Paper or digital catalogs? If you’re a retailer, catalogs are essential in your promotional plan. It’s well known for its power to influence purchase decisions. Currently, 72% of people said they were more likely to purchase a product after looking at a product catalog. They’re crucial to communicate your products and keep your business in mind. In turn, they’re visual beings and are more engaged with visual content than other types. In this article, you will discover the pros and cons of including the digital catalog in your marketing strategy.
Multiple features and flexibility
Digital catalog viewers, such as Tiendeo Viewer Pro, offer a wide range of valuable features for retailers and brands. Displaying your catalogs with such technology will allow you to add direct links to product landings, generate e-commerce traffic, add a store map, product information and so on. This technology enable you to connect with your consumer to enhance loyalty and to facilitate the shopping experience.
At the same time, digital catalogs offer flexibility compared to paper-based catalogs. Digital versions allow retailers to scale their content, update products and prices quickly, or create multiple versions in different languages. This will help you to manage updates and share your products across multiple channels. This will speed up the production and distribution processes, while allowing for possible corrections or updates at a later date.
Reduce print costs
Why not make the transition to digital? There are many reasons to do so. You can save money by reducing your print costs and improving your customer’s experience. It’s also easier to update digital catalogs without printing additional materials. The process of creating a digital catalog is easier than ever. There’s no need to worry about the logistics of creating a printed version. Having a digital catalogue will save you time and money.
Digital catalogs are more sustainable
According to a study by ELMA (European Letterbox Marketing Association), Spain ranks ninth in the European ranking with 3,750 million leaflets distributed per year. Germany (28.9 billion), France (21.024 billion), the Netherlands (10.9 billion) and Italy (8.3 billion) are ahead.
This figure is certainly worrying considering that for each tree felled, between 500 and 1,000 kg of paper are extracted, the equivalent of approximately 10,000 pages (according to the US association “Forest & Paper”). In an increasingly digitized society, where purchases are increasingly made remotely, and where environmental conservation awareness is at the forefront of everyone’s mind, paper waste is less and less tolerated.
The difference between the CO2 emissions generated by one campaign and the other is up to 300 times lower in the case of a digital campaign compared to a paper campaign.
Furthermore, if we compare an advertising campaign on paper with an equivalent digital campaign in terms of cost, we can see that the difference between the CO2 emissions generated by one campaign and the other is up to 300 times lower in the case of a digital campaign compared to a paper campaign. A much lower environmental impact, which affects not only the conservation of the planet and its forests, but also the greenhouse gas emissions that we are releasing into the atmosphere.
Collect relevant information about your consumers
Paper-based catalogues have limited impact on consumers. They’re not as effective as digital ones because you can’t track them. While it is true that there are mechanisms to measure this impact, it is less precise than the traceability provided by digital catalogs.
Digital catalogs enable you to gather relevant information of your consumers behaviour. It is possible to know not only how many people have read the catalog, but also how many pages on average they have consulted, the reading time, which products they have clicked on, zoom-in and zoom-out, among others. In this way, digital catalogs allow you to have full traceability of your campaign performance and ROI.
In short, the digital catalog offers a range of very valuable functions to improve the user experience, its production costs are much lower than the paper catalog and it offers high agility, scalability and traceability. Finally, it has a lower impact on the environment.
