Catalogue Design
A report by the Harvard Business Review shows that catalogues can yield ROIs as high as 600%, over twice as much as email marketing. Lime’s top-of-the-line catalogue design and printing services can showcase your business and accelerate its growth beyond anyone’s expectations, even yours!
What is the difference between a catalogue, a brochure and a flyer?
Catalogues contain information about some or all of a business’s product offerings in book or folio form, using attractive design and persuasive copy to spur customers’ purchase decisions. Brochures are marketing materials in fold-out or booklet form, containing information about a business, product or service. Flyers take the more compact form of handbills, which accommodate less content, advertising specific products and services or events.
Catalogues are the ideal marketing tool for impressing both existing and new customers with the quality, distinctiveness and professionalism of a business and its products. Brochures are better suited for highlighting a range of products and services, and often designed to impress. Flyers are smaller and cost less, making them a good choice for conveying basic information, even to “cold” prospects.
If you’re interested in brochures or flyers, please explore Lime’s specialised services for brochure and flyer design and production.
Is it true that printed catalogues are still effective?
A surprising number of research studies across several countries have found that print catalogues continue to enjoy tremendous popularity among customers:
- Research by the USPS found that 84% of retail customers placed an order after receiving a catalogue.
- Across the UK, USA and Canada, studies measuring brain activity showed a deeper, more long-lasting impact of catalogues and printed mailers on consumers when compared to digital catalogues and online ads.
- Australian customers of all ages enjoy receiving and reading catalogues, with millennials (surprisingly!) showing the highest preference, followed by Baby Boomers and Gen Z readers.
What are the different types of catalogues?
What makes for a highly effective catalogue?
Depending on the nature of your business, and more importantly, the type of audience you are targeting, the design and communication of a catalogue must be calibrated along two important parameters: the level of involvement and the degree of emotion influencing the customer’s decision-making.
Using this framework, it’s easy to see why an Ikea catalogue is full of art-directed photographs of tastefully decorated homes, while the catalogue of an insurance company or mining equipment manufacturer would be full of tables and diagrams, and a supermarket catalogue contains lots of product images, with prices highlighted prominently.
Each catalogue is trying to fulfil the same goal of helping customers find and buy products, but the differing consumer psychology suggests entirely different designs to fulfil that goal. With this in mind, see how Lime’s customised approach the perfect balance of imagery and wordcraft that places your business’s catalogues a cut above the rest:
Insights into consumer behaviour
Compared to the few minutes an average person spends on an online catalogue, four-fifths of customers save and browse through print catalogues for as long as three weeks. What’s more, neuroscience research shows that print catalogues elicit increased activation in a brain area that’s been shown to predict future purchases in consumers.
At Lime, our design process is guided by these and other insights specific to your business and industry, to produce catalogues that maximise your audience’s interest and attention.
The right information at the right time
For products with more emotionally-driven purchase decisions, catalogues need to speak to the reader’s feelings. For instance, a catalogue that positions a retailer’s camping equipment as the gateway to the great outdoors is going to be more memorable and relatable for customers than one that merely extols the durability and affordability of the gear.
By contrast, rationally-driven product categories demand catalogues with answers to the reader’s questions and concerns about the products. This involves anticipating what information or product image the reader may want to see, and ensuring that everything is easily discoverable and scannable.
Whether your products are emotional or rational purchases, Lime’s design process ensures that your catalogues are page-turners, keeping readers exploring for longer, enabling them to discover more of your brand and product lineup. With a custom-designed catalogue by Lime, you can expect to inform and enchant your audience, and keep them coming back for more.
Powerful calls to action
No matter how well-crafted a catalogue is, it will fail to boost business growth unless it impels potential customers to take action – by making a call, visiting a nearby store, or ordering online. Lime ensures that our custom-designed catalogues have thoughtful, strategically placed calls to action, providing customers with your business’s telephone number, email address, online store URL, QR codes for special offers, and so forth.
Why should I choose Lime for my next catalogue project?
When you opt for a customised catalogue from Lime, here’s how we ensure that we deliver on substance, style, and speed.
Modular, flexible design: We understand that business can be dynamic; products may suddenly have to be dropped or added because of supplier issues, changing market trends, or myriad other factors. Fortunately, our proprietary catalogue design process enables us to streamline even the most complex projects, ensuring changes can always be implemented quickly and effectively.
Persuasion powered by consumer-insight: B2B corporate buyers and individual consumers think and act completely differently. Accordingly, we tailor what each catalogue talks about and how it’s said, to maximise the persuasion for your target readers. This includes compellingly written product descriptions and attractive layouts that maintain visual interest.
Scalable, error-free workflow: Whether you have a dozen products or thousands, Lime’s systems make managing product information and imagery very efficient. We have robust pre-press cross-checking procedures in place, to avoid costly delays at the printing press, or worse – undetected errors in print.
On-demand photography and image editing: With Lime’s full-service capabilities that include photography and image editing, your project never has to be stalled waiting indefinitely for new assets. Need to add new products or images? We offer product photography services. Or if you take the photos yourself, we can colour correct and isolate the product backgrounds..
Fast turnaround: Given our extensive experience with the retail and B2B verticals, we appreciate the pressures that drive “need it yesterday” deadlines. The unique Lime workflow lets us deliver faster and better than conventional agencies.
E-commerce and cross-platform compatibility: An e-commerce website is essentially an online catalogue. What if you could leverage the time and effort that you’re investing in a physical catalogue to also power your online store and digital catalogues? At Lime we are a one-stop-shop specialising in both – print as well as online media.
With our catalogue design services, we can also semi-automate the setup of a full-fledged database-driven e-commerce store (with a shopping cart or Request Quote facility) using the same content in your catalogue. By re-using the same data, there is a major cost-saving. You save even more in the future because updates become easier to manage, as you only need to notify us once and your catalogue, as well as online store, will be updated simultaneously.
Product database management and promotion planning tool: For ultimate efficiency, Lime also provides custom product database development services. We can build an offline database system that powers both – your catalogue as well as website. This system can store details about your products that your staff can access to manage the stock. It can also monitor buying patterns and help you analyse trends. We can even program it to help you plan the content of upcoming catalogues and other promotions. Read more about how this system can assist with other areas of your business.