Retaining customers on your platform is definitely a tough task to do. But, these days’ people started using product information management, or say PIM in simple words, to achieve a decent odd. Making product-related data personalized and improvising the digital shopping experience was even assimilated among top themes of Year’s NRF 2021 vision.
So, in this article, you will know how to offer a personalized shopping experience by using PIM. But, before rushing into this topic, let’s discuss more on the PIM.
What is Product Information Management (PIM)?
As the name suggests, Product Information Management (PIM) is nothing but centralized management of every product data. It helps the brand to gather and store data in a particular location; therefore, it can be distributed through a number of sales channels effectively.
But how exactly does it work with the eCommerce or retail shopping experience? Let’s see in detail.
Nowadays, a single tap on your smartphone is enough to order almost everything apart from fortune! And that too right at your place. Today, eCommerce businesses are able to anticipate the demand and requirements of the customer and hence could enhance the overall experience of shopping. How has that become possible? Data analytics and AI are unfolding the infinite potential for automation and enhancement of retail operations, product, asset, inventory, and logistics management. This all surprisingly blended with the intent to strengthen customer relationships by creating personalization engines.
In such an advancement a naïve eCommerce enthusiast might be lost, so here are a few considerable facts that would be a great help.
When an eCommerce enthusiast looks forward to PIM enabling, he must take the following steps:
- An experienced panel of decision-makers: One must understand how a planned PIM can be implemented in a given business. Therefore, an experienced group of decision-making panels would enhance the overall outcome.
- Consult the stakeholders: Many people make the mistake of taking the decision unilaterally. However, stakeholders like content developers, vendors, designers, testing teams, quality, and other end users must be consulted before the implementation.
- Anticipate the final project: One should not hit the arrow in dark and having a final goal would clarify the entire idea. As a result, you are expected to finalize an end goal during the pre-implementation phase.
- Have a planned budget: Planning a PIM integration within the budget would always help. As you all know, low investment leads to faster return, which ensures profitability.
After getting knowledge about how to consider the decision of PIM, let’s now see how a PIM is going to change the scenario of business.
How To Deliver a Personalized Shopping Experience Using PIM?
Now, you must be wondering how to personalize content for tens of thousands of customers. So, let’s discuss several tips and tricks to offer a personalized solution by using Product Information Management.
5 Tips for E-Shopping Personalization PIM
1. Use Relevant Technology in Order To Offer a Personalized Solution
Every customer wishes for a smooth and reliable experience while making their purchases. As a result, you are expected to use relevant tools and technology in order to offer a better experience. By using PIM, you can offer features like personalized product and content recommendation and the automation of the marketing process.
Plan to Offer Personalized Experience to Your Customers throughout the Interaction
If you observe minutely, you will come to know that a potential customer could interact with your website in three different ways, such as at the time of browsing, carting, and last but not the least, while purchasing. As a result, you are expected to offer engaging personalized messages in all these three stages of interaction.
At the time of product browsing, you can drop a message of “people also brought….” Therefore, your customers will get a more number of options to choose from. However, your recommendations must be relevant to the search and have more or less similar price points.
In most cases, this particular trick works, and it will force the customer to add the product to his cart. Besides, you can also showcase a personalized page where all relevant products are placed from the most discounted deals to the higher ones.
2. Personalized Mails Will Do Wonder
Be it an eCommerce site or any other type of website, personalized mails will boost your traffic significantly, which will lead to more transactions, and most importantly brand building of your firm. You need to understand that a business can only thrive if you can pull enough repeat customers. Repeat customers will act as ambassadors for your firm, and the word of mouth will act in favor of your firm. Therefore, you can go with personalized emails to each of them on a regular interval of time, and force them to revisit the site to avail the best available deal.
3. Take Care of New Customers
You need to take certain initiatives to onboard the new customers. In order to familiarize them with your brand, you have the option to send them newsletters. Besides, you can also opt to send them some exclusive deals having heavy discount offers to win their trust.
4. Targeting the Spot Correctly
Well-planned product delivery is another aspect that you should focus on. A PIM solution would enable a retailer, distributor, or even manufacturer to integrate, optimize, and supply content efficiently to websites, microsites, external marketplaces, and even catalogs.
5. Continuous Evaluation
An analytical feedback loop with good quality metrics is essential to stay ahead in the game of sales by enhancing the quality and by resolving consumer grievances. An integrated PIM would help to channelize such a loop using AI and data analytics simultaneously and hence such an in-house evaluation would help the business.
Here is Why You Should Consider Using PIM?
Still confused, as a correct business owner one must doubt something which isn’t usual. However, a retailer who is an eCommerce enthusiast too must consider the following reasons why he can go ahead to rely on PIM solutions and help his own business to grow.
Let’s talk easy and consider common things right from the daily chores where technology drives all of us. The smartphone everyone carries along, music players and gadgets, and the navigation tools in cars, hasn’t technology overtaken almost everything? Nearly all of the mentioned products are supplied by retailers. Hence, it’s needless to consider that technology is God for bread and butter. Hence it came up with its own set of challenges too, let’s consider a few of them and see how PIM going to resolve them all.
- Evolving competition and growing competitors
- Changing products
- A considerable change in logistics and supply chain
- Dynamic customer behavior.
So let’s discuss more on why the retailer needs to have PIM in order to succeed in the eCommerce arena.
1. For the Management of Product and It’s Information Accurately
A PIM would enable a retailer to create, organize, and enhance the product-related data from one source. The PIM would also make data to be entered from external sources such as supplier websites and warehouses. A PIM is a tremendous time-efficient tool to aid retailers.
2. Consistency of Brand
A PIM helps the retailer to ensure the consistency and styling of a brand. It also helps them to convey a correct and appealing message about the product and brand that a retailer has to sell. PIM allows a retailer to control the access over data of a product and edit the content of the product to confirm its own style of the brand.
3. To Anticipate the Upcoming Trend in the Market
A PIM would help a retailer to consolidate the data from all outside systems i.e. ERP, mainframes, Excel, Oracle, etc. to deliver real-time analytics and exact reports. Such a detailed and integrated assessment will help to reach the store manager, regional in charge, and headquarters simultaneously. In the long run, it would be too helpful in assessing consumer behavior and other interrelated data. Hence the decision could be well planned and implemented in a fast manner.
4. For Better Advertisement
Whether to sell directly or through social media, PIM comes up as a great help. A PIM would allow in-house bloggers to organize, update, and publish the blog with recent information along with curtailing the clutter and outdated content.
A PIM would help the retailer to configure and feed information of products from data banks to websites and to mobile-friendly platforms alongside social media channels. A PIM would also be helpful in digital marketing by customizing things as per the geography of the customer.
Summing up
A well-planned and strong PIM solution is flexible, certain, configurable, and easy to implement the solution and hence too easy to be used as well. For such reasons, A PIM for a personalized shopping experience becomes a strong foundation of any retailer’s information management and marketing strategy too. Experts around the world are predicting a similar trend for PIM in the next few years as well. A retailer can control the product information, integrate the demand, and hence implement the necessary changes to expedite the immediate requirements.
Man doing Online Shopping -DepositPhotos
