A guide to seasonal catalog creation | Omi.so

What is a seasonal catalog in the eCommerce age? 

A seasonal catalog was a printed guide with illustrations and descriptions of all of a business’ seasonally relevant products, plus a form for customers who wanted to order them from you. 

However, in the last decade or so, digital catalogs have replaced physical ones almost entirely. Even retailers who used to rely on catalog selling have discontinued publication — IKEA officially cancelled its catalog in 2021.  

The catalog format is still with us — it’s just no longer on paper. An eCommerce website’s product pages are essentially a digitized catalog, with some added functionality: now, customers don’t have to fill out an order form to make a purchase, they can simply click “buy now.”

In our context, then, creating a seasonal catalog means updating your website with images and text that are relevant to the current moment of the year. It also means positioning your products as especially relevant and useful right now, due to an annual holiday or anticipated weather patterns. Done right, seasonal catalogs can help you create pertinent marketing campaigns that capture your customers’ imaginations and drive sales. 

Mon Shampoing uses Omi throughout the calendar year.

Why bother creating a seasonal catalog?

It pays to update your eCommerce site to follow the rhythms of the year. Creating seasonal catalogs allows you to:

• Encourage brand loyalty — so much of marketing is about making people feel something. Seasonal marketing is a way to suggest that users emotionally engage with your brand, since you insert your product into an upcoming experience they already feel something about — whether that’s a cosy autumn or a hot girl summer. 

  
  

• Trigger purchase events — it’s helpful for marketers to think in terms of triggers — the events or moments that motivate people to make a purchase. Seasonal marketing helps you show your customers why your products are relevant to buy right now, planting a possible purchase trigger in their mind. 

• Identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities — seasonal marketing is a way of telling customers why to buy your product — and if you know why customers are buying your product, you may be able to spot cross-selling opportunities. For example, if you’re selling someone sunscreen because it’s almost summer, you may be able to sell them a sun umbrella too.

  
  

• Plan your marketing year efficiently — when you know that your campaigns for the following year are scaffolded around a pre-agreed selection of holidays and seasons, you can distribute your resources judiciously. Use planned-for seasonal marketing to structure your ideas, allocate your budget, and set internal deadlines.

  
  

• Capitalize on seasonal opportunities  — seasonal marketing reflects existing seasonal buying patterns. For US retailers, the holiday season accounts for almost 17% of the years’ total sales. Why wouldn’t you want to double down your efforts to make the most of this annual trend? 

With these great benefits in mind, here’s how to create the kind of seasonal catalog that speaks to your customers’ annual customs and weather patterns, and drives sales. 

5 steps for creating a seasonal catalog that converts

Here’s how to create a seasonal catalog that’s primed for storytelling and conversion. 

1. Create a plan and define your goals 

Every great marketing initiative starts with figuring out the “why” and the “how”. Sit down with your team and establish: 

• Who your seasonal catalog will target: depending on the holiday or season you’re working around, it might make sense to go after a different or narrower customer persona than your go-to ICP segment. For example, if you sell chocolates and primarily sell to US citizens aged 25-40, you might narrow your target market to citizens aged 25-40 who are in a romantic relationship.

  
  

• The scope of your catalog: decide how ambitious you want to be with this initiative. Will you change every product page on your website, or just create a single landing page linking to several products? Using Omi’s Virtual Photo Studio, you can create a seasonal takeover of your socials or homepage, for example, turning them into temporary “catalogs.”

  
  

• How you will promote it: liaise with the rest of your marketing team to decide how to drive traffic to your seasonal catalog. You might choose to run ads to promote it, post about it on social media, and/or mention it in any customer emails or newsletters.

  
  

• How much resource you will use to create it: set yourself a deadline and a budget for creating this piece of content. Realistic estimates will depend on which tools you decide to use. For inspiration: Endro Cosmétique used Omi to create their visuals, and changed their whole site to a Christmas theme in just 2 days. 

You should also set yourself some goals by which to measure the success of the project. Decide on one or two KPIs to focus on — for example, conversions or revenue generated — and a few ‘nice to have’ metrics that can help you understand the reason behind your KPI results — for example, click-through rate on CTAs, time on page, and bounce rate.

Decide in advance which analytics tool you will use to monitor these numbers, and when you will take measurements. If you have data from previous seasonal catalogs to draw on, you can use it as a benchmark to judge this campaign by. 

2. Select which products you’ll highlight 

Now comes the first creative task of catalog creation — choosing which products to include in your campaign. Look through the items in your site and select a number of them to fit into the season-based narrative you plan to create. Depending on which season you’ve picked to work with, this may require some lateral thinking. For example, plant hangers aren’t inherently Christmassy, but you could showcase one as a Christmas gift.  

The number of items you should choose will depend on the scope of your seasonal catalog. Endro, for example, changed every single item on their site for the Christmas season. 

3. Create seasonal visuals that tie your product into a story 

Visual storytelling pumps the success of your catalogs. Why? Because it expresses your brand's values and unique interpretation of the season in question. It’s important to create a coherent set of photos and videos that encapsulates the season you’re using to promote products. Consider:

• Color schemes and imagery: use colors and motifs associated with the season (e.g., warm tones for fall, icy blues for winter, pastels for spring)

  
  

• Your branding: find ways to adapt the existing vocabulary of your brand to the holiday in question, and decide which elements will remain consistent (e.g., for Christmas, you could add a holly motif to your logo, but you may want to stop short of changing the logo’s color to green or red)

  
  

• Premium design tools: use high-definition images to maintain a polished look — if you create this catalog under intense time pressure, the user should not be able to tell.