Personalizing Visual Content for E-Commerce Marketing Success

In the world of e-commerce, most consumers are not committed to a specific brand when they are at the top of the sales funnel. In fact, 70% of consumers’ searches on Amazon do not include a brand name. Online interactions play a fundamental role in influencing the ultimate purchase decisions. However, consumers are overwhelmed with the abundance of alternatives and choices when it comes to purchasing. The options are even more challenging when shoppers only see generic product visuals from one specific angle with a white background. Can enhancing personalized content through product visuals be the solution?

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Personalized content effectiveness can’t be denied 

According to Salesforce, 88% of U.S. marketers reported seeing measurable improvements due to personalization — with more than half reporting a lift greater than 10%. We know that consumers do not purchase via product data but emotional triggers, where contextual visuals can recall a memory, inspire a better future, and add value to their current lifestyles.

And consumers want to feel valued! Adobe indicates that 42% of consumers get annoyed when their content isn’t personalized, and 66% of consumers will not purchase from a site when they feel the content does not speak to their specific interests. Gone (hopefully) are the days of one-size-fits-all marketing using the same visuals across geographies, demographics, and personas. This approach is being replaced by an authentic visual identity that is tailored to consumers’ tastes and preferences.

Moreover, when the average consumer is exposed to hundreds, or even thousands, of visuals a day, fighting for their eyeballs is more critical than ever. Marketers have only a few seconds (even less) to not only grab attention but also to generate relevancy and be memorable.

Making compelling, personalized, memorable content is vital in today’s competitive market. It is simultaneously a game of scaling to accommodate an ever greater number of visuals created, and efficiency to achieve relevant visuals that help convert sales. Increased efficiency means less wasted time, resources, and budget.

Revolutionizing and digitizing product visuals  

As sales channels evolve from physical marketplaces to the digital sphere, product visuals’ production process should also make the leap.

Digitization is the only way forward to address the growing number of product catalogs (scale) and a greater need to personalize visual content (creativity). It’s not just having a digital file of traditional photography, but a digital model, often in 3D, of a product, where content producers and digital marketers can easily insert and imbed seamlessly into lifestyle backgrounds to make the product more eye-catching and to be tailored to different audience segments, thus increasing desirability that translates into sales.

Some of these can indeed be done on a small scale using in-house capabilities or existing agencies. Still, on a grander scope, the limitations of traditional methods start to become more noticeable. The linear production methods would eat up too much resource, especially when the growing trend is having more products available online, with more variations of visuals tailored for different target audiences, and shorter sales cycles.

Programmatic online advertising already exists. In a few clicks, you can make thousands of variants of ads, with different text, for a diversity of markets, demographics, contexts, and even time of day.

Why can’t that exist for product visuals, too?

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CGI lets you scale creativity 

Traditional methods will not get you to scaling personalization. Imagine the hassle of shooting the same product naturally embedded in a wide variety of lifestyle scenes. The logistics would be obscene!

Thankfully, there are now turnkey solutions that leverage CGI technology to create, display and manage unlimited product visuals, resolving the scaling issue modern marketers face. This is achieved by creating a digital model (CGI/ 3D) of a product, where content producers can easily insert and imbed seamlessly into lifestyle backgrounds that can be tailored for different audiences, seasonal campaigns, and digital formats.

Now you can start creating visuals that were previously impossible to create in a fraction of the time of a traditional photo shoot. In fact, these services create product visuals 10 times faster than conventional methods, saving up to 90% of the visual production budget. And in terms of performance, it can drive up to 10 times more traffic and increases add-to-cart by 20%.

The future is personal!

The future of marketing is personal. We see a growing trend with 51% of marketers asserting that personalization across multiple touchpoints increased ROI by 300% and more. Brands can also apply this approach when creating product visuals. Potentially, marketers will leverage valuable consumer behavior data and creative personalized visuals through AI. We can foresee the arrival of this day – 77% of marketers believe that real-time personalization is indispensable.