One of the most impactful designs that you'll make as a business owner or as the marketing guy in your company is the design of your product catalog.
The right product catalog design will entice everyone who picks up your brochure to convert into a customer. The wrong one will serve as anti-customer repellant.
In this article, we've got a simple guide for you to follow so you know exactly how to create the kind of product catalog design that attracts and converts customers at a high deal value.
Pick the Right Size and Format
First things first: it's important that you pick the right size and format to use in your product catalog. Finding the right balance of size is the most crucial step and can often be the difference-maker in someone just glancing at your catalog and someone actually picking it up and perusing it.
You don't want your product catalog to be too big and unwieldy. If that's the case, then your catalog design will scream to viewers that your catalog is cumbersome, unnecessarily long, and difficult to read. None of these negative connotations are ones that you want crossing your customers' minds.
At the same time, you don't want your catalog design to be too small, either. Particularly if you're in an industry that has a lot more elderly buyers, some older folk can be turned off by a smaller-sized catalog, thinking that it will have small, difficult-to-read font sizes.
Once you've picked the right size, it's time to move on to format. The format will depend heavily on how many products you have to showcase in your catalog. If you have a fair few, then consider going with a full-on, book-style catalog. But if you have only a couple of products to showcase in the catalog, then consider using a tri-fold or something similar.
Image Quality Is Key
Remember the proverb, "a picture tells a thousand words." In no scenario is that truer than with a product catalog. At the end of the day, people don't want to hear or read about your product. They just want to see it in action.
By taking high-quality pictures of your products, you can ensure that your target audience has a good understanding of what your product looks like and how it functions.
Don't be afraid to pay a little more and invest in a professional photographer and photography studio to take those pictures. If you don't know what you're doing, then your own photography could hurt your business if placed in your brochure. This is because if your catalog has unprofessional pictures, that can lead customers to think that your product itself is made unprofessionally.
Thus, it's very much worth it to spring for the professional photographer who does this for a living. You'll certainly see a return on your investment in terms of more customers buying your products after seeing the pictures.
Limit Font Usage
Any product catalog that has too many fonts vying for attention simply screams unprofessionalism. You shouldn't be trying to use a gimmicky collection of fonts in order to entice new customers; your products and the pictures of your products should largely speak for themselves.
Rule of thumb: if your product catalog is beginning to look like a NASCAR car, it's time to rethink your design and font choices.
Leverage High Quality Paper
There's a difference in the way good quality and low-quality paper feels. Always spring for the heavier stock of good quality paper, because that simple sense of touch can have a huge impact on whether or not the buyer in question purchases your product.
The higher quality the paper is, the more that your prospective customers will think that your business operates at a high level. Touch is a very important sense; use it in your catalog design to your company's advantage.
Hire a Professional Copywriter
Writing is no easy task — you might be the best salesman in the world in person, but that doesn't mean that those sales skills will automatically translate over in the written word. In order to avoid any major copywriting gaffes, it's important to ensure that you hire a professional copywriting service like Bootstrap Business public relations that does this kind of thing for a living.
Be Clear With Calls to Action
Remember what your goal is with the brochure: for the prospect who's browsing through the products to buy one of those products. To that end, you have to make sure that you give the prospect the next steps for him or her to go through once they finish browsing the brochure.
If you operate a business that sells high-end machinery, then make sure you include contact info for and a call to action to contact one of your top sales reps. If you operate a business that sells clothing, then make sure that you have a number where customers can make calls to order clothes or a link to a website where the customer can order the same.
If you don't have a call to action in your catalog, then you're simply wasting your brochure. People will pick it up, read through it, and maybe even get a little excited about the products. But if you don't actually give them concrete next steps for them to take action and convert into customers, then only a very small percentage will become real customers.
A/B Test Your Results
Last but not least, remember that testing is everything. You shouldn't merely settle for the very first design that you come up with. Remember that there are a multitude of different factors at play that can influence the conversion rate of your brochure.
Come up with a few different iterations of the design, wording, and product imagery. Test them by setting each type out for customers to look through, and assessing the conversion rate of each one. Take into account not only how many customers converted, but also the average deal size they converted at. Then, you'll have a good idea of which product catalog designs work best for your industry and your company.
Product Catalog Design Made Simple
With this concrete guide to product catalog design in your hand, you're all ready to go out and build your own high-conversion product catalog.
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