4. Engage
Your digital catalog is now automated with fixed scheduling and publishing, and 100s of product links or shop icons. It’s running smoothly. Now what?
With print, you need to present everything on the page, as there are no ways to engage with the content.
In the digital world, showing everything can be overwhelming.
On top, capturing shoppers’ attention and keeping it is paramount: without it, closing a sale becomes an elusive goal.
Therefore, you can create more aesthetic designs in your digital catalog, and "hiding" the more elaborate product information behind an interaction with features such as Product View modal or Pop-up Media Gallery.
An engaging digital catalog can be more than just a website!
The key to getting your shoppers’ attention lies in crafting an engaging experience. Your digital catalog serves as the ideal platform for achieving this goal, provided you invest a bit of extra effort.
Beyond serving as a conventional grid-view webshop, the digital catalog has the potential to offer much more: it can breathe life into your products, elevate your brand, and enhance the overall purchasing journey.
Most importantly, engaging browsing experiences are exactly what shoppers want:
Why creating engagement in your digital catalog is important
In the digital landscape, engagement equates to attention. By prioritizing the engagement of shoppers, you not only capture their complete attention, but also provide them with a compelling reason to prolong their stay within the digital catalog.
Consequently, they are more likely to:
Shoppers not only want engaging content and interactivity in their shopping experiences, but they have also come to expect them. Without these crucial elements, there's little guarantee that shoppers will click on products and make purchases.
67%
The percentage of shoppers seeking inspiration when browsing online catalogs, according to the European Shopper Survey 2021.
78%
El Corte Inglés Portugal, for example, sees that 78% of all digital catalogs sessions come from mobile.
For an optimal, user-friendly experience, consider:
The result?
Your shoppers will be able to easily navigate the digital catalog, and thereby get an overview of all products and information.
Learn more about how to create an optimized digital catalog experience in our guide:
We already know that the key to capturing and holding shoppers' attention involves creating vibrant, interactive, and inspiring content. In digital catalogs, you can achieve this by creating movement with videos or animations via Enrichments in your digital catalog.
You could for example…
The possibilities are almost endless.
Doing this will help build the visitors’ feeling of engagement, and immerse them into the story you are telling.
What's more, the automation of this process, akin to generating shop links or icons, adds to the efficiency and ease of implementation.
After implementing interactive content and making the catalog shoppable, Yves Rocher saw:
The result?
You’ll capture and hold shoppers’ intention for longer.
Learn about how to include animations in your digital catalog in our Enrichment Editor:
But what happens when a competitor offers the same, or similar, T-shirt on sale for $15? This poses a challenge unless your competitive edge extends beyond price alone.As this CMO says:
The more you can inspire your target customers, the less they're looking at exactly the price.
One way to inspire is to tell product stories: crafting a narrative around your product, weaving a compelling web that captivates the shopper, positions you favorably against competitors.
To do so, you should add customer testimonials, how-to-guides, product showcases and so on.
For example, you could…
The result?
I think our brand partners and new customers are very inspired when they can see how to – for example – apply our skin care products. Having that opportunity is definitely helping us.
A way to overcome this is to include dynamic promotions, such as time, holiday, or weather-sensitive offers, in your digital catalog.
However, constantly changing your digital catalog to reflect these factors can be a daunting, and resource-heavy task.
With Display — a CTA that opens an interactive banner — you can create more promotions without having to make changes to your existing catalog or create a new one.
If you’re looking for tactics specifically for holidays and themed catalogs, check out our post.
The result?
See our use-cases on how to increase visitor engagement by adding a new layer to your digital catalog.
Learn more about how Display can enhance your digital catalog, and how to get set up:
While this takes out a great deal of manual work in the iPaper admin, someone in your organization still needs to put work into making your product data fit with one of our automation standard data templates.
But with advanced automation, we build a custom Enrichment Automation, just for you!
A custom-built Enrichment Automation is built around your data, your material and your desired outcomes, instead of adapting these to fit one of our standard templates.
In some cases, it may require slight tweaks or additions to your data to get the desired Enrichment Automation result, but we’ll help you get there.
The result?
You eliminate any hassle of conforming to our standard data template. Instead, we make the Enrichment Automation fit with your existing data.
Ready to take the next step? Book a meeting with our dedicated team and discover how an advanced Enrichment Automation can revolutionize your digital catalog creation process.
The more product information you provide, the more informed your shoppers are, and the more likely they are to purchase. This can be everything from:
With the Product enrichment, you can do it all!
Shoppers want information!
As discovered in our Behaviour of Online Shoppers Survey, 48% of shoppers read about product specifications on Google. 43% on Amazon, and 35% on other webshops.
With a Product-enriched link, you can present additional product information with images and text in a way that doesn’t clutter your digital catalog.
Simply by providing iPaper with a data feed that includes product images and information, we can build a Product View for any and all products in your digital catalogs. The more information provided in a data feed, the more you can surface in your catalogs.
The result?
An exceptional shopping experience, allowing shoppers to easily access relevant product information. This enhances their shopping journey and aids in making informed buying decisions, all without cluttering your catalog.
Learn more about how to engage your visitors with Product enrichments in our guide:
If you have included product variations in your data feed, you can use the Product enrichment to present variants of the same product in a drop-down menu.
For example, if you sell a shirt, available in a white, black or gray, you can present all the colors along with a full selection of sizing for each, in one product space.
This allows your shoppers to select the color they want, in the size they require, without having to find the specific variant displayed in your catalog.
The result?
You reduce the number of CTAs (like shop icons) for similar but different products to a single CTA that opens a drop-down menu. This greatly improves the readability of the catalog and the shopping experience.