When we demoed DAT we saw how quick and efficient serving up images would be—especially using the webP format. We were just so keen to get it up and running
In today's digital-first world, powerful digital experiences are key to better customer engagement. Marketers are vying for their brands to stand out in a crowded marketplace. That's why digital experience has become one of the hottest trends in marketing today—it provides an opportunity to break through the clutter and connect with potential customers like never before.
But website performance is one of the most important aspects when delivering engaging digital experiences. Images alone account for 70% of the load time of a website, in turn, long loading times are one of the top reasons consumers decide to leave your website in favor of your competition.
From a backend point of view, ensuring high website performance and responsiveness requires some forethought to make sure the right images—often stored in various locations—are retrieved successfully, optimized effectively, and displayed correctly.
Currently, asset transformation is a very manual process for most organizations, putting a strain on marketers and creatives. At times, it's a matter of manually creating channel-specific content in the source files (e.g. PSD, INDD, etc.); at other times, it's about creating and predicting these image transformations with pre-defined derivatives.
Dynamic Asset Transformation (DAT) allows you to automate and scale this process by transforming images on the fly based on device and channel. The new transformations are also cached on the Cloudfront CDN for easy viewing next time. The result? Your valuable content is available anywhere, automatically transformed and optimized—and ready to deliver smooth digital experiences.
Benefits of DAT - an overview
Before Bynder, we used to upload original high-res assets directly to the webserver—taking up a lot of space—and serve them directly to the user. It used to take too long to download the image and it used to make a mess of the backend of the website
Better website performance leads to better conversion rates—that's only one of the benefits of leveraging automation to ensure the right asset versions are in front of the right customers.
Achieving this while reducing the burden on your teams is definitely a bonus. Other benefits of automated digital asset transformation are:
- Reduced loading times on your website
- Increased engagement metrics & lower bounce rates
- Improved SEO rank
- Reduced manual workload for marketing and creative teams (by automating the creation of images in different versions, sizes, resolutions, crops)
- Eliminated risk of misuse via Version Control
Benefits of DAT - the breakdown
1 - Increase website performance
Maintaining an efficient website can be tiresome and time-consuming. You want your website to be fast, responsive, and mostly, personalized—after all, your website is your gateway to your customers, whether you’re after education, leads, or transactions.
Think about an airline website or mobile shopping app. Everyone is pretty familiar with those, you see dozens of images of possible destinations or categories of products, promotional banners, images that come in all shapes and sizes: from thumbnails to squares—and even landscape and portrait orientations.
How is this achieved? Typically, each of these images will have a different source, different parameters, and is fetched through custom-made derivatives that need to be stored for future reference.
Most of the time, success is measured by having the right image in the right spot on your website, but if these images aren't optimized to maximize performance they will hinder your customer experience—all while the risk of manually selecting the wrong asset is way too real.
With DAT, images are automatically compressed to a website-optimized format (webP). Why is this important? Because images in webP are 30% smaller (on average) in terms of byte size when compared to a JPG image—which will have a positive impact on load times without affecting image quality.
[Pro Tip] Faster web performance means your site will deliver a better experience to your customers, resulting in more clicks, more conversions, and ultimately more sales.
2 - Minimize developer overhead
Different departments work on the website every day and refresh their content there—we use Bynder to get all of their assets onto the website easily and quickly.
Everyone with even a little backend experience will know how difficult it is to manually maintain a website that provides engaging digital experiences. Without leveraging automation to deliver the correct images and sizes to your CMS, your technical teams need to create and keep records of hundreds of derivatives—and make sure these are used correctly.
By leveraging Dynamic Asset Transformation to increase web performance—together with a DAM system that serves as the single source of truth for your marketing needs—you will ultimately simplify the work of web developers and web content managers so that they can be more focused.
With DAT and DAM, there's no need to manually resize, compress, and crop assets anymore. Instead, the system generates a smart URL that is responsive depending on where the recipient is opening it. And the libraries within your CMS or e-commerce applications will thank you for not creating an unholy mess!
When you’re building or updating a page, you can simply choose the media from Bynder directly in the native UI or have it automatically mapped through the API. You will be served with a responsive link to the asset that can be used immediately.
Developers want reliable, secure cloud-based applications that work with each other. There’s always something strategic happening at the organization, and DAT enables those teams to focus on the next big step in the digital transformation, as opposed to wasting valuable time each week resizing and uploading images with the right specs.
[Pro Tip] Simplify the work of web developers and web content managers so that they can work more efficiently, saving time and money.
3 - Brand differentiation
In the future, we'd like to roll out DAT across a lot of our other systems—internal and external—like our email marketing platform and play around more with some of the additional transformation options
A lot of teams contribute to a high-performing website. Developers take care of the technical bits, but your creative team (or external agency) is responsible for the creation of assets.
If you'd like for them to give you a piece of their mind, ask anyone within your creative team about the trials and tribulations of being constantly nagged to resize an existing image—or set a different focus point in an old image for which they've lost access to the master file.
Relying on technology like Dynamic Asset Transformation means your marketers and developers will be able to always deliver the best version of each asset to fit their technical needs—without further input from the creative team. This way, your creatives will be able to focus on what they do best: creating new and engaging concepts to take your brand to the next level.
Thanks to DAT's enhanced UI experience your teams will be able to:
- Optimize images by automatically cropping based on clipping path
- Automatically remove background based on clipping path
- Scale content transformations using predefined transformation sets
- Set autodetection of focal point for optimal image display and cropping
This is not only beneficial in terms of time saved or streamlined processes. It also allows your brand identity to come through seamlessly. Today, we have more marketing channels than ever before and some of these channels require multiple transformations (crop, resize, change background color, etc.) to deliver the right asset. With DAT, your teams can create predefined multiple transformations, save them, and reuse them when needed e.g., “e-commerce”, "app", “newsletter header”.
The result? You'll immediately notice a reduction in the amount of manual work for transformations while scaling content production and optimizing web performance.
[Pro Tip] Increase email and web campaign conversion rates thanks to faster page load speed while reducing resizing costs.
Ready for DAT? Dive into more details here.
