PIMMonetising your product

information Management system

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IntroductIon Customers. They can be a fickle lot. But one thing is constant; an appreciation of the best experience at every touchpoint. Our latest research tells us this1. We also know they value content that is relevant, inspiring, rich, continually updated, trustworthy, and placed in the right context. And consistent across all the devices accessing it.

From the moment customers start their journey on their mobile or tablet, to the moment they place an online or in-store order, they expect a fantastic experience. How can you live up to the demands of modern customers?

A high performance website can help, providing it offers a good user experience (UX). But without data, there’s no relevant information to show. We’ve seen many ecommerce stores where templates, apps, and pOs (point of sales) systems were created by trendy design agents without looking at the data format, or even the content that is available.

it’s a given that companies aim to deliver the best experience for their customers. A recent Forrester study revealed that 86%2 of business and technology decision makers cite an improved CX as a top business priority for 2017. Yet many of these companies are struggling to find the right ecosystem; one that can serve the enriched personal content at the right time, through the right channel, to the right person.

With so many content variables, the challenge is clear. How do we achieve this? Notably, piM does not often feature in the discussion.

1 source: salmon Ltd 2017 report “Buying Tomorrow”. Download a copy here.2 source: Forrester Data Global Business Technographics® Data and Analytics survey 20173 source: Forrester Data Global Business Technographics® Data and Analytics survey 2017

About the Author

Tim is a digitalist and versatilist with in-depth knowledge of ecommerce and piM / MDM solutions. in his previous roles as business consultant, product and project manager he has developed and implemented over 30 commerce solutions for leading Benelux companies like G-star, WE-Fashion and pLUs supermarkets.

As an online marketing enthusiast, Tim is passionate about digital technology and data and how it influences our daily lives of today and tomorrow.

tim boschHead of Marketing and product Management Netherlands, salmon

According to research, 87%3 of businesses have implemented a PIM or are planning to implement or expand one for data quality and governance.

But many companies have not enabled their PIM to improve customer experience.

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Let’s reacquaint ourselves with piM. One of the major reasons companies originally purchased a piM was to centralise product data to drive cost reductions.

Today, a piM can be implemented as a revenue generating hub, one that helps you to:

■ Expand your product offering (long-tail)

■ Easily distribute your product data over all of your different sales channels, like trending marketplaces and social media

■ speed up product editing – actualisation of product content (e.g. prices, new product versions, etc)

■ personalise and enrich products, making them more relevant and compelling to customers.

in the majority of use cases, the customer will experience a better buyer journey, and sales will increase significantly. Enterprise piM vendor informatica states that piM is a revenue driver for retailers, manufacturers and wholesalers for nearly all sales channels. Not only will the conversion increase but, according to their study, 80% of piM users sell their products at higher margins.

80% of PIM users sell at higher margins

it’s not surprising that a piM-system helps to increase revenue, when we consider that, according to Forrester, 85%4 of prospective online buyers now rely on product information and content. Nearly as many rely on ecommerce features, typically, enabled by information managed from a piM solution.

Why is it that a piM can drive revenue and increase conversion? is it because compelling product images and videos seduce us? is it because detailed product specifications give us a sign of quality, and the ratings and reviews a feeling of trust? For sure, the answer is yes but only when placed in the right context.

if you are able to personalise this product content, the chances of conversion increase exponentially – and this is where a piM can help you. piM makes it possible to differentiate the content for various devices and channels, ensuring for instance that:

■ A mobile app doesn’t load very large product images or load content unfit for small screens

■ social channels can be populated directly with the appropriate formats and content for specific social audiences

■ Enriched product feeds can be created for marketplaces such as Amazon and Alibaba with optimised keywords for higher ranking

■ products and accessories can be differentiated and merchandised on ecommerce stores using (geo)location of the customer

■ sEO-friendly content can be sent to Google, who love good product data and will guide potential buyers to your website.

piM goes even further, as we’ll explain in this paper. When you unleash the full potential of your piM, you’ll create a better customer experience at all touchpoints and devices. With respect to studies by Gartner, Forrester, Enterworks and informatica, we believe with a piM you can:

■ increase your conversion rates between 15% – 35%

■ Lower products returns between 10% – 25%

■ increase products margins (long-tail strategy) between 10% – 40%

■ increase customer satisfaction between 20% – 39%

This article reveals how piM supports your business in creating the best customer experience at all touchpoints, promoting the best sales catalogue for every device. it’s aimed at ecommerce practitioners in organisations that already have a piM solution.

4 source: Forrester Data Consumer Technographics® North American Retail and Travel Benchmark Recontact survey 1, Q3 2017 (Us)

Salmon says: Before you design anything, whether it is a web page or an app, have a look at your data first. What is available? And how can it be presented to customers in a relevant and personal way? instruct designers to take your data into account. Make a customer-data-centric design.

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Side note: dIFFerenceS betWeen PIM / MdM / dAMif you’re perplexed about the differences between Master Data Management (MDM), product information Management (piM), or even a digital asset management (DAM), you’re not alone. Let’s demystify this right here:

MdM – Master data Management

MDM relates to providing a single, trusted version of back-end data to an organisation to aid its pursuit of operational excellence. it focuses on all critical business data not simply product data. An MDM can be a separate or hybrid platform as well as the sum of integrated business systems like ERp, CRM, piM, creating an MDM-ecosystem that is able to create master data files. Companies that don’t own an MDM-system often face challenges getting reliable data out of different business systems and therefore don’t have the overall insights to make critical decisions. The purpose of having an MDM-system is to have one single truth of master data across the enterprise.

PIM – Product Information Management

piM is about centralising product data. it can be seen as a part of an MDM yet with a pure focus on product data. Many companies choose to implement standalone piM without a larger MDM undertaking. Thinking of compelling product content for omnichannel marketing? Think piM. some enterprise piM-systems come with some MDM features that mostly include supplier and reseller data.

dAM – digital Asset Management

in broad terms, a DAM is a managed system of digital assets: files, documents, images, and the metadata associated with them. DAM systems are mostly used by marketing and sales to safely store branded and promotional collateral. DAM can be seen as part of MDM just like piM, but DAM systems don’t focus on product data alone.

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Product dAtA In conteXt

1.1 pRODUCT CONTENT is KiNG if you ask customers what they are looking for when they buy online, 85% would say product information5. A similar percentage of respondents like to see manufacturer and retailer information. Customers also like to see what customers think of the products, in the form of ratings and reviews.

This shows how important product data is for different perspectives and audiences. Ultimately, it will determine whether you sell the product or not.

product information is king. Just think how you buy products online. The more (online) research you do before buying a product online, the more expensive the product probably is. Did you ever watch an ‘unboxing video’ on YouTube? Did you view the ratings and read the reviews on the retailer website? Why do we do this? simple: because we want reassurance that we’re getting the best deal.

it’s also true that the journey sometimes brings more joy than the destination, or – in our case – the product. Often, getting as much information on the product as possible before buying it is crucial. Customers also appreciate the fuller product perspective (for example, how people are using the product). some companies even create social awareness around products by connecting them to community-based social platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

All of this can be achieved with a piM. But you can go even further by determining:

■ when you want to show content

■ what content to show

■ to whom

■ on which device or touchpoint.

This makes the content more relevant and personal to the viewer and places it in the right context.

5 source: Forrester Data Consumer Technographics® North American Retail and Travel Benchmark Recontact survey 1, Q3 2017

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1.2 WHAT? WHEN? WHERE? WHO? When serving product information to a customer, we need more: more channels, more customer demands, more devices, and more variables. in a single channel environment, it could be done manually. But with a multi – or even an omni-channel strategy, this becomes almost impossible. The exponential growth of data makes it even more difficult. How do you create the right product content in the right context with all these variables?

Whether you are a B2B wholesaler with 25,000 sKUs, or a B2C retailer with only 1,000 products, the personal factors, device types, touchpoints and other criteria can result in millions of product content variants. Most of these variants can easily be created in a piM, sometimes with just a push of button. The system gives you access and the best possible variant: what to send, and which device or touchpoint to send it to.

Many factors can determine when you create or update product content; the weather, the seasons, and even the time of day. The piM knows when your Christmas products are due to go live; it can promote umbrellas when it’s raining, and so on.

Companies that enable these features are typically more successful in selling those products. There’s less navigation for the customer, plus higher ranking in sERps (search engine result page). Just think how many scenarios this feature can apply to. For example, you could create in-store promotions if a customer is in the vicinity of one of your physical stores.

With a piM, you can decide what content is going where. image assets can be marked for specific channels e.g. optimised product images will be sent to mobile channels, and high-resolution pictures to desktop or print channels. Creating rules in the piM can automate these processes. You won’t deplete customers’ mobile data allowances, and the customer also sees better performance on mobile. people using laptops and desktop computers will be impressed with your content, too. it all improves the buyer’s journey, as well increasing your sales.

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For the best personal customer experience, you’ll also want personal factors like gender, age, interest, and purchase history. Combining this with device type (mobile, tablet, laptop), location, and past search behaviour will create a customer experience beyond customer expectations. However, to create this you need to know whom you are facing so you know what content to serve, to create the best CX and the best-selling catalogue. To enable this, you need to integrate with CRM, ecommerce, analytics and pOs systems. This last one is important if you own physical stores or have an omnichannel strategy. Creating buyer personas will help setting up your piM system to facilitate touchpoints as well.

Just imagine, after buying shoes, you get a smart link for a matching belt and the right shoe polish. Even better, the system skips the shoe polish link because you already purchased it. in piM, you can create these product relations. With a smart ecommerce platform, recommendation engine, or merchandise tool, you can display these product links at the right time, to the right customer, on the right device. You can even go a step further by connecting your piM with big data pools and make your offers even more personal.

From a business perspective, it is now clear that a piM can fulfil all three pillars of the Treacy & Wiersema model (image 1). This business model determines how your business differentiates itself from other companies in terms of product leadership, operational excellence, or customer intimacy. simply put, it tells you how unique your company is.

piM will stimulate the time-to-market, and it will lower the mark-up costs of products once you reach the break-even point of your piM investment. All of this will help you improve your product leadership. Efficient data storage, supplier onboarding, reseller portals, and data quality improvements will elevate your operational excellence thanks to automation and clear processes. Customer satisfaction will increase with integrated MDM features, like personal and situational factors enabled in your piM.

The enriched product content and information that piM creates will help boost your intimacy with customers as well.

Image 1: treacy & Wiersema model

customerIntimacy

Product

differentiationoperational

competence

“threshold”

“Leadership”

Product Leadership

operational excellence

customer

responsive

Salmon says: Remember that data in itself is nothing. You need to combine data with other data to create information and value. Now, what data should you combine to sell your products?

Most enterprise piM systems integrate well with other business systems like ERp, CRM, ecommerce, pOs and WMs. Retrieving data from these systems will help create more personal and relevant product information, but also helps in the way this product information is offered through interfaces to your customers. Don’t integrate everything at the same time and start first with the systems that contain interesting customer data.

At salmon we say “he who owns the interface owns the customer. He who owns the customer owns the data. He who owns the data owns the future.”

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Side note: the core oF PIMAt the heart of piM is a database that contains all data and other assets related to the products. For example, it collates information of the supplier, reseller, files, documents, imagery, and so on.

in terms of these databases, most piMs have five core functionalities:

1. Product on-board management. This is the so called ‘golden record’. it’s created with data from all internal and external systems from different domains, whether from your own ERp, CRM, or WMs systems, or incorporating data from suppliers and manufacturers. Data is onboarded into the piM system following an ETL (Extra Transform Load) principle. in the end, all data is validated and verified and the ‘golden records’ are created.

2. Product enrichment