Catalog Design from the best design firm in Pittsburgh

Catalog Design: Pittsburgh’s Best Firm

Catalog design is key print design tool for marketing strategy. Prizum Creative can help you design the ideal layout and structure!

Q: Do catalogs still drive sales in the face of the internet?
A: Yes! A catalog will drive trips to the store and the store will drive a trip to the web. Printed catalogs with interactive elements, coupons and discount codes will often drive users directly to the website.

01 – Catalogs are important

In the digital age catalogs are still important for a variety of reasons. Chief among those reasons is that people like to keep catalogs on hand. Catalogs can be attractive in a way digital images are not because the touch and feel of printed material is an experience we still enjoy. Like most print materials, people tend to collect and save catalogs.

Up to about a decade ago, catalogs were the original omnichannel and in the sense of retail the internet is technically just a giant catalog. Turns out that there are plenty of reports where people contact digital only companies and request catalogs from them, even Amazon is considering a printed catalog!

Catalogs have withstood the technology age because there are no advertisements in a catalog, less distractions mean people spend more time immersed in their interest, uninterrupted. No popups, no digital nags and no temptation to bounce over to social media, catalogs are making a comeback.

02 – Interactive elements in print catalogs

Interactive eCatalogs are designed and programmed with the same elements in mind as printed catalog design, with an extra layer of digital flair. This interactive layer can range from augmented reality in printed catalogs to coupons and discount codes that are only available in the printed edition.

When your customers know that special catalog only coupons are to be found in the print edition, they will invite a permanent piece of your marketing into their home. Customers then show those catalogs to friends and family making the catalog an effective trophy as well as tool of brand loyalty.

03 – Online only eCommerce catalogs

An interesting tactic and phenomenon have occurred recently in the realm of eCommerce and web design – online only versions of catalogs. Online catalogs serve several purposes. For example, they can reduce the cost of building an eCommerce website by stripping out all of the ordering and payment layer features with the goal of simply making an internet based catalog that costs less than building a fully enabled eCommerce website.

Interactive PDF files and a variety of Catalog Software systems like Salsify and Adobe’s Digital publishing suite have brought interactive catalogs onto the internet in an interesting way. It is now possible to serve different catalogs to users in multiple sizes and formats such as a smaller catalog for a mobile phone, another one for an iPad and yet another one for a desktop computer.

If the digital catalog and the print catalog are designed correctly and at the same time the process of going from digital to print is easy, Prizum Creative can help you develop both versions at the same time.

04 – Catalog mail merging

Specific tactics and professional experience in catalog design are needed to pull off a successful mail merge and can also save your company money. When any piece of marketing is mailed, its weight is a determining factor in cost; the size and the thickness of the paper also affect the user experience and the cost of delivery. USPS knows that catalogs remain a marketing powerhouse.

Here at Prizum Creative, we pride ourselves on being able to save money for our clients by carefully blending engineering, experience, design and print tactics in print and publication design.

05 – Dynamic catalogs with granular analytics

It is now possible to design, print and send different catalogs, with different content to different customers by collecting information about their preferences. Using target audiences, we can successfully produce advanced catalogs that are slightly different for customers or advanced ones that are granular, and change based on their buying habits or interests. We can do this with target market research or by Preparing a Customer Profile that is unique to each shopper.

A great example of this tactic is Giant Eagle, where by tracking the purchases of their shoppers and tying them into a discount card (with the users address), custom catalogs can be printed and mailed to that customer. Those catalogs can be unique to each user or generalized based on the market. They can have different pages, different coupons and even very different designs.

Catalogs built with granular analytics are a new and powerful tool of marketing as they can introduce customers to products that are similar to their likes and also because they can be persuaded to buy other products or brands. Next time you get your catalog in the mail from your grocery store compare it to your neighbor or friend. If they are using targeted demographic tactics, you will see 2 slightly different catalogs.