1. Prepare

Whether you have one digital catalog, or ten, whenever you update them you’ll likely want to keep the same visual identity and settings across every successive catalog. This creates a consistent brand and customer experience in the digital catalog.

However, setting up and maintaining visual brand elements for all of your catalogs can be incredibly time-consuming, especially when dealing with multiple digital catalogs.

To save time, you can simply use Inherited Settings to make the required changes once at the folder level: All digital catalogs contained in the folder will automatically inherit the settings and display the right logo, color, text, and price currency and more.

Your brand should inspire confidence in your customers, and your digital domain is a direct extension of this. Present your digital catalog as the fully integrated part of your business it is, with a Branded Domain.

Branded Domain allows you to present your digital catalog on your own domain, for example catalog.yourbrand.com instead of viewer.ipaper.io/yourbrand/digital-catalog-1

This will provide continuity across your website, webshop, and digital catalog.

For example, an ambient video that auto-plays can create an extra, immersive layer to enhance the browsing experience.

You can also highlight key areas of your catalog, such as your bestsellers, new products, or great deals by drawing attention to them with cleverly placed videos, or GIFs.

But often, the more pictures and videos, the better. For example, in a physical store, you’d be unlikely to buy a product you’ve just seen. Rather, you’d inspect it from different angles, hold it in your hands, or even try it on.

With Popup Media Galleries, you can include multiple product images or videos from different angles, or in different contexts, in the same popup.

CTAs can be used for any number of actions, including:

For example, pop-ups within your digital catalog can be used to:

Pop-ups can also be customized, to automatically engage, with exit intent or timed open.

This can also be done in your digital catalog.

The News ticker can be used to provide multiple, rolling, clickable CTA texts that provide next steps for your reader. What functions these CTAs perform is down to you: the News ticker is customizable!

For many shoppers, their primary form of conversion after reading a digital catalog will still be to go to the nearest store, to either learn more and see the product in real life or to buy.

And shoppers find it to be a huge benefit:

For some businesses (for example, furniture or electronics), shoppers will typically just select one or two products to buy.

In such a case, you can use External Links as CTAs to enable the shopper to go directly from the desired product in your digital catalog to the product page on your webshop.

When the shopper clicks a product in your digital catalog, the product page will open in the same or a new tab and provide more information, size selections, and, of course, the ability to purchase.

External links, while being easy to implement, move the user into another browser tab and thereby away from your digital catalog.

This increases the risk of the visitor not coming back into the catalog after visiting a product page, wasting your effort of retaining the visitor, and the resources allocated to creating an interactive digital catalog with many pages.

Instead, you can retain visitors in the digital catalog by making your product CTAs open a popup iframe of your webshop on top of your digital catalog.

With Email sharing, you allow your catalog readers to send their basket contents in an email as a wish- or shopping-list!

It’s convenient for the shopper and, combined with the store locator, a powerful way to drive traffic to the store and ensure the shopper doesn’t forget any desired items from the digital catalog.

In some cases, a company may not have a physical store or an ecommerce. Instead, orders are received, handled and fulfilled through contact between the company and the customer. This is common in B2B.

In this scenario, you can use Email checkout to directly collect the information needed to fulfill the order (such as name, company, VAT, payment method etc.).

You simply need to decide what information you need to collect, and a custom form will appear when clicking the checkout in your digital catalog.

Then, when the shopper fills the form, their information and basket content is sent to an email address specified by you - For example, an email to a representative or an order-handling company email.

Customers can receive a confirmation email, to give them peace of mind, while you handle their order.

Learn how to set up Email checkout in your digital catalog.

With a Social media checkout, your shoppers can send their basket contents to your company representatives via WhatsApp, or Viber, who then completes the transaction.

The WhatsApp and Viber integrations can further be customized where customers can send their basket content to a predefined recipient, or select an existing contact to share with.

Learn how to set up checkouts for WhatsApp and Viber in our guides, below:

If you’re looking for more tactics to create a converting digital catalog, check out our post on designing a digital catalog that converts.

This could be, for example, if you need to send your catalog off for review by a colleague, who doesn't have Admin access. Alternatively, perhaps you want to create a catalog with offers specific to a certain customer, which you don’t want others to see.

You can control who has access to your digtal catalogs by applying a password to it. Doing so means that you can share it with whoever needs early access, and only password holders can access it!

Besides the statistics in the iPaper platform, you may want to compile the data for comparison with other marketing activities and channels in a single dashboard, such as Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics.