Digital catalogs with WhatsApp led to representatives’ sales increasing by 65%
A few years ago, Grupo Andrea were like most Latin-American direct selling companies: Their business model was fully dependent on printed catalogs and representatives physically meeting with customers.
But then came COVID, along with social distancing, and changed shopping in Latin-America forever.
As Grupo Andrea's Marketing Director, Andrés Padilla says:
We faced the challenge of taking an analog business model, 100% paper printed, to a digital world.”
Grupo Andrea tackled this challenge using a familiar format, just online: Digital catalogs.
But how do you get started with the transition from print to digital?
As Melisa Ruiz, Grupo Andreas' Digital Strategy Manager, knows, digital transformation from print to digital is a lengthy, complicated and necessary project for companies in Latin-America.
To succeed, you need at least two things...
At minimum, a tool to digitalize print in Latin-America should create digital catalogs that are shareable, have WhatsApp integration and enable engaging content.
For Grupo Andrea, iPaper had the right tool:
iPaper’s tool met all the requirements we had.”
- Melisa Ruiz, Digital Strategy Manager, Grupo Andrea
The support from the provider should include frameworks for success, working hours matching Latin-American time and market knowledge of Latin-America.
iPaper have all of that.
The support from iPaper was crucial in this transition of making the digital catalog a reality. I don’t think the territorial barriers are so important, because the processes and the support are provided naturally.”
- Melisa Ruiz, Digital Strategy Manager, Grupo Andrea
Grupo Andrea found the right tool with the right support in iPaper. Now, they’ve transformed print into an interactive, shareable digital catalog with WhatsApp checkout:
This transformation has led to great results for many digital marketing metrics:
The results have been exponential. The number of sessions, times shared, the number of downloads started to grow at a vertiginous pace.”
- Andrés Padilla, Marketing Director, Grupo Andrea
On top, Grupo Andrea see that 80% of their website traffic visit their digital catalogs.
But what about overall sales, the most important metric?
“Last year, in 2023, we grew by 65% in terms of sales by representatives who sell through digital catalogs. It was a much higher growth than expected.” - Melisa Ruiz, Digital Strategy Manager, Grupo Andrea
Given those results, the entire direct selling approach has now shifted towards digital for Grupo Andrea, their representatives and the end-customers:
There’s already quite significant growth of representatives who choose to use more digital catalogs than physical catalogs, and who have 100% of their sales through such a digital tool.”
- Melisa Ruiz, Digital Strategy Manager, Grupo Andrea
And, as one 13-year Grupo Andrea veteran representative says, that’s also the case for the customers:
Nowadays there’s less people asking for a physical catalog. They have adapted to digital catalogs. I love the digital catalog because it saves me a lot of time.“
- María de Luz Ruiz, Catalog Sales Representative, Grupo Andrea
Grupo Andrea’s goals are even higher this year. So, even though Melisa thinks that “everything we have now in the digital catalog is innovative”, there’s no time to rest for Grupo Andrea:
When you start to innovate and start to set a trend, you know that your competitors are going to come behind, other companies are going to want to emulate it.”
- Andrés Padilla, Marketing Director, Grupo Andrea
So, Grupo Andrea will have to keep innovating – for example by implementing personalization of the digital catalogs with iPaper’s Build-A-Flipbook feature.
So, if other Latin-American companies haven’t joined the race to digitalise their print catalogs, it’s time to do so – otherwise, you’ll never catch up.
Here's a few more benefits for you:
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