There’s No Good Reason Not To Employ Digital Catalogs

By now, you’ve probably seen some examples of digital catalogs (also called “Flip Books” or “Flipping Books”) on some of your favorite websites.  Most retail sites allow you to download a PDF version of their catalog online already, but it’s far from the same thing.  While a simple PDF download makes sense because of how much you can save on shipping a physical print catalog, there are many limitations compared to flip catalog software.  Let’s look at some of PDF’s inherent limitations:

• PDF’s don’t always look that good on all devices. A PDF that looks great on your desktop computer might look “choppy” on an iPad.  Reading the PDF can be far from convenient, and zoom support can be bad or simply nonexistent.
• PDF’s can be read with many of dozens of “readers”: software designed to view PDF’s.  Because there are so many different readers out there, there is no way to guarantee your audience uses a particular one, so you have very little control as to their experience with the file.
• PDF’s increase the amount of steps needed for you to close the sale. With a PDF open, your customer still must either make a phone call or transition to your e-commerce site.  As you know, the more steps there are, the lower the odds are they will purchase.
• A PDF needs to be 100% downloaded before it can be opened and viewed. For larger catalogs, this makes it increasingly difficult to distribute them across the Web.
• PDF’s are seen as “boring” in 2015. Modernized sites know that entertaining customers is just as vital to success as is functionality.  There is also something to be said for not being lumped in as yet another staid company using “old technology”.

With that being said, let’s now make the case for Digital Catalogs aka Flip Books by discussing some of their greatest features they bring to the table.

Highly Interactive By Nature

One of the other names “digital catalogs” and “flip books” go by is “interactive publications”.  Interactive catalog software isn’t just a buzzword:  it’s a key feature that people expect in this day and age.  Studies have conclusively shown that modern consumers don’t simply grab a paper catalog, flip to a product they like, and phone in an order.  Yes, the print catalog still has a place in the process—but it’s more of a launching point.  That physical catalog fires ideas–and hopefully inspires—consumers to go find out more about whatever it is that piqued their interest.  With so much information available at our fingertips, we just expect to be able to hop online and get more details.  We expect to be able to quickly find the available locations and delivery options.  And, yes, we expect to be able to do some price comparisons!

While the PDF alternative has many advantages over Print by itself, it starts to fall apart when you think about it in terms of the above capabilities.  You can’t take that PDF and use it as a “live window” into your existing product database.  You can’t easily expand on the contents therein, or use it to drive customers to your website or e-commerce portal.  If your product data changes, you have to update and create a new PDF.  And then that customer needs to re-download it.  None of this is an elegant or modern approach.

Your Digital Catalog software can easily incorporate “clickable zones”, which allow your customers to go to web pages, links to other websites, or your e-commerce portal.  Likewise, you can make the products “pop” more by providing multimedia content like product videos, 3D product views, animated graphics, and any other digital bells and whistles you can think of.

Improves the Buyer’s User Experience

Unlike a PDF, a Digital Catalog can be accessed virtually immediately without requiring the full file to be downloaded.  That may not sound like much at first glance, but really think about it:  you’re a prospective customer and you’re interested in seeing the product offerings for Company A and Company B.

Company A has a PDF link, which you click.  You wait for the download to begin, and at 130MB over a decent Wi-Fi connection, you see it’s going to take 4 minutes to download.  Then, once you download it, you know you will have to open the file with a PDF viewer (hopefully you have one installed or it’s back to the App Store with you!).

Company B offers you the Flip Book, which you click on and within seconds you’re going through the actual catalog pages in stunning detail.  The rest of the pages load in the background and as you access them, so from the user perspective, it’s “instant”.

Seconds versus minutes, and this is hardly a loaded scenario.  PDF downloads can easily take longer depending on the quality of your connection or the size of the file.  But using a good Flip catalog software is always going to make this experience near-instantaneous.  Besides the obvious convenience of the Flip Book, how many prospects are simply going to cancel that download when they see it’s going to take 4+ minutes before they can even know if what they’ve downloaded was worthwhile?  It’s an impatient world out there, and when people have options, they aren’t afraid to use them.

