level of snap judgments that immediately influence perceptions of credibility. When it comes to first impressions, time is of the essence.
What to do about it? Use the power of User Generated Content
The best (and only) way to get rid of a high bounce rate on your store’s homepage is to improve its design. Introducing visual UGC – or customer generated content, might be just the thing your store needs to gain trust and credibility. Across the board, user-generated videos and photos have an immense impact on reach, engagement, and ultimately sales.
- Reviews that include user-generated photos convert up to 91% better than textual reviews
- Visitors of websites that include UGC galleries spend 90% more time on the site
- Social campaigns that incorporate UGC see a 50% lift in engagement
- Ads with UGC generate 5-times greater click-through rates
UGC drives a 73% increase in email click-through rates
Source: Inspire Uplift
Keep it visual
Humans have been communicating with each other for approximately 30,000 years, but we’ve only been using the written word for about 3,700 years. 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual. Perhaps because of the incredible amount of information that we’re consuming, we process visual information about 60,000-times faster than text.
Because of this long history of communicating without text, our brains have adapted to process visual information more efficiently than text. In a race, text just can’t compete with images.
Source: Dockatot
Love at first sight – it’s all about the first impression
Visual reviews are the perfect way to communicate loads of information. Fast.
The task the modern Shopify entrepreneur has is to communicate loads of information in a blink and build trust quickly. Just by glancing at the happy customers’ page, your store’s visitor can understand right away: “other people trust this store” “here is what this product ACTUALLY looks like in real life” “there are many satisfied customers” etc.
What do people see when they land on your store’s homepage or on your product pages? If all they see are long texts and some branded photos of your products, your pages can benefit from injecting the visual UGC.
Remember that people form a first impression in a mere 50 milliseconds. So when it comes to reviews, visual cues such as photos and images become extremely important.
Reading textual reviews requires a conscious effort. It also takes our brains longer to process text-based or verbal information, while the time it takes to process visual content is 0.25 seconds. So before the visitor even gets to reading the textual reviews on your site, they often have already made up their minds about whether to trust your brand or not based on visual cues alone.
If users like what they see, then, and only then, will they proceed to read textual reviews. Before users even get to reading your copy, they’ve already decided whether to trust your brand or not.
Our brains LOVE shortcuts. Use it to your advantage.
Images evoke emotions, and nothing could be more crucial to our decisions to buy something.
No matter how much we would like to consider ourselves rational creatures, emotions strongly influence, skew or sometimes completely determine the of decisions we make.
Reading your website copy requires concentration and resources which the brain would rather not use. Showcasing galleries of user-generated photos speaks more loudly than words.
The Key Takeaway:
We want images, videos, and an inordinate amount of information that requires very small amounts of our attention and can be consumed at a glance. And in the midst of it all, we are actively spending money without even looking up from our phones. Visual UGC isn’t just a growing force in marketing. It’s becoming the very essence of the way businesses connect with their customers. Are you taking advantage?
