Business owners should consider displaying photos of owners, employees, or customers to help increase their online business. Technology entrepreneur and web expert Paras Chopra brings us the results of two independent studies showing pictures of people on websites tend to increase conversion.
The first test was with Medalia Art, an online art dealer. Medalia designed a web page with pictures of paintings for sale. Next, they designed the same web page, but added photos of the artists, and recorded the conversion for each website.
The second study was on EmptyMind, an organizational blog. EmptyMind tested the use of an additional information link on their blog. The first link was a simple icon of a phone labeled “additional information.” The second link, replacing the first at a later date, was a picture of the blog author labeled the same. You can clearly see the results of both studies in the chart above; there is significant correlation between the presence of pictures and the increase in conversion.
The reason for the increase in conversion has been attributed to a number of different causes.
- Potential customers are more likely to convert to customers when they feel an emotional connection. Pictur
es of people help to bring about this connection. - People tend to spend more time looking at photos of other people than they do other images. According to Paco Underhill, author of popular retail science book, Why We Buy, the more time a potential customer spends in a space, brick and mortar or online, the more likely they are to convert to actual customers. If photos of people cause potential customers to stop and look longer at a website this can attribute to the increase in conversion too. While the tests are not conclusive, they do show significant statistical support that photos of people improve conversion on websites.