In a world where selling products online means dealing with hundreds of different attributes — from titles to descriptions, SKUs, measurements, materials, photos, videos, reviews, keywords, translations, and plenty more — it’s easy to see how ecommerce brand managers and marketers can easily spend the majority of their days just maintaining all this information.
If you find yourself bogged down by managing product information instead of making the strategic moves that you need to grow your business, it’s high time you started thinking about PIM.
In this article, we’ll start with a quick refresher on what PIM is before spilling the secrets on how the right PIM can help you unlock growth. And, if you stick around to the end, we’ll even throw in a list of key features to look for to make your first PIM shopping trip a resounding success.
Quick primer: What PIM means
“PIM” is short for “product information management” and it’s the name for the process as well as the platform that empowers brands to manage all the data, content, and other information they need to market and sell their products online.
Modern PIM technology is made to integrate seamlessly with the rest of a digital commerce suite to centralize and standardize product details so they’re ready to be distributed across departments as well as to any emerging marketing and sales channels.
5 ways the right PIM can help you unlock business growth
In this day and age, a PIM solution isn’t a “nice to have” as much as it’s a “must have” for brands looking to supercharge their growth. And here are five ways the right PIM platform can help you do just that.
Get on more channels, get in front of more buyers
Amazon, Google Shopping, Facebook Shops, Instagram, Alexa, your own website… the list of channels upon which your brand must be active is frankly exhausting.
However, it really does pay to be in all these places at once.
Compared to their single-channel counterparts, omnichannel shoppers spend 10% more each time they shop with you online, spend as much as 35% more on an average transaction, and end up being a whopping 30% more valuable over their lifetime as your customer!
In addition, businesses that excel in omnichannel sales and marketing enjoy an 89% customer retention rate on average — which leads to a 9.5% yearly bump in revenue as well as a 7.5% yearly drop in cost per customer.
How can a brand reap the benefits of getting on more channels when the demands of omnichannel sales and marketing have grown to be too much for any small- or medium-sized marketing team to manage manually? Implement a modern PIM where smart automation helps centralize, optimize, and syndicate product listings to any channel, template, portal, and beyond.
Take control of your product data — not the other way around!
When your products have hundreds of attributes like we mentioned above, it’s totally acceptable to let a few data errors slide, right?
Unless you’re swimming in extra cash, you need to be as diligent as possible when it comes to identifying errors in your product data. That’s because bad data costs your business money, to the tune of $10 to find and fix each bad data point or $100 for each bad data point you choose to ignore. On top of this is the fact that 20% of the times a shopper fails to complete their purchase it’s because they found the product information incomplete or unclear.
When you adopt the right PIM, you can feel certain that no faulty product information ever gets published — putting clean data to work for you instead of letting faulty data shave money off your bottom line.
Achieve more consistent profit thanks to more consistent branding
About 60% of consumers prefer to shop with familiar brands. And even when they’re ready to try a new product, half of them are still more likely to go with a company they recognize.
In a world where your competition is a click away, representing your brand consistently across channels is the key to loyalty. The benefit of this loyalty? Brands that can grow their number of loyal shoppers by a mere 5% can expect to see a 25% to 95% jump in profit.
With a PIM, you’ll have a single source of truth where all product data is centralized and from which all product data flows. This makes it easy to keep your products and your brand image consistent no matter which platform, channel, reseller, or distributor you’re working with.
PIM can get you in with the leading sales platforms
People in the know at the largest comparison shopping engines (CSEs) and marketplaces in the world have been warning for years that, sooner rather than later, their platforms will require all sellers to use certified data partners — such as approved PIM software — to syndicate products to their platforms.
Already, plenty of leading online retailers require the sellers they work with to share product data via an organized PIM platform. In fact, this is already business as usual for retailers in verticals with highly-specific industry standards, such as the European Technical Information Model (ETIM) for example.
The sooner you make the effort to integrate a PIM to help with sales and marketing, the more prepared you’ll be to achieve success on every channel and platform.
Detailed product information means better personalization for your customers
Over 90% of consumers report that they’re more likely to shop with brands that provide personalized offers and product recommendations — and 72% say they’ll only engage with brand messaging that’s relevant to them!
When it comes to personalization, it takes two to tango. On one side is the data you collect on the customer’s demographics and behaviour. On the other side are the highly-detailed product attributes that allow you to match the just-right products with what you know about a particular shopper.
A PIM gives your brand the power to not just detail out these attributes but to make them searchable so the other tools in your ecommerce system can easily find and show the right product to the right shopper at the right time.
Parting advice: Features to look for when choosing a PIM that will unlock your growth
When it comes to unlocking business growth by selling and marketing on all the key channels, achieving consistent branding, gaining access to every major sales platform, taking control of your product data, and enabling personalization through detailed product data — it’s all about finding the perfect PIM that fits your business flow and goals.
While it would be impossible to recommend a specific solution in that case, what we can do is tell you the key capabilities to look out for when choosing your PIM:
- Cloud-based technology
- Integrated product performance metrics
- Scalable and easy-to-use product content syndication
- Easy-to-design product sheets
- Customizable, interactive brand portals with automatic syncing
- Highly-available customer support that will make the adoption process seamless
To learn more about the possibilities of product information management, visit our PIM partners of choice at Plytix.com