Follow these simple tactics designed to engage customers and drive sales with your digital catalogue. Unlock new marketing channels and discover innovative ways to engage, inform, and persuade your audience.
Written by Ed Jones
Marketing Strategist at YUDU Publisher
10 February, 2022
Resources | Guides | 5 Tactics to Increase Engagement in Your Digital Catalogue
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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