Designing a digital catalogue experience to actively engage your readers is a clear pathway to sales success. Unfortunately, it’s a task that is increasingly difficult.
Customer expectations have reached an all-time high, according to a recent study from Salesforce. When engaging with your brand, the modern consumer expects a cutting-edge online experience, with personalised interactions, connected seamlessly across numerous digital channels. Paired with shrinking attention spans and a distraction-filled digital landscape, the challenge quickly becomes clear.
Capturing the attention of prospective customers and keeping them engaged with your digital catalogue is no simple task. To help you in this process, we’ve put together five tactics to increase digital catalogue engagement to help you drive increased sales.
Use interactive content types
As we’ve already touched on, expectations of the modern consumer have never been higher. They demand unique interactions to enrich their browsing and buying experience. A simple recreation of your print catalogue in the digital space isn’t going to cut it.
Introducing interactive content types to your digital catalogue is one of the best tactics to drive user engagement. Successfully implemented, interactive content brings your products to life. Creating an immersive experience where a prospective customers are compelled to engage and convert.
Depending on the capabilities of your digital catalogue publishing platform, below are a range of interactive content types you can embed or overlay to drive engagement.
Video
Adding video content to your online catalogue is a quick and easy way to increase user engagement. Video offers a richer experience than written content, while also requiring less effort from the customer.
Research backs this, with 66% of people preferring to watch a short video when learning about a product or service. 84% of people also say they were convinced to buy a product after watching the brand’s video.
Pop-ups
In-catalogue pop-ups are a great strategy to further engage your users. Not those automated monstrosities that interrupt your journey and create friction. We’re talking about pop-ups crafted to enrich the reader’s experience, only triggered by a proactive click.
Below are a series of scenarios where deploying pop-ups will actively increase digital catalogue engagement:
- Deliver more information - a pop-up is a creative way to deliver additional product information. You could even use an iFrame to pull in information directly from your website.
- Enrich the experience with different content types - pop-ups are a great way to include additional content types like videos and images.
- Guide users through a story or sales pitch - combing a static image with a series of well-crafted pop-ups, customers can explore your product through a guided process.
- Deliver in-catalogue purchasing - pop-ups can be deployed so the customer can complete their purchase within the catalogue. Through an embed of your e-commerce website, or an in-built sales order form.
360° Product Viewer
In recent years, we have seen the rapid expansion of software allowing you to deliver a fully interactive 3-dimensional visualisation of your product in the digital realm.
360° product viewers offer a unique, immersive experience, where customers learn about your product in a completely new way. With a modern digital publishing platform, you will have the power to embed this interactive content type into your catalogue to offer new levels of engagement.
Deliver a mobile responsive experience
More than 50% of website visits are now performed using a mobile device, according to the latest figures from Statista. This continuing trend has created a major strategic shift, with many companies now adopting a mobile-first approach for designing and delivering digital content - websites, catalogues, magazines, brochures, etc.
When it comes to online catalogues, providing a mobile-responsive experience has a major influence on engagement metrics. This is achieved through a combination of digital catalogue design and digital publishing platform software.
Your standard PDF to digital catalogue conversion isn’t mobile responsive. This static content cannot resize or reshape itself for different device types, causing a series of issues:
- Difficulty reading content - users will have to constantly zoom in or out in order to make catalogue content clear and readable.
- Friction from continual scrolling - with content not constrained to screen dimensions, users will be continually scrolling to find and engage with content.
- Frustration with interactive elements - elements like call-to-action buttons and menu navigation won’t resize, making them difficult to click.
Left alone, these issues create a poor user experience, reducing engagement and leading to high abandonment rates.
Combining mobile responsive design and the technology to deliver it means you can offer a digital catalogue built to drive engagement. Your content will be optimised for each device, reshaping and resizing itself to fit the screen dimensions. Meaning you deliver the best experience and achieve the highest engagement levels from desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
Alongside engagement, a mobile responsive design positively impacts the reach of your catalogue. Especially with Google taking a mobile-first approach in crawling and indexing content. With an increasingly significant factor in ranking said content in its search engine.
Use push notifications
Push notifications are a (relatively) new marketing channel that can be incredibly powerful. There are two types of push notifications that we’re going to talk about:
- App push notifications - these are mobile alerts that can be delivered directly to a user's device. They appear similar to an SMS text message, creating an on-screen pop-up that can even be accompanied by an audible alert.
