With fall on the horizon and the holiday season rapidly approaching, businesses can expect to see shoppers ramp up their holiday season shopping efforts. Now more than ever before, consumers value the convenience of shopping from home, meaning marketing efforts need to reach consumers in the same place – home. One of the best ways to do that is using direct mail marketing pieces, but perhaps no option makes for more effective direct mail marketing for this time of the year than marketing with well-designed, professionally printed catalogs.
Catalogs are victims of an underserved reputation as a relic of days gone by, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Catalogs are easy for customers to use, and they present a lot of information and marketing content for the customers that receive them. It’s a way to present a suite of products in a professional, effective way. This guide will help you understand how to design effective catalogs and use them for your holiday season marketing efforts.
Organization is Key
The most important facet of a well-designed catalog is organization. Organizing the items within the catalog by category, use, or theme will help give the catalog itself a sense of direction and organization that will ensure readers don’t get exhausted by the sheer amount of information in the catalog itself. One of the best ways to ensure your catalog winds up in the recycling bin is to overlook the importance of this step. Prioritize organization and ease of use to ensure that readers actually enjoy looking through your catalog, giving them a chance to peruse it in its entirety. Remember, customers’ time is valuable, so make the best use of whatever time you’re allotted.
Provide Easy Navigation
A table of contents or index is an absolute must in catalog design. Some customers will prefer to look over a specific section of your catalog that best matches their interests as a consumer. Helping them find the section that’s most relevant to them is the best way to ensure that their eyes ultimately wind up on the pages of your catalog. Another way you can help them navigate through the pages easily is by adding colored tabs/borders on the side of each page that represent the specific category, section, or theme. For example, if you’re selling furniture, you could label all the pages featuring sofas with red borders, beds with blue borders, and dining sets with green borders. This is a simple, visually pleasing way to make your catalog easier and more enjoyable to flip through.
Design to Fit Your Brand
Think about the nature of the products your catalog contains. If you offer a large selection of a wide variety of products, you’ll want to create enough space to properly organize all of these items within your catalog. This will likely force you to creatively use space, minimize text, focus on the key details of the products, and use small photographs in order to fit multiple products on a page. If you deal more in niche or artisan style crafted goods, you can focus more on an artistic style with a focus on high-quality images that dominate and/or bleed off the edges of the page. This style provides customers with a view of the effort that goes into the product and the high levels of detail and quality the product boasts.
Partner with a Quality Printer
Keeping in tune with good design techniques, proper structuring and organization and using great images will make sure you catalog is memorable, readable and effective. Working with an experienced, talented team of printing professionals is the final step to ensuring your catalog is one to be truly excited about. You can count on U.S. Press to guide you through every step of the way and help you create a catalog that exceeds your marketing expectations. Contact your U.S. Press account manager to get started today!
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