The importance of visuals in landing pages

Visuals play a crucial role in landing pages and can have a significant impact on conversion rates. When users visit a landing page, they form an immediate impression based on the visual elements they see.

Images have the power to capture attention, create an emotional connection, and convey important information in an instant and the ability to grab the user's attention and guide them towards taking the desired action.

Creating a visual story on your landing pages

An excerpt from our LinkedIn pages

Landing pages

Want to level up your page and improve your results? You can learn from my mistake...

In a previous role at Regit, we did a pretty big website revamp. New colours, page styles, really quite a different feel. But we left one page alone, our best landing page - the core of our registration process.

The same layout, the same words. It was too risky to do anything else.

We had a conversion rate of 28% on the old page. Our success metric was it moving to 32% in the new site, and we were pretty confident from our testing that we would hit this.

So we put it live... the conversion rate dropped to 18%. What's going on? It's the same page!

We knew that all the other new pages worked well for content and bounce rate. They were faster. Better on mobile. They even had more ads on. Happy commercial team!

How could this be? We viewed recordings and poured over tiny details in analytics: speed, devices, everything.

But, 2 weeks later and we've tested and tested, but we're stuck at 20%. It's costing us tens of thousands of pounds every week. But then I remembered a book I had read and it dawned on me... the background image wasn't the same.

The page was a car valuation page; the old image was a picture of vehicle with a piggy bank on top. Nice happy colours and it worked super well, so after 2 weeks of work that yielded a tiny change, we put the old image back on. It created instant success, the conversion rate raised up to 33% - relief!

The learning is pretty simple, and it goes back to the book I mentioned (see below). From memory, it showed an old study about a website selling either beds or pillows. The background of one page was fluffy clouds and the other wasn't. Fluffy clouds page won, as the context of comfort was maintained. The conversion for soft items was much better.

The landing page style we all use is pretty much the same. Copy can be persuasive and create better results. But your imagery can make or break it.

Few teams I have worked with test their landing page images thoroughly. Some do it really well.

For me, the learning is this: Landing pages work when there is harmony between the words and images both on the page itself, and with the expectation you created in the user's mind.

If your page image doesn't match their expectation, the "privileged moment" of attention you had earlier disappears and is replaced by new thoughts. New attention. This means lower conversions.

TL;DR Test your images. Improve your conversions.

I recommend you try these two books to learn more; I found them super useful: Neuro Web Design by Susan M. Weinschenk PhD and Persuasion by Prof. Reberto Cialdini

Enjoy!