How to turn readers into customers…

A recent German eCommerce report shows that video is a feature that can leverage online sales. The potential of videos used strategically to display product features are far from exploited.

An easy way to get started is to embed videos directly in your digital catalogue. The reader is presented with streamed video, which loads at once and increase the attention on whatever you like. We found a really good example here from Mariner’s Lifestyle with a full size video on the first spread. Enjoy!

Publishers, search engine marketers and media consultants have shouted “content is king” in unison since the turn to digital media. The message can’t be neglected: your content is most important when spreading the word via online media. But the quality of the content doesn’t matter if your core target audience cannot get access to your publication. Dozens of digital media fail when it comes to direct access for a traditional end user, whose most qualified IT consultant is the neighbor’s teenage son. Easy to use technology is a must-have when implementing an e-publishing solution.

To ensure ease of use, you must avoid solutions that require client plugins or high download times, use unstructured controls and non-intuitive navigation, or may cause issues with browser incompatibility.

Ease of use can be very subjective, but selecting an e-publishing provider that does not fall into the pitfalls listed above will provide acceptable accessibility for your readers. In the end you will get the real litmus test when you place your first publication online: If your readers complain, the ease-of-use test failed. If you don’t hear a word, your readers are silently accepting your new way of publishing online.

To read more about the benefits and challenges of e-publishing, get our free e-Publishing white paper.

Do you own a car or does your house get heated by fossil fuels? In that case you have probably been shaking your head in disbelief when looking at the receipts. Oil prices have skyrocketed over the last year, and it is not over yet. Gazprom, the Russian oil giant, estimates that 2009 prices will reach $250 dollars a barrel.

So transportation is getting more expensive, but how does this impact on publishing?
Well, in terms of having printed matters distributed it surely matters. Most transport companies are charging adjustable oil rates of 10 % or more, or they simply raise prices in general to deal with their increased costs. If your business relies on having printed catalogues, newspapers or magazines distributed, oil prices are directly cutting your contribution margins. Do you re-transfer the bill down to your customers, or do you look beyond the printed page?

At Zmags we see an increased number of companies looking for alternative ways to distribute their prints. This is especially important when distributing heavy prints such as mail order catalogues or product catalogues. By presenting a neat-looking digital copy of your printed catalogue, distribution costs are cut dramatically.

Digital catalogue versions, however, typically cost 10-15 cents (USD) per person which represents a cost reduction of approximately 95% when compared to the postal version. Yes that’s right – you can cut distribution costs down to a dime.

The mail order industry, for example, is working to 2% pre-tax margins and at a time of rampant general inflation, the ability to slash costs by 95% can’t be underestimated enough.

For publishers rising oil prices is not the only threat. Add these facts that the industry is facing:

• Pulpwood prices have increased 24% over the past two years
• M-real and Stora Enso announced at DRUPA that it would be raising the price of its coated magazine papers up to 8%
• The European Printing Ink Association recently announced shortages and thus rises of to 40 % on certain raw materials for ink production.

The publishing forecast looks dim, but the obvious alternative is presenting your catalogue digital. It’s an extremely cost-effective way if you want to avoid these sad, headshaking moments like you get when filling up your car.

With up to 35.000 pages converted from PDF files every day, we have a huge pool of overall e-publishing statistics. I took a dive into the pool and found some interesting facts regarding reader loyalty. Using page turning magazines really keep your readers interests.

First of all overall bounce rates are very low. We kept it down to 18% the last 30 days. This means that more than 4 out of 5 readers proceed to page 2 once they have opened the page turning magazine. In Zmags terms a reader is bouncing, if the window is closed on the entry page. Zoom clicks do not have any impact on bounce rates.

So is this good or bad?
I would say: Good for sure. Most websites struggle to keep bounce rates below 40 %, so this level tells us that your readers:

• get what they are looking for.
• find the page turning magazine easy to explore.
• are not lost due to heavy load times or requirements to install plugins.
• want more once they opened the page turning magazine.

On average 75 % of all readers visits are first-time visits. Which apparently mean that only 25 % returns to the same page turning magazine.

How impressive is that in terms of reader loyalty?
Actually it is better than it sounds. Our top 15 most visited Zmags all consist of digitalized mail shot from Scandinavian retailers. All these have a short life-cycle - most often 1 week - and readers tempt to know this. The peaking hours is just after the launch of the actual issue with next weeks special offers and the overall amount of visitors is silently increasing without sudden changes in traffic. All factors indicating that loyal visitors get back to the page turning issue.

All Publicator Pro customers have access to advanced statistics tracking all events at customer and publication level. We can’t do direct comparisons to related industry verticals, but please comment below, if you have you comments to your specific stats.

