How Dynamic Imaging is Revolutionizing Omnichannel Marketing

By: Sarah J. Flynn | July 20, 2021 | 5 Min Read

What makes a great omnichannel customer experience (CX)?

Marketers face this question every day. They constantly seek to deliver a cohesive branding approach for their customers, especially as they navigate through multiple outlets.

Brick-and-mortar stores are becoming more tech-infused. Advancements in online interactive tools enable e-commerce sites to deliver intimate visual encounters—even on 2D screens. However, new technologies provide both a blessing and a challenge to provide our customers the same buying experience in every medium.

In omnichannel marketing, a key element to consistent customer experiences is quality product imagery; but, imagery is often an afterthought, even in today’s high-tech world. Marketers need a revolutionary technology to set their products apart and meet the demands of mercurial shoppers.

What technology can they use to deliver a true omnichannel CX? Dynamic imaging.

The Power of Dynamic Imaging

Dynamic imaging is the ability to alter digital images in real-time. By combining digital imaging, image editing, and workflow automation, dynamic imaging allows omnichannel marketing businesses to empower shoppers to customize merchandise and view their changes instantly.

An End-to-End Omnichannel Marketing Solution

E-Commerce is fluid and progressive, but many website images remain fixed at a single point in time. Most marketers and web developers do not realize that, with the proper technology, imagery can be altered on demand.

That is why LiquidPixels® developed its flagship LiquiFire® Operating System (OS). LiquiFire OS is an enterprise-wide dynamic imaging solution with unlimited possibilities for an organization’s omnichannel marketing needs.

Offered in two solutions—LiquiFire OS Blaze™ for advanced imaging capabilities and LiquiFire OS Zap™ for production imaging tasks—LiquiFire OS provides all of the necessary functionality to scale with the demands of any business, as well as current omnichannel marketing trends:

• Device-agnostic superior rendering: dynamic images rendered on any device—from desktops to laptops, from smartphones to tablets—without compromising quality and resolution.
• High-definition, immersive capabilities: LiquiFire Viewer Suite™ enables multiple viewing capabilities, including interactive motion, zoom-and-pan, magnify, image collections, multi-axis photography solutions (360º spin), and a viewer for 3D models.
• In-depth product exploration and interaction: interact with and explore every minor detail of a product, large and small, even in low bandwidth situations.
• Full customization and personalization: allows shoppers to see products in their preferred styles, change product colors, customize and accessorize, and the ability to personalize products with their name or brand.

There Are No Limitations

Most of our clients offer fully customizable products in a variety of colors and textures. This gives shoppers a breadth of options. But how can e-commerce brands’ omnichannel marketing campaigns keep up with the demands of unlimited product options?

With traditional imagery, a stand-alone picture is required for each product in every possible variation. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of images are needed for a single product.

To solve this, LiquiFire OS Blaze uses a single master image to instantly create images in any variation in response to the user’s choices and purposes, which can be one or all of the following:

• Authentic color, style, and design displays: allow customization through genuine product color, style, and design representation, to meet your customer’s expectations.
• High-quality embroidery, logos, and other embellishments: personalize products with photorealistic custom logos, embroidery patterns, and more, with a seamless start-to-finish workflow.
• Advanced typography and graphics capabilities: accommodate all 13,000+ characters and symbols from the Unicode standard that range from alphanumeric symbols to Asian language characters.

Once rendered, the dynamic image achieves two goals:

• Product consistency and corporate brand integrity; and,
• Customer freedom to make their item unique.

The E-Commerce Dilemma

Product variation is not the only demand faced by e-commerce. Most web experiences must solve another challenge: a limitless number of presentation environments.

Desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones each have their benefits, but the overwhelming number of devices make it impossible to predict the best image output for a broad audience. In addition, websites that only deliver high-resolution images may provide the best image display, but can destroy bandwidth.

Creating duplicate images in varying quality, detail, compression, and format is a drain on resources. Yet images that speak to the customer’s intent and mindset are necessary for your omnichannel marketing strategy to work.

Balance Clarity and Performance

A truly dynamic solution is required to solve this problem.

LiquiFire OS dynamically creates and manipulates multiple images on demand and in real-time. With a few simple commands in LiquiFire OS Zap, an image is optimized based on the network bandwidth and properties of the requesting device. Furthermore, by capturing data from the CDN or target device, LiquiFire OS automatically renders an image that self-adjusts for both transfer speed and image quality.

This results in a wide spectrum where compression levels can be increased to accommodate network speeds, thereby optimizing image delivery. Thus, two solutions are guaranteed:

• Optimal image presentation in low bandwidth environments; and
• Automated scaling, resizing, formatting, and compressing.

Here are some real-life examples based on recent studies and data that we conducted with LiquidPixels Optimize™:

• Tesco PLC has a 15.8MB page weight, which would often take almost 7 seconds to fully download on a 17Mbps mobile connection. If optimized, Tesco’s page weight will be reduced to 12.4MB, reducing site load time to 5 seconds (a 28.6 percent page speed increase).
• Amazon’s Basics page would take at least 13 seconds of download time, owing to the fact that it has a staggering page weight of 29.3MB. With optimized and dynamic images, however, 2 seconds is shaved off of the download time.
• Chow Tai Fook, a privately-held Hong Kong conglomerate, takes a surprising 23 second load time due to its enormous 48.6MB page weight. Optimizing the imagery, however, will save the company at least 5 seconds of load time on their pages.

Shape the Digital Future

The current economic climate calls for the right omnichannel marketing strategy in order for businesses to be more resilient. With omnichannel marketing trends forcing brands to rethink their approach, dynamic imaging should be a top-of-mind priority, especially for e-commerce sites.

Compelling product imagery is key to converting shoppers into buyers. By utilizing the power of LiquiFire OS, websites will drive the buyer’s journey to:

• Improved customer satisfaction
• Higher conversion rates
• Creating a true omnichannel customer experience

It is time to revolutionize your company’s omnichannel marketing approach. Interested in learning more?