The power of email marketing is limitless only when your brand can stand out and your message is clearly understood.
Today, traditional catalog marketing has made a comeback with a twist. eCommerce companies today send AI-generated digital catalogs to stay relevant and ahead in their email marketing efforts.
Here’s our take on the infinite potential of digital catalogs and how they trigger and drive sales to your online eCommerce store.
Billions of emails are sent and received globally every day. But Barack Obama’s fundraising emails are still remembered for having raised a whopping $690 million back in 2012.
To run an eCommerce business successfully, your marketing strategies have to be on point. Luckily, digital catalog marketing lets you benefit from using AI in marketing and sales that can lead to significantly higher volumes of sales in eCommerce.
In 2023, the number of global e-mail users was 4.37 billion, which is set to increase by ~12% by 2027.
Remember when IKEA bid adieu to its annual print catalog, bringing its 70-year run to a screeching halt? It transformed 286 pages of its print catalog into a 3-hour 41-minute auditory experience.
It is clear that we are fast moving away from traditional print catalogs to match steps with the changing needs of discerning customers.
With digital catalogs, you can dynamically update prices, product specifications, etc. as often as you need. There is also no printing cost or paper wastage involved. Even search engines love digital catalogs.
Online product catalogs also lead to better product discovery among a larger audience. Since online product catalogs are automated, there is absolutely no time wasted on curating new catalogs. And so it is easier to launch new products or introduce new features to get into the market quickly.
Segmented emails can drive 30% more opens and 50% more clickthroughs than unsegmented ones. eCommerce businesses are seen segmenting their email groups based on demographics, behavioral, psychographic, and geographical data.
The right segmentation allows you to create campaigns that resonate with the specific needs of your target audience, find and attract new leads, leading to clicks and conversions. You can also use historical data like past purchases/ inquiries to segment or resegment existing customer groups.
Catering to each of the different categories of buyers is necessary to maintain a steady customer base. Further, many small to mid-sized businesses have admitted to seeing an increase in profits by offering free shipping.
A hotel with a pet resort, for instance, may buy dog food in bulk. Repeat customers can be offered loyalty points or a membership to allow them access to VIP benefits like seasonal discounts and early-bird offers on rooms, pet accessories, pet grooming services, toys, pet food, etc
Audience segmentation is not something you’d want to do manually. It is time-consuming and prone to human errors. AI-powered eCommerce Platforms like ewiz commerce can help you automate this process and help you segment your customers using pre-defined triggers.
According to a recent research study, 64% of respondents would buy products that are visually more appealing. While having custom offers surely helps, you must also personalize your catalog. This means including products that a prospect is more likely to buy.
A great digital catalog maker can create personalized email templates using a machine-learned selection of product listings. It can add seasonal offers and catchy call-to-action buttons, use images that are more engaging, and can time the emails to send at an optimal time of day.
Ecommerce marketing automation tools like the Marcomm Creator by ewiz commerce could do this for you.
Using it, you can create custom catalogs within minutes. You can experiment with different free catalog design templates and create your own custom template and set it to a specific audience group.
Apart from this, you can also reap the benefit of email marketing automation. These tools use artificial intelligence to analyze your customer data (both past behavior and real-time data), segment customers, and trigger emails to specific groups based on the data gathered.
And of course, you do have a say in it. Using the data gathered, you can set or edit triggers, modify the templates, content, offers on the personalized recommendations provided by the digital catalog software.
Digital catalogs make everything so easy. You can add links to your social media accounts, blogs, or any other marketing material you’d need to spread the word. It triggers pre-timed emails that would influence customers’ buying behaviors and empower your email marketing campaigns.
For smooth and dynamic product catalog management, online retail store products must be precisely ordered with minimal manual intervention. Product tags like product names, brands, product type or categories, price, brand, color, suppliers, etc must be set. All of these will be included in your product catalog.
Automated product tagging organizes and tags product images in the online product catalog based on specific characteristics. The machine-learning algorithms identify objects in images, videos, and other visual content and assign a value to them.
In order to improve visibility and product discovery, most eCommerce businesses opt for automated product tagging. And so, your online catalog must also be SEO-friendly. Incorrect catalog data and product tagging will lead to incorrect search results.
Manual catalog tagging is almost impossible. Your digital catalog has to be informative, easy on the eyes, and also must have accurate information. Powerful descriptive tags that are generated from smart analytics using artificial intelligence are the only way out.
Apart from only collecting product data, image tagging also gathers user behavioral data surrounding a specific product. When clubbed with various sales and marketing campaigns, this ensures a higher rate of engagement than any other eCommerce sales and marketing strategy.
Automatic tagging gives you a LOT of data. This will help your sales and marketing team do wonders when it comes to increasing sales and conversions. They will now understand what customers really like, what are their buying trends and what can of offers are most likely to resonate with them.
Spend time monitoring your campaigns’ performance. Analyze what worked and what did not. B2B eCommerce platforms may notice that employees of a particular company are making solo purchases of different products. Offering them corporate discounts would then make good business sense to encourage them to buy more and buy together.
Campaign reports will tell you how often your catalogs were viewed, which products got more views, and which ones were finally purchased. These insights can help you craft more specific and targeted campaigns, prevent wastage of resources and help create a more sustainable business model.
After sending a couple of email campaigns, you will have a huge stream of data on your prospect’s activities. Opens, clicks, site visits, time spent, and a list of all inquiries placed. This is gold!
This real-time data will become core to all your marketing and sales efforts. Your sales team will now have a head start because it’s no longer a standard pitch. They can personalize their calls and emails based on the data you have shared. The same goes for your eCommerce marketing teams.
Once they know their customers, they can plan their next set of activities accordingly. They could follow up with specific offers, share invites for special events, or offer discounted prices at the right time to induce purchases.
An AI-driven digital catalog software can also help reduce friction between teams due to idea clashes as there is ample data to back any new business decision. Certain email designs and templates, ongoing offers, etc that aren’t doing well currently can be scrapped to create new ones.
ewiz commerce is the world’s only B2B eCommerce platform with built-in AI-powered marketing automation tools and software. Create personalized shopping experiences for your customers using AI-powered digital catalog marketing and management.
Call us today to explore over 100 features for your unique business objectives, including ideas and tools for the coolest custom digital catalogs and hot inquiries.
6 ways how digital catalogs can attract 'Hot Leads' to your eCommerce business