Paintball! That means action, speed and a lot of bruises. How do you show that in a digital magazine?
I suggest you do like Ironman Publishing did to the SplatXD magazine.

This cool digital magazine did not require black magic or custom add-ons. Just some skills in art directing and flash animations. In addition, SplatXD contains over 2 hours of video, embedded in the digital magazine by use of Link Manager and Video Manager.

Enjoy!

If you are into IT, you have probably heard about Moore’s Law. You know, the famous statement from Intel’s co-founder claiming that the capacity of transistors doubles every 18 months. It stresses the exponential nature of computing. Somehow the statement is universal as it has been referred to again and again for almost 40 years.
E-publishing follows the exponential road. The use of Zmags boosted so much within the last 6 months that we are violating Moore’s Law. Yes, I know it’s like comparing apples to bananas, but the path for e-publishing sure is logarithmic. The figure below explains it much better:

Digging into the overall stats we find some other crispy stats: Every second around the clock 21 page flips are made in Zmags. And on May 28th distribution peaked by delivering content to readers in 165 countries in total.
Watch out for steeper curves and more e-publishing analysis, once we crunched some more numbers.

Lauritz.com - Nordic pioneers in online auctions – just announced a record sale on their deLuxe Catalogue Auctions series. Not only did the total sales exceed the estimates with 0.5 million EUR, the exclusive catalogue was accessible online with some additional advantages.

The online catalogue contains a full description of unique pieces of art, design and antiques available on the online auction at Lauritz.com. Each offered piece has its own page, description and a lot number. Every single lot number is unique and by use of the Auto Links add-on, the online catalogue is mapped to lauritz.com.

In other words: The customer can simply browse through the catalogue and click on the highlighted item if s/he wants to bid on a particular item. In fact 49 % of all readers decided to click a link in the online catalogue. These very interested visitors count as another revenue source generating extra bids and – ultimately - extra revenue.

The deLuxe Catalogue presents the high-end series of Lauritz.com. Volume is generated from more common items, so the deluxe catalogue auctions are basically skimming the cream. Because of the narrow focus, online catalogues are not generating any remarkable additional traffic to their website, but online catalogues make auction customers more loyal and keep their attention longer. For Lauritz.com this again means extra bids.

Increased traffic from search engines

A positive side effect of presenting auction catalogues online is the additional traffic accumulating from search engines. Online catalogues are only presented about 14 days before the auction ends, so the impacts from search engines are minimal during that period. But once the auction has ended the search engines takes over; the content of the catalogue is packed with precise and rare item names, which overall are keywords with lots of daily searches. One of Lauritz.com’s first online catalogues has generated another 1078 visits and serves as an extra window for exposure to their website.

Extra traffic, free of charge and without any efforts, yes please!

Allright that’s it! Greatest news in history. Pulitzer Prize awarded – let’s proceed.

Well, my statement is not the greatest surprise on earth, but some new figures for Scandinavia turned up recently. According to IT-tjej - a Swedish it-portal for girls – 4 out of 5 decisions about what to buy are carried out by women. That goes for selections on goods like cars and insurances as well.

And here in Denmark a newly published analysis on e-commerce states that 53 % of all buyers on online shops the last 3 months were women. A few years ago electronics were the most sold item category on the web, but now goods like clothes and holidays are more frequently acquired online.

So the women decide, but what’s in it for online publishing?

Most marketing departments focus primarily on the content. Are the images appealing? Does it have a nice layout? Is the color composition right? But try to take a step back and see what happens if you put your neat-layouted 200 pages holiday catalog online as a PDF. The smoothness disappears. Waiting time drains your patience. And the navigation simply is not the same.

This is the point where I should tell you to choose Zmags to publish your catalog online: The readers –and especially the female ones - adapt the look-and-feel of the physical catalog, thus the need for special it-skills is eliminated, when reading online. But I’m more sophisticated than that…

If your intention is to sell something – and especially if you want to sell something online, you should consider how your potential buyers’ attention is caught. You may have an online shop with plenty of outstanding products, but how do people get there?

Through search, you say. Yes, good.

And carefully managed Pay-Per-Click ads, not bad.

But again, try to take a step back and look at the inspiration point: How do people get inspired to buy something? If you know you are looking for a two-week holiday on a hotel in Sharm el Sheikh in August, search features are a blessing. But if you are just browsing for destinations to your next holiday, your reader is trapped. And this is the point in the buying process where the smoothness of the catalog matters, when presented online.

