The Paperless Catalog Comes of Age
Truly effective multichannel marketing is an ongoing challenge for most catalogers. Ultimately, you want to deliver consistent customer experiences across all your sales channels, right?
Although there isn’t one formula for success, there are a growing number of multichannel commerce tools that can help you achieve that goal. One such tool is a virtual catalog, defined by Chicago-based the e-tailing group as an almost exact replica of your print catalog integrated by varying degrees into your Web site, as opposed to a simple menu of products. By using a virtual catalog, customers can experience the aesthetics of a print catalog as well as enjoy the convenience of Web shopping.
No doubt you’ve seen these virtual catalogs. They look almost exactly like actual catalog pages, but they have some interesting features. For example, site visitors can zoom in on a picture, turn a page as if viewing a print catalog, rotate a picture, etc.
According to the etailing group’s “Shop the Catalog” report, three providers compete for the business of turning print catalogs into virtual versions: RichFX, Scene7 and DS Retail. Costs for this service vary depending, for example, on the degree of customization of the tool and your own in-house development resources.
Noelle Buoncristiano, associate editor of Catalog Success, asked three catalogers who have posted virtual catalogs to their Web sites to share their experiences and insights.
Mark Friedman
chief marketing officer,
Redcats USA (formerly Brylane)
Merchandise: apparel and home decor
www.brylane.com
Catalog Success: Why did you implement a virtual catalog instead of design a more traditional Web site?
Friedman: We spend a lot of time and money to create a page for our catalogs. The Internet wasn’t able to leverage all of that time and money for us. We needed a way to have the customer understand more than one item at a time [as with a traditional site].
We wanted customers to be able to see a complete room setting from our home catalog segment or a few different ways of putting an outfit together. By being able to reproduce the catalog creative online — and then allowing customers to directly make a purchase from that creative — we believe we’re bringing together the best of both media.
CS: Tell me about the implementation process.
Friedman: The implementation process takes on many flavors depending on the legacy systems you have in place. For Brylane, we needed to build “containers” for our sites that would hold all of the pages to eventually be shopped by customers. We also needed to create PDFs of the pages and then provide low-resolution scanned documents to RichFX to complete the execution.
There were some moderate costs associated with this through our pre-press suppliers, as well as some minimal internal costs to build the containers. We were able to [post a catalog online] in about four weeks from the time we started thinking about this. For each successive business we bring up, it takes a shorter period of time as we learn the nuances of the process.
CS: What are the benefits to Redcats of having virtual catalogs?
Friedman: Many customers are using our paper catalog as a driver to our Web site. We believe customers take the book, see what they want to buy and, in many instances, go directly to that item on our Web site. In other cases, they’ve seen our catalog but then sit down to browse our Web site.
The online catalog allows customers to flip the pages and stop where they want to shop. We believe we’re seeing a higher average order value when they shop using the online catalog.
CS: Are there disadvantages or challenges?
Friedman: The actual execution of getting the catalogs online is a challenge. Our internal process needed to change to make that happen. For example, we needed to send the PDF files to our provider, and we needed to create some Web capability to allow for the feature on the site.
Secondly, we have many different versions of our catalogs. We mail quite often, and because the process of getting a book online is time-consuming, we currently aren’t putting up all versions of all drops. This has led to some customer confusion. The cover they see in the mail might be the same as what we have online, but page counts may differ.
Another challenge has been the analysis of whether the return on investment truly is there. Unless you have two sites — one with the online feature and one without — it’s very difficult to know for sure whether or not the sales you get truly are incremental.
CS: What role does this play in your multichannel strategy?
Friedman: It’s one piece of it. Many people shop online while they have a paper catalog in their hands. We know the catalog drives customers to the Web. We believe if we can make traditional paper-catalog customers feel more comfortable online, then we’re serving them well.
CS: What advice can you offer to other catalogers thinking about this?
Friedman: At least try it, as long as it doesn’t take time away from other features that may be more core to their offers. The start-up process isn’t that difficult, and we’re seeing that customers really like the functionality. We hope to improve upon what we’re doing and do a better job of analyzing the performance.
Clay Lingo
vice president, direct to consumer, Illuminations
Merchandise: candles and home decor
www.illuminations.com
Catalog Success: Why did you implement a virtual catalog?
Lingo: Like every retailer, we have budgetary limitations that preclude us from printing and mailing a catalog to every customer in our database. By creating a digital version of our print catalog, we knew we easily could leverage our e-mail database, as well as the traffic to our Web site, thereby expanding distribution on a very substantial and low-cost basis.
