You’ve spent weeks developing the messaging for your Spring Fling mailer or your annual fundraising letter. You know your audience. Your message is on target. The call to action is compelling. You can’t wait to see what happens. The campaign drops and the results are… disappointing. What went wrong? One question to ask is, “Did I use enough visual content?”

When creating any marketing campaign, graphics and images are a must. There are three things to remember about the importance of visual content:

• 93% of communication is non-verbal.

• 90% of the information transmitted to our brains is visual.

• People remember about 20% of what they read, but as much as 80% of what they see.

Also, consider the following data about graphic content from around the web:

• 55% of website visitors spend less than 15 seconds of actively reading text on the page.

• Social sharing more than doubles when images are used.

• For posts without images, the average number of Facebook shares is 28. With images, it jumps to 65.

• For tweets without images, the average number of Twitter shares is ten. With images, it jumps to 20.

Strong, powerful graphics are critical to any print or digital marketing program and can make the difference between your message being noticed and remembered and not. How many images do your marketing communications use?

Data source: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/boost-engagement-visual-content