How to Create the Perfect Digital Catalogue
table of contents
The Benefits of a Digital Catalog
Choose the right products for your digital catalog
Create a clear and meaningful structure:
A product catalog is one of the most important tools used to sell your products, but it is also useful for telling your brand’s story and building relationships with your customers. In this blog post, we will go through the importance of a product catalog; what should be included; and how you should structure it to get the most out of it! So, let’s begin.
Besides selling your products, a product catalog - done properly - can have a huge influence on identifying and reinforcing your brand awareness. You can represent your brand in a way that your customers will remember. But creating, publishing, and delivering a catalog can be time-consuming and costly to produce. Therefore, we would recommend creating a digital catalog!
What are the Benefits of a Digital Catalogue?
Create a digital catalogue - shopping cart feature graphic
The first and, probably, most important benefit of an online catalog is that you save money. You are saving printing costs, distributing costs and storage costs, just to mention a few.
By saving money on distributing your catalog, you enable multi-channel distribution. Embed your catalog directly on your website, send it in an email campaign to all your (future) clients or share it on social media! The options are limitless. A benefit that comes with doing this is that you automatically reach a greater audience!
Another advantage of not having to distribute your catalog physically is that you have much faster launch times! While you would typically have several steps to deliver a traditional catalog, you can directly distribute your online catalog as soon as it’s ready! In addition, if you don’t want to send a normal PDF file to your clients, you can transform it into a beautiful flipbook with a real page-turning effect. This takes just a few minutes, and you’re ready to go.
When you decide to transform your catalog into a flipbook, you instantly have access to insightful statistics! These help you optimize the performance of your catalog even more, so that you can get the most out of it.
Finally, you can speed up the selling process! With our integrated shopping cart feature, your customers can shop directly from your catalog, without having to go to an extra website or contacting someone. Isn’t that convenient!
How to Create your Catalogue:
Now that we’ve given you all the reasons as to why you should create a digital catalog, we can talk about how to create it. A product catalog has to be functional, but at the same time it has to be appealing to the customer. A person that is looking for a power tool is probably using your catalog differently than someone who would like to look for the newest clothing trends. Therefore, you need to build your catalog with your customers in mind. This means that you actually need to know your audience before you can start creating your catalog! Do some research, create a profile and have a target audience so that you can produce a tailor-made catalog.
Once you know your target audience, you need the following: your product data, images of your products and a structure for your catalog. Let’s go into depth to each of these points to create the most effective catalog.
Choose the right products for your digital catalog
You need to select the right products. When you’re a small company selling only a few products, this is an easy step. However, when you’re a large retailer with hundreds of products available, you should keep in mind who you’d like to target with your catalog. Based on this, you can decide which products to include.
Each product needs to have a convincing product description. Again, you should have your customers in mind: how would they like to be approached? Depending on this, you should focus more on the material aspects or on the emotional aspects - but you should always include both!
Use high-quality images:
It goes without saying that your product images should be of the highest quality possible. If products don’t look good in a catalog, would you buy them yourself? So, spend some time on taking high-quality images and maybe hire a professional photographer to shoot and edit some stunning product images.
When creating the images, you should also keep your customers in mind. Just like the product description, you should ask yourself: what do I want to show? And depending on this, you can focus on the features or on the design.
Create a clear and meaningful structure:
Create a digital catalogue - flipbook statistics graphic
Before you begin creating your catalogue, you should already know what you want to be in there. To make it a bit easier for you, here is a little check list of content that should definitely be included:
Front Cover
Introduction
Your products (in a meaningful order)
Final pages: e.g. descriptions, advertising, notes
Back cover
Now you’re probably thinking: what is a meaningful product order? You should organise your products either by category or by attributes, for example colour, price, applications and so on. Again, the order is dependent on your customers: do they like a more organisational structure or would they simply prefer to browse a beautiful catalogue with diverse & dispersed products?
You should make it easy for your clients to reach you, so a good idea would be to include your contact details on every page. Another very easy way to get your clients in contact with you is to include links to your phone number or email address.
Finally, you should also include a fact sheet, that includes information like minimum order requirements, payment methods, shipping or same-day delivery options, refund policies, and so on. By doing this, your customers won’t have to search too long.
When you include all of the aspects mentioned above, you’ll be on the right track to creating the perfect catalogue for your customers. However, the work doesn’t end here. Once you’ve published your catalogue and distributed it, you should keep informed on who your clients are - analyse the statistics; make surveys and market researches, and based on this, continue to improve your catalogue. A great Paperturn feature is our overwrite function, which allows you to make changes within your catalogue which appear directly in the live version - making it immediately available for all your customers, without having to send it again. Isn’t that great?
You’d like to know how a catalogue with all of the features would look like? Take a look here!