Our customers often start exploring the possibilities by replacing their PDF with a link to a Zmag, when presenting online catalogs. While getting more experience with the media, some of the enriching features are often used, and especially the possibility to stuff the online catalog with deeplinks to a web-shop - like this holiday catalogue from Star Tour for instance. Once inspired, the desired item is just a click away. This is not e-commerce. This is e-shopping. And we all know what women love, right?

Now we learned that women make most decisions, so why not help them buy what they need by providing an intuitive and smooth way to buy stuff?

As a provider of Software-as-a-Service in an emerging business, we frequently experience some fundamental questions. Fundamental in sense of questioning the business model and data structure of our solutions, which you may refer to as Page Turning-as-a-Service in this matter.
Software is still referred to the Microsoft way - It’s a physical item that comes as DVDs in a neat-looking package, you get a licence key and have full control of the data, which most often is saved on your own servers. This is the traditional client-server paradigm way of thinking of software. Let’s leave that for the 90′es and look forward.

Wikipedia refers to Software-as-a-Service as: well suited, where customers may have little interest or capability in software deployment, but do have substantial computing needs. By leaving the tough work to professionals, customers save ressources for other and more important things. Hotmail were early birds here, and for most people who grow up with the internet it is hard to imagine that anonomous e-mail accounts should be paid for. It’s pretty simple: If somebody spend time setting up software that you can simply access online and fullfill your needs, why spend time installing or configuring on your own servers or even developing it by yourself.

Reading this warm entry from HattersWorkshop reminded me about how people usually think of our ePublishing solutions. The first impression is the “Wauw”, when trying out the interface. The next impression is: “OK, so I can only rent the page turning feature - how do I get 100 % control of that”.
The client-server paradigm is still going strong in the ePublishing business.

Unless you are one of those insisting DIY-type who takes joy from building your own garden shed from timber you cut down with your own bare hands, putting things together from scratch is a waste of efforts. Especially when working with the web where most sign-ups are just so easy. Giving away a tiny bit of control of how the end result looks, is most often a really fair price when calculating cost-benefits on your efforts.

And that’s what Software-as-a-Service is all about. You can’t control everything - but you can control the things important to you and leave the complex stuff to professionals.

At Zmags we tell our prospects that our page flipping platform is Google optimized. Well, it is for sure, but the truth is that it depends on several factors and no guarantees on the impact can be forecasted. I will shed some light on how you can get better rankings on Google by publishing digital magazines in Zmags platform.

How the platform works with Google:

The Zmags platform is optimized for Google. (In fact it is optimized for various search engines, but we have focused on Google, so let’s keep it that way). Whenever a PDF converts into a Zmag, the process ensures that all text from the PDF is captured and made indexable. The flash and the page flips do not spoil that – we are at the PDF level here.

Whenever a digital magazine is converted, our integration ensures that Google becomes aware of that. This allows for much faster indexing of new Zmags and therefore also a much shorter time from upload to readers comes on board.

The deep-linking structure of the Zmag ensures that every spread in your digital magazine is indexed individually. Apart from being convenient for readers, who find the precise page in your digital magazine, it improves the range of possible keyword matches.

How your digital magazines content influence on Google ranking:

If you upload digital magazines by random, each phrase in the publication counts as a lottery ticket. In terms of search engine optimization each phrase is a keyword consisting of 1-4 individual words. However, the lottery game of Google is not based on luck alone. Your chances of getting a better rank on Google are aggressively increased if special phrases are repeated throughout the publication.
Example: You are publishing two publications. The first is a narrowed target cookery book focusing on Italian dishes. The other one is a digital magazine focusing on urban lifestyle in Southern Europe. The natural content of the cookery book has a much better chance of getting a good Google rank on a specific keyword like “pasta” than a broad target one, where the keyword is only mentioned a few times.

Optimize your digital magazine:

If you want to improve your rankings, Zmags offers different easy ways to do this. The most important is providing a good title containing your most important keywords. You only have 66 characters for this purpose – longer titles will be cropped and the weight of your keywords will be blurred, so write your title with care.

Deeplinking to spreads in your digital magazine will improve your rank as well. This also goes the other way around if you use Link Manager. The area of link building is vast, but for a beginning a link containing the keyword on the given spread as an anchor text will improve google rankings. Let’s have a look at the Italian kitchen again:

On your website you integrate the zmagged Italian cookery book with multiple deeplinks. On page 40 a chapter about Pizzas begin, so you copy the deeplink for that spread and ensures the word “pizza” is a part of the anchor text on your webpage. The word “pizza” should of course be found inside the cookery book and on the actual spread. You get even more successful if you can get others to link to you using “pizza” in the anchor text. But hey, forget about buying the domain pizza.com.

This is the basics on Google optimizing your digital magazines with Zmags e-publishing solutions. Please leave a comment if you have questions or some good samples to share.