eCommerce has now become mainstream and everything is expected to be just a click away. One avenue that’s often overlooked but has immense potential to help you grow is catalog marketing.
Catalog marketing is an eCommerce sales & marketing technique used to sell eCommerce products using digital catalogs.
A catalog lists a set of items or products that may urge the customer to buy one or more things from the catalog.
eCommerce Catalog management is a dynamic process where products are organized in a specific way to ensure consistent and high-quality data across sales channels. An online catalog provides product names, descriptions, hierarchy, price, supplier, and other related details.
When used correctly, catalog marketing can land you hot inquiries and happy customers. Read more to find out why!
According to a recent survey conducted by HBR, the results showed that the “Email + catalog” group experienced a 15% lift in sales and a 27% lift in inquiries, compared to the “Email-only” group.
There’s evidence pointing towards a clear interest among Millennials towards the catalogs they receive in the mail.
Today, consumers want more than basic product information. They want accurate details, clear images, and the exact dimensions of a product. They want to know what it's going to cost them and how that expense is going to benefit them.
And so, it’s super-important that you understand in detail why catalog marketing can help sell your products faster.
Disney recently announced its plans to close at least 30% of its brick-and-mortar retail stores in North America — about 60 locations — by the end of 2021. Also, in the offing are plans to revamp its online store and integrate its digital retail operations with the mobile apps used by its consumers to up their eCommerce game.
As per Gartner, those that have operated enterprise marketplaces for more than a year will witness at least a 10% increase in their digital revenue by 2023.
The beauty of eCommerce is that it allows eCommerce businesses to transcend geographies and marketplaces.
The modern eCommerce platforms come with multilingual capabilities to cater to different regions. By integrating your catalog tool with your eCommerce store, you can easily create multilingual product catalogs and reach out to a local or global audience in their own language.
You can address the needs of your customer more accurately with custom catalogs with the right message and offers. For instance, regular customers buying a particular product in bulk can be targeted with bulk purchase offers, while discount buyers can be reached with discount offers.
Well-defined catalogs with automated product tagging allow businesses to improve their efficiency, categorize products based on certain attributes and accordingly create personalized catalogs for different segments of buyers.
This has been made simple and easy by AI-powered platforms such as ewiz commerce, which use historical data to predict personalized recommendations and generate customized catalogs in minutes. Also, these platforms come with dashboards to help them track buying behaviors and know exactly what their customers are looking for, the products they have liked.
If you have a thriving eCommerce business with thousands of products, imagine how tedious and time-consuming it would have been to add a new product line with print catalogs.
But digital catalogs take away the burden by offering quick ways to add new products in no time. You can have a glowing launch online ensuring reduced time-to-market. Digital catalogs also allow new products to debut almost instantaneously in the eCommerce world.
With properly designed digital catalogs, you do not have to manually manage entries or changes. Once you curate the catalogs the way you want them, you can simply publish them on all sales channels across multiple touchpoints. The best part about these catalogs is that they can be updated easily and often.
Etsy with its wide array of face masks and its efforts to personalize search results within its vast digital catalog had its revenue soaring to a whopping $10.3 billion, a 106.7% surge from the previous year.
The modern-day catalogs are a fresh departure from the not-so-impressive, random collection of product images seen in print catalogs. They are creative, aesthetic delights digitally honed to perfection to boost your abilities to communicate with your consumers and evoke strong emotional connections along the way.
They employ rich media as appealing images, product videos, tech specs to provide all information at a glance. Such is their pull that consumers can live vicariously through these catalogs. Catalogs now come with greater power and bigger influence.
When backed by the right eCommerce platforms and strategies, digital catalogs forge fresh ways for enriching product experiences in the wake of the new normal. They can help improve product attribution, create brand recall, and create hot inquiries.
With automation taking care of everything from product catalog navigation to synchronizing product information, updating product pages is now no longer a time-consuming chore. This also ensures that all stakeholders have instant access to the right information, thus paving the way for operational optimization.
The information can pertain to SKUs, images, videos, product documentation, etc. that not only minimizes the work of sales and marketing teams but simultaneously allows them to understand their customers better.
For instance, ewiz commerce helps them create marketing campaigns, set up auto-triggers and auto-lead engagement facilities, and view individual campaign reports. This not only tells them how a particular campaign is performing but also gives them the much-needed insights to plan for future campaigns.
Catalog marketing can boost the performance of your eCommerce business and help your customers make informed decisions. They ensure fewer cart abandonments and higher conversion rates while giving your workforce the much-needed respite from managing them manually.
Most of these catalog creator tools charge you a very nominal subscription cost, which could range anything from $10 to $250 per month. The basic ones are often cheap, but if you want to create effective and personalized catalogs, then it’s better to go for the AI-powered ones which offer product recommendations.
To start with catalog marketing, all you need to do is find the right catalog marketing tool and integrate it with your eCommerce store. There are a few eCommerce platforms like ewiz commerce which offer built-in catalog creation tools, making things easy for businesses. Also, there’s no limit on the number of catalogs you can create.
All these benefits make it one of the favorite tools for eCommerce sales & marketing teams.
With so much to look forward to on the eCommerce front, it’s time you went a step further in your eCommerce plans with simple but effective strategies.
ewiz Commerce is the world’s only B2B eCommerce platform with built-in AI-powered marketing tools to help you create personalized shopping experiences for your customers. Some of our offerings to help you with catalog marketing capabilities:
Call us today to explore over 100 features for your unique business objectives, including ideas and tools for the coolest custom catalogs and hot inquiries.
What is Catalog Marketing in eCommerce?