- Web push notifications - these are the web-based equivalent to mobile app push notifications. Users can subscribe to receive web push notifications on your website. They appear as a pop-up, with a message and clickable link that can deliver subscribers to your chosen URL.
Although different in design, they perform the same function. Helping you to capture attention, continue to engage your target audience and bring them back to the catalogue.
As with any marketing channel, it’s important to be smart about how and when you use push notifications. The persuasiveness and relevancy of the messaging are paramount in maximising engagement. Frequency is also a key factor, where overuse can create friction, lowering interaction rates or even complete disengagement.
Below are a few ideas and scenarios where push notifications are ideally suited. When expertly applied, they will significantly increase re-engagement:
- Launching a brand-new product line
- Releasing the latest version of your catalogue
- Running a discount campaign - seasonal or surprise
- Updates on changes in product pricing
- Limited stock availability, or last chance on retiring product lines
- Offering a discount coupon - for first-time buyers or valued customers
Organise catalogue navigation
Navigation plays a central role in how users engage with and consume your digital catalogue content. Done well, users move with ease through your content, finding the products they need in seconds. Done badly, users get lost, frustrated and abandon their experience.
To help you deliver a navigation experience that promotes engagement and ease-of-use, we’ve provided some sage advice below:
- Introduce a floating navigation menu - this allows you to display product categories and top sellers, so users can flow to different catalogue sections with one quick click.
- Add click-to-navigate links in content - most digital publishing platforms employ software allowing you to include hyperlinks. Adding these to your contents section and throughout your catalogue provide a pathway for users to quickly navigate your products and services.
- Ensure navigation elements are clear, obvious, and easy to click - this is a simple design feature to consider when crafting your navigation menus.
- Consider the mobile experience - we’ve previously touched on the importance of a mobile responsive design. You require a navigation that will reshape and re-order itself based on device type.
- Use data to inform your decisions - use tools like Google Analytics to inform navigation elements. User heat maps, top landing pages, and user flow reports will all provide valuable information that can inform navigation layout and contents.
- Experiment - conducting A/B tests in your digital catalogue will allow you to experiment with different navigation designs, layouts, and links to see how you might improve engagement.
Integrate Remarketing
Introducing remarketing is a powerful strategy to engage digital catalogue visitors and bring them back for repeat browsing.
The practice of remarketing involves adding a tracking pixel to your digital catalogue landing pages. These pixels allow visitors to be added to an audience list through the creation of browser cookies. Remarketing audiences can then be segmented and combined to create curated groups that can be targeted with highly relevant advertising. These adverts display through your chosen display network or social media platform.
The following platforms support remarketing:
Remarketing has the power to deliver a highly personalised marketing and sales experience. Driving significant increases in re-engagement and conversion from customers who might otherwise never view your digital catalogue again.
Recent research from Wishpond showed users are 10 times more likely to engage with and click on remarketing adverts, versus their display equivalents. Better still, retargeted customers are 70% more likely to convert on the website than those left alone.
The practice of remarketing is incredibly versatile and can be deployed in a number of ways. Below are just a few ideas for campaigns and strategies to get you started:
- Build brand recognition - create remarketing campaigns for the express purpose of reminding prospective, existing, and lapsed customers that you exist.
- Target customers who didn’t buy - using segmentation, you can create audiences to advertise to customers who didn’t make a purchase. Combined with dynamic remarketing, you can even display the exact product the customer looked at. Dropping them back on the relevant catalogue landing page.
- Upsell customer with complimentary products - segmentation can also help you create audiences to advertise to customers who made a purchase. This can be as simple as a discount for repeat purchases. Or as complex as a dynamic remarketing campaign where you display complimentary products based on the customer previous purchases.
Summary
Crafting experiences to engage your customers is the foundation on which you can build a successful digital catalogue sales strategy.
A digital recreation of your print catalogue is the lowest entry point to begin engaging your customers in the online space. To be truly successful, you’ll need to deliver an online catalogue experience that meets the demands of customers whose expectations have never been higher. This means interactive content and slick navigation delivered with a design that can respond and optimise for any device. With targeted remarketing campaigns and push notifications to re-engage after the first experiences.
Even after deploying the above tactics, there remain 100s of strategies you can employ to drive engagement in your digital catalogue. It’s time to get started.