An electronic catalog also provides a unique means of browsing and purchasing within the e-commerce marketplace. Many of our customers, while appreciating the speed and convenience of the Web, still prefer to browse and shop via catalog. It’s a format that’s comfortable for them. By presenting the customer with a digital catalog and simultaneously offering the convenience of Web ordering, we’ve achieved a synergy that’s resulted in substantial increases for conversion and average order size.
CS: Tell me about the implementation process.
Lingo: We create PDFs of each page and e-mail them to Scene7 for production. This is a one- or two-person process that takes only a few hours. Along with the PDFs, we send a spreadsheet that has a URL for each product in the catalog. Scene7 image-maps each page and does all of the URL linking. Special features such as zoom, pan, rotate and page turn are added as part of the production process.
They then assemble the catalog, publish it and host it within their network. Start to finish time is typically less than a week. We check the finished catalog for quality, publish it on our Web site and then deploy it to our customers via e-mail.
CS: What are the benefits of having a virtual catalog?
Lingo: The ability to greatly increase distribution at a nominal cost is probably the greatest benefit. About a week before the print catalog drops, we e-mail a digital version to customers belonging to our store loyalty program. It’s a welcome benefit to our members, as well as a terrific store-driver.
Often we’ll create a catalog that’s 100-percent digital rather than basing it on a print version. Aside from providing us another opportunity to communicate with our customers, producing a purely digital catalog gives us the ability to test and refine our offerings prior to producing something in a physical format.
And while there are fewer opportunities for a second drop of a print catalog, the digital arena makes it a snap to swap out a cover, replace one or more spreads, and remail [electronically] — at virtually no cost — to our entire e-mail database.
CS: Are there any disadvantages you can note?
Lingo: We view our electronic catalog as an adjunct to, and not a replacement for, our print catalog. The ability to pick up a print catalog, read it anywhere and take it with you is an attribute that can’t be matched in the digital realm.
CS: Any results you can share?
Lingo: Sales directly attributable to the digital catalog achieve the highest average order value within any sales channel. On an ROI basis, we see a return of several hundred percent.
CS: What role does this play in your multichannel marketing strategy?
Lingo: We segment our e-mail list and sometimes use the digital catalog as a pure store-driver. More often, we deploy an electronic catalog with offers that are valid across all channels.
To stimulate demand on a channel-specific basis, we sometimes develop offers that only are redeemable in-store or online. The same holds true when we’re clearing inventory: We’ll deploy an offer that’s redeemable in the channel where we want to sell through the inventory.
CS: What advice can you offer to other catalogers about this?
Lingo: View the digital catalog as another communication touchpoint with your customers, and always remember that it complements, rather than replaces, your print version.
Define your objectives at the outset and develop the means to track results. Like anything else, test, analyze, refine and retest to achieve optimal results. Finally, make sure you choose a great partner to produce your catalog.
Jarid Lukin
e-commerce business manager, LEGO Shop at Home
Merchandise: toys
http://shop.lego.com
Catalog Success: Why did you implement a virtual catalog?
Lukin: Our global e-commerce site launched four years ago and has been a great success. In the fall of 2003, we added virtual catalogs to our site to help some of our existing customers who are less familiar with online shopping to adapt to the new channel.
CS: Tell me about the implementation process.
Lukin: All we have to do is provide RichFX with the pre-existing PDF assets that we already send to the printer for the paper catalog. RichFX then creates the flash assets we need for the virtual catalog, which they turn around to us in about two weeks.
Since RichFX handles most of the production for the virtual catalogs, it literally takes our Web developers less than an hour to implement a new virtual catalog.
CS: What are the benefits of having a virtual catalog?
Lukin: Online catalogs help ease some of the e-commerce “late-adopters” into the online shopping process. These customers already are used to and are comfortable with a catalog. And we’ve received thousands of positive comments from our customers that the online catalogs are cool, fun and easy to use — ultimately leading to a better shopping experience for them.
CS: What are the disadvantages?
Lukin: It requires a fair amount of bandwidth on the user’s end for optimal experience. However, the majority of our users are on broadband connections, so this issue has had minimal impact on us.
CS: Any results to share?
Lukin: When we first implemented the online catalog, we conducted an A/B test using our Web analytics software to determine the application’s success. The test results demonstrated that both average order value and conversion rates significantly increased for users that had online catalog access.
CS: What role does this play in your multichannel marketing strategy?
Lukin: From a marketing perspective, we’ve successfully used e-mail campaigns to drive users to take advantage of online catalog functionality and to increase sales. The overall LEGO experience is about playing, learning, interacting, exploring, discovering and imagining — all with a heavy dose of fun. The virtual catalog exemplifies many of these features on our Web site.
CS: What advice can you offer to other catalogers?
Lukin: Virtual catalogs can be a very effective tool for a certain segment of your audience. When implementing them, follow the best practices, and measure results to ensure optimum benefit.
- Companies:
- Brylane