As the rules of customer engagement evolve, digital commerce players must adapt fast in order to survive and thrive. A PIM system can be a game-changer.
Product information plays a critical role when the customer and the seller are connected via digital commerce platforms. On one side, digital commerce relies heavily on the assortment, relevance, and overall effectiveness of product information for building customer loyalty. On the other hand, customers analyze a product’s capabilities by checking its complete product information and then make a purchasing decision.
Product data can range from the product name, SKUs, inventory number, metadata description, manufacturer name, image link, etc. It can exist in different formats across different systems. And it needs to be accurate, up-to-date, and consistent across all platforms.
As the rules of customer engagement evolve, digital businesses must re-analyze their product information management capabilities to adjust to the changing realities. While every eCommerce platform can manage its product information to a certain extent, as they grow, they need full-blown systems that provide accurate data, flexible management, centralized visibility, and other sophisticated round data handling. That is where Product Information Management (PIM) comes into the picture.
What Does a PIM System Do?
A PIM system enables you to create, manage, and maintain a single, trusted, and shareable version of rich product content and digital assets to support digital commerce business and enable omnichannel marketing. It can derive positive outcomes from product data by eliminating manual complexities, keeping diverse product assortments, sorting, cleaning, or filtering data feeds, and scaling product reach to diverse channels and newer markets.
Who can Benefit from PIM?
Almost everybody in marketing, commerce, and product teams can take benefits. Product managers can efficiently create assortments, marketers can create campaigns with high-quality media assets and real-time data, and channel administrators can oversee content dissemination with complete visibility. By streamlining end-to-end sourcing, optimization, enrichment, and delivery of product information, PIM ensures effective returns on the digital commerce strategy while reducing the go-to-market time.
Here are eight reasons why PIM must be incorporated into your digital commerce strategy:
- Product catalog expansion: Using a PIM system, you can simplify the process of creating, maintaining, and using product details and descriptions of online product catalogs. It provides a single place to collect and cultivate product information and synchronously disseminate it to channels as the product line extends.
- Customization and localization: A PIM platform offers flexibility to customize and manage all data processes swiftly and seamlessly. Data can be altered as a product gets upgraded, modified, or changed over time. Moreover, accurate product information helps with designing compelling messages around the products. With PIM's complete, transparent, optimized, and reliable data, marketers can plan targeted promotion across sales channels for different geographies and demographics.
- Higher conversion: Accurate and up-to-date product information plays an influential factor in converting potential buyers to actual buyers during online shopping. Completeness of product information facilitates informed purchases and eventually reduces returns. With consistent product data available anytime, anywhere to customers, retailers, dealers, sales teams, and other stakeholders - the probability of expectation mismatch or human error is minimized significantly.
- Better customer trust: When customers connect with a brand through multiple devices, portals, interfaces, websites, and applications, product data accuracy and consistency can significantly impact customer trust. Data consistency and accuracy assure the viewers about the authenticity of product specifications, improve brand credibility, and build confidence.
- Visibility improvement: As product information is updated, edited, and enriched by multiple teams across the value chain, PIM provides complete data compilation transparency so everybody can view the latest changes and stay updated. The information remains transparent at every step, right up to the time the product reaches the customer.
- Personalization enhancement: What is critical to personalization is to be relevant to the customer and tailor the experience to their context. PIM can help you make available new product features, specifications, updates, etc., immediately to customers. It can also enhance new product/service launch speed, personalization, and omnichannel and cross-channel experiences.
- Higher productivity: PIM automatically updates eCommerce platforms with product data from the source point throughout the value chain, thus minimizing the manual effort and reducing the error probabilities. This enables operational excellence such as supply chain optimization or order fulfillment accuracy, thus reducing instances of product returns, complaints, and even shopping cart abandonment.
- Improved omnichannel marketing: PIM softwares are easy to integrate. They centralize product information and simultaneously publish up-to-date and accurate digital product catalogs to all the channels and customer-facing touchpoints. With such capability, any digital commerce strategy will get an impactful omnichannel presence, where the right information is accessible to customers at the right time.
Wrapping up:
Whether your business is launching new product lines or refreshing its existing product portfolio, you need a product information management (PIM) system to ensure the success of your digital commerce strategy. For businesses looking to manage data for millions of products and thousands of attributes, PIM is a must for smooth functioning, business growth, customer satisfaction, and ROI.
Want to know the features & benefits of Pimcore PIM platform and how they meet your business requirements? Schedule a FREE demo with Pimcore consultants.
Related Insights:
