As B2B sellers look for new ways to drive sales and expand their reach, the online catalog has emerged as an effective, multi-functional tool that can reduce overhead, measure engagement, and grow revenues — all while satisfying the demands of today’s savvy and increasingly digitally-native B2B buyers.
3 ways online catalogs are driving ROI
Today’s B2B buyer overwhelmingly prefers self-service and digital experiences to offline or traditional sales. Giving them an online alternative to print catalogs, especially during the research and purchase phase of the B2B customer journey, is a win-win for all parties.
Here are 3 ways online catalogs drive ROI for B2B sales:
Reducing Overhead
With rising production, postage and environmental costs, mass-print catalogs are an expensive undertaking for most businesses. While still extremely useful as a branding tool, print catalogs can be a slow and inflexible solution for today’s modern and fast-moving B2B landscape. By contrast, many online catalogs can be updated in real-time, making it easy to run special promotions, sales events, or set customized pricing levels on the fly. If you’re using an instant, catalog creation tool like Publishop, the savings are even more palpable, as you are repurposing a pre-existing PDF catalog into a live, interactive flipbook with shopping cart functionality. Not only does this reduce admin time spent on manually hotspotting catalogs and managing sales orders, it also stretches your marketing dollars to help you drive even more value from your efforts.
Measuring Engagement
Online catalogs also make it possible for sellers to track and automate many aspects of their reporting processes. Measuring conversion rates, impressions and engagement becomes possible, which means marketing efforts can be instantly tweaked to minimize or maximize a particular effort or strategy. While measurement from a print catalog is also possible, it’s harder to create a direct connection between the sale and the print catalog itself, as users may have done additional research online. Ultimately, access to more data points gives you a roadmap for serving your customers better — whether that’s through personalizing promotions or automatic upsells and cross-sells, you are creating a richer and more satisfying customer experience.
Growing Revenues
Shoppable online catalogs can help grow revenues in a few different ways. By automating static catalog files and creating associated product links and display info in seconds, online catalogs can reduce the excessive amount of admin time spent on manually hotspotting catalogs and other parts of the sales order management process. In addition, online catalogs with integrated shopping cart functionality and secure payment processing allow users to shop directly from the online catalog environment, driving more conversions. Online catalogs are also shareable, which means you can boost marketing efforts easily by sharing your catalog across different platforms and online channels — expanding your customer base and your reach without incurring any additional costs.
Digital catalogs serve many functions and are a cost-effective tool for the B2B seller’s modern e-commerce arsenal. Curious about the kind of ROI a digital catalog could produce for your sales org? Check out our ROI calculator to get a quick snapshot of your savings.
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