The holiday season has already begun. The pace of our lives speeds up and emotions run high. It all begins with Thanksgiving, then Black Friday and Cyber Monday, leading up to Christmas and New Year.
These last months of the year are a great time for you to promote your business and increase sales. While the 2022 season focused on increasing profitability during a challenging economy, Salesforce’s holiday shopping predictions show that 2023 is all about keeping loyal customers happy.
Why? Because finding new customers is getting more expensive and marketing budgets are shrinking. Since existing customers drive most of retailers’ revenue, keeping them satisfied this season should be top priority.
That's why creating and launching a holiday product catalog or a gift guide to engage and nurture your loyal clients and even get the new ones is a great idea. Whether you are a small business or a large corporation, an online catalog or gift guide can play a leading role in your holiday promotions.
So let’s see how to make catalogs and gift guides the stars of your holiday marketing. By the way, if you don’t have PDFs yet, we’ve specially created a Canva catalog template to get you started and design your own PDF holiday catalog. And if you have print-ready PDFs, you can easily turn them into interactive online catalogs that engage and inspire.
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#1 Design Your Catalog in Holiday Style to Drive More Attention
The holiday season is the time of festive feelings and traditional activities. So, even if your brand style is rather formal, you can add a bit of holiday cheer to your marketing materials to create an emotional connection with your clients.
The easiest thing to do it is to design your holiday catalog with seasonal accents: add holiday images and colors, bright titles and fancy fonts, or even a winter edition of your logo.
Look how Christmas background creates a special holiday atmosphere and showcases your catalog at its best.
Color and style are powerful and essential tools for dressing up your catalogs to match the holiday mood. There’s a big variety of holiday colors to choose from—you don’t have to use green and red all the time: gold, orange, and blue work just as well. Don’t be afraid to be creative—think of this as an opportunity to add a human touch to your marketing activities.
Check out this nice looking holiday catalog full of light and warmth. And adding a company logo helps your clients to instantly recognize your brand and start reading right away.
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#2 Enrich Your Content with Interactivity to Increase Sales
Holiday catalogs and gift guides are often centered on the best and most exclusive products and services. Because when customers know that certain items are in limited supply, they react.
Make these products the focus of your interactive catalog—put them on the cover and link them to the products in your online store. People can just click on the ones they like and buy them right away. Doing this gives you more opportunities to create rich content and enhance your communication with your audience.
Check out our video on how to enhance your catalogs with interactivity and wow your readers right away!
Pop-up Images and Galleries
You can add pop-up images and galleries to showcase your products at their best. Adding a pop-up image gallery allows you to show the items in your catalog from every angle and in every color. Your readers will love this immersive shopping experience, and your products will sell like hot cakes! It’s also possible to weave images right into the page—add fresh photos to make your catalogs informative and engaging. Or update the old illustrations to always keep your digital materials up-to-date.
For example, check out this lovely holiday catalog by Precious Moments Company. They made festive limited edition figurines the main focus of their Christmas gift catalog and added pop-up images to show all the items in detail. Plus, the readers can open the first pop-up and navigate through all the images within the page, slide, or double spread.
Precious Moments Christmas Catalog
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Animated GIFs
Be sure to add GIFs to your holiday catalogs. GIFs are great for making your product seem even more engaging and lifelike to consumers than a standard image. You can draw customer attention to your best-selling items by simply setting each GIF to autoplay once the page is turned. See how almost every page of ANDA’s Christmas gift catalog has a cute GIF that brightens up the mood and creates a light and festive atmosphere.
Christmas Catalog
Videos
What can be more interactive than videos? Add them to your holiday product catalog to make it even more engaging. Tell a story about your products and add some nostalgia and sentiment to keep with the holiday spirit. Videos can be very effective for gaining traffic, views, and engagement, so a digital gift guide with compelling videos could be just the thing to get people interested in your products, allowing you to crush your holiday sales goals. Knowing that, APISource added videos to its catalog to show off the products and make every page even more informative. Videos helped them add great value to the reading experience and create a festive mood.
API Holiday Gift Guide#3 Go Omnichannel to Create a Wider Outreach
PDFs are the main format used for holiday catalogs and guides, but they are not made for a seamless experience on the web and in social networks. Interactive online catalogs, on the other hand, are great for easily sharing what you have to offer and reaching a wide audience, including both current clients and new ones. When audiences are ready to buy your brand, be everywhere they are.
Use all available marketing channels—embed digital catalogs into your website, share them on social networks, place a QR code anywhere you need, or create a special holiday-themed marketing campaign centered around exclusive offers from the catalogs. Such a tool as FlippingBook allows you to generate a QR code, download it in the PNG format, and use it on your website, blog, or printed materials. The more channels, the better!
See for yourself: scan this code to see a gorgeous catalog.
Keep in mind that you’re not only targeting clients who are looking for deals for themselves but also those who need a little help making purchases for loved ones. Holiday guides from your company might be exactly what they need.
Here are some great examples and useful ideas for your holiday email marketing.
#4 Prepare Your Catalog for the Best Mobile Experience
Mobile shopping has been on an upward trajectory for years. Customers claim that purchasing via mobile phones saves time. When it comes to 2023, retail mcommerce sales are expected to account for more than 43% of total sales in 2023, and 44% by 2025, slowly equaling out the mobile commerce vs ecommerce ratio. So it’s essential that your viewers have a seamless experience with your catalogs and guides no matter the device they are using.
Make sure that the copy and images look sharp and clean on mobile devices and that links and videos are visible and easy to click and open. Mobile-friendly digital catalogs give you a competitive advantage over thousands of holiday marketing offers and help increase engagement and conversions.
Learn about the easy ways to create content that looks great on mobile devices.
‘Tis the Season
There are many reasons to feel optimistic this holiday season.
We know this can be a stressful time of the year. But now, when you are able to create a great holiday catalog that is personal, relevant to your audience, and importantly, converts—you don’t have to worry.
After you have designed your catalogs and gift guides to work for you, you can sit back, find some time for yourself, reflect on a job well done, and see your sales and conversions grow.
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