Before digging into converting your PDFs to Interactive Flipbooks, let’s start by defining what an Interactive Flipbook is. An Interactive Flipbook is an interactive experience that looks like an online book or magazine with which viewers can turn the pages and flip through it like if they were physically engaging with it. It is a new and innovative way of presenting content that replaces PDFs and other types of paper-based content like magazines, reports and brochures or catalogs, etc.
An Interactive Flipbook is an online format. You can create many types of Interactive Flipbooks depending on your industry (e.g., ebooks, lookbooks, online magazines, etc.). But, no matter the type, this guide to convert PDFs to Interactive Flipbooks is the best way to go if you want to create a captivating interactive experience for your audience.
10 steps to convert your PDFs to Interactive Flipbooks
1. Plan your PDF
The first thing you’ll want to do when you want to convert your PDFs to Interactive Flipbooks is to plan the content. For example, you’ll want to decide what parts of your PDF will be interactives. In other words, where will you add animations, buttons, links, videos, interactive experiences, and so on.
Pro Tips: Creating a well-thought mock-up that includes every section and interactive element of your Interactive Flipbook is the best way to go to achieve success.
2. Upload your PDF
Now that your mock-up is ready, what you’ll want to do is to create a new version of your PDF that you’ll use when uploading it on the Interactive Content Platform. On the new version of your PDF, you’ll remove every section that is interactive or animated. Basically, you’ll only want to keep the static elements.
3. Integrate a Product Catalog (if needed)
This step is not always relevant when converting your PDFs to Interactive Flipbooks, but if you showcase lots of different products in your flipbooks, it’s definitely a must. Integrating your Product Catalog within your flipbook will allow you to easily modify details about your products (e.g., the price, the name, the image, etc.) without having to modify the flipbook itself.
With the Product Catalog feature, readers can click on each product to read more about it (with a slide up effect) and add the products directly to their basket.
Pro Tip: Connect it with your e-commerce website to automatically feed in needed information such as product & price updates and availability.
4. Add the Interactive Elements
Now, it’s time to add all the interactive elements you have planned. An efficient way to do that would be to do it page by page. Start with the first page, and end with the last one. Of course, follow your mock-up closely.
Instead of creating all of your Interactive Experiences (e.g. Polls, Marketing Games, Interactive Videos, etc.) within your Interactive Flipbook, you can design them separately and simply copy-paste them in.
Pro Tip: Adding interactive experiences to your flipbook is the best way to engage with your customers, educate them, and collect audience data. It’s definitely a crucial addition.
Learn more about different types of Interactive Experiences here!
5. Gate sections
To gate or not to gate? The debate about gating or not gating your content has been going on and on in the marketing world for years. Both strategies include many benefits, but also some disadvantages. When converting your PDFs to Interactive Flipbooks, you don’t have to think about that anymore.
Why? Because instead of gating your entire PDF, you can now gate sections of your Interactive Flipbook. You can gate the result of a poll, the access a marketing game, or simply the entire Page #5.
Pro Tip: Think about the value you are giving readers in exchange for their contact details! The higher the value, the more readers will fill-in your lead form.
6. Set up integrations
At this point, you are done designing your Interactive Flipbook. But, before you publish it, make sure to set up all the integrations you need. For example, you’ll want to set up a Google Analytics Integration if you want to know what countries people are reading your flipbook from or what devices they are using.
Moreover, if you want to use your Interactive Flipbooks to enhance your marketing automation flow (and you should), don’t forget to integrate with Pardot, HubSpot, Mailchimp, etc.
7. Publish it
Now, it’s time to publish it. What you’ll want to do is to have it under your own domain on a separate page. Plus, don’t forget to specify the metadata. That’s super important for SEO purposes. Think about adding a Meta-title and a Meta-Description that fits your flipbook’s content, and that contains your chosen keyphrase.
8. Promote it
As any good marketer knows, creating content is never enough! You have to promote it. There are many ways of promoting it. First, you’ll want to make sure people who visit your website can access it. You can achieve that by creating a few CTA buttons that encourage your website visitors to take a look at your flipbook. Another important way of promoting your Interactive Flipbook is through your Social Media platform, of course.
Finally, you could also promote your Interactive Flipbook in your next monthly newsletter or in your online community.
Pro Tip: Plan your promotion strategy with care and make sure to set up KPIs to evaluate it later on.
9. Evaluate the performance
Once your Interactive Flipbook has been live for a while, you should check how things are going. How many people have read it? Did you expect more people to read it, or less? That doesn’t tell you much, though, does it?
A great advantage to convert your PDFs to Interactive Flipbooks is the possibility to gather way more insights. For example, you can find out how many people read Page #5, participated in your marketing game, or clicked on your CTA button at the bottom of Page #3.
10. Optimize it
Finally, converting your PDFs to Interactive Flipbooks allows you to modify and optimize them. If you find out that your number of readers is dropping dramatically after Page #2, you can try to optimize your flipbook to avoid that. For example, you could have a CTA at the end of Page #2 saying, “Try our Tic Tac Toe game” or “Scratch a discount on the next page”.
Because readers don’t download your Interactive Flipbooks, you’ll always be sure there isn’t an old version of your Interactive Flipbook being shared around.
Pro Tip: In the dashboard above, we can notice a drop between Page #3 and Page #4. Therefore, we need to optimize Page #3 and encourage readers to continue to Page #4
Are you ready to convert your PDFs to Interactive Flipbooks?
We will not lie; converting your PDFs to Interactive Flipbooks is not as easy and straightforward as converting your PDFs to Word. There are many things to plan and consider, but we can assure you that the benefits are incredible.
If you are interested in converting your PDFs to Interactive Flipbooks, you are more than welcome to create a free account and try it yourself using a customizable template!