Works On All Types of Devices and Computers

One of the best things about interactive catalog software is that it isn’t oriented towards specific devices.  This means that regardless of whether your customers are viewing from a PC, a Mac, iPad or competing tablet, iPhone or Android smartphone, it’s going to look beautiful and will be responsive and easy to read.  Essentially, Flip Books are designed to work on everything.  This is a tremendous asset in today’s world because we have so many choices on how to get our web content throughout the day.  During work hours, we may be on our desktop or laptop, but the rest of the time we’re most likely to use our smartphone or perhaps our tablet.  No one wants to sacrifice any quality or ease-of-use depending on where or how our users view the catalog, because they’re all vitally important.

Just how important is it to be accessible to all flavors of these operating systems and devices?  Consider the proliferation of mobile devices and data networks.  According to Cisco’s 2013 global mobile data forecast, there are almost as many mobile devices (7 billion!) as there are humans on the planet.  How many billions of devices are you comfortable with not supporting?  From that same study, the mobile data network in 2013 was 18 times greater than the entire Internet in 2000!  Considering this study is now almost 2 year old data, we can safely assume the numbers are even higher today.  With so many devices and options out there for modern consumers, you simply can’t afford to say “iPhones aren’t supported at this time”.  You’re talking about 400 million devices!  Just for this reason alone, you could justify the cost associated with creating and maintaining a Flip Book catalog.  You can rest easy knowing that you can be reached by literally anyone on the planet.

The Closest Thing To Print

One of the main reasons Print continues to stick around, is just how good it looks.  From the brilliant, glossy images to the crystal-clear text, it keeps its spot on your coffee table despite being a product from a technological Neolithic age.  Being easy to read and comfortable on your eyes isn’t a small matter.  While the convenience of PDF in comparison to Print can’t be stated enough, it can still suffer in terms of a quality comparison.  In many cases, it boils down to a simple choice of how the PDF was exported; because PDF’s must be downloaded completely to be usable, you don’t want the files to be too large.  In order to keep the files from getting too large, you sometimes must compromise on the DPI, image quality, or otherwise.  It’s a matter of trade-offs.

With Flip Catalogs created using digital catalog software, you don’t have the burden of requiring users download the file upfront.  This frees you from painful choices like choosing a sub-optimal export quality in order to satisfy customer expectations regarding download times.  The end result is that you end up with a digital representation that is as close to a high-resolution print copy as is possible with today’s technology.

Improves Your SEO

This is another area where Flip catalog software really shine in comparison to PDF’s.  Whereas a PDF is a “dead file”, meaning it’s simply something you download and then open in an “offline mode”, a Flip Book can take full advantage of working Online.  You can actually enhance your SEO with a Digital Catalog.  One way is by using backlinks, which increase the popularity of your website.  Another simple way is because search engines will automatically index your digital catalog, which makes it easier for people to find you on the web.

One of the fanciest ways, which really pops out and grabs attention, is by the use of “Tags”.  Tags look like blinking dots on your Flip Book catalog, and you can put them over any of the elements (in our case, products).  Tags can showcase text and links, or even videos and other images.  This “live linking” benefits the user because they have access to tons of beneficial information that they wouldn’t have if page space were the major constraint, like it is for Print and PDF.  Because of this, you have virtually unlimited capacity to expand the product info and specifications, build relationships to other products, and show all sorts of alternative and optional photos.  All of this additional information, digital assets, and links are building up your SEO capabilities, because everything tracks back to the original source (you).

Track User Patterns By Knowing What Categories They Spend Time On

Another great side benefit of having a Digital Catalog with interactive capabilities, is that you can take advantage of that built-in ability to track advanced web statistics.  Ultimately, you want “buyers” and not “browsers”.  The best way to make that happen, is by formatting and shaping your content to increase your conversion rates.  In order to do that, though, you need access to better tracking info—and fortunately, digital catalog software was made for this.

With Print and PDF, you may be able to track orders, but you’ll never really know that people are spending a LOT of time browsing a particular category with a very low conversion rate.  You’ll just know about the actual conversions.  Using Flip catalog software, you’re essentially creating a hyperactive web page and so you can easily track which categories of products your customers are spending that time on.  This is invaluable, because now you would be able to see that your “Kitchen Supplies” category gets just as many views as “Bed & Bath”, albeit with 60% the conversion rate.  This helps you put your focus on why you’re converting so much better in one part of your catalog than another—and therefore, you have a much more educated basis on what to change, and how to change it.  You’ll know which parts of your catalog are most successful, and this in turn will help you to bring the parts that are lagging up to speed.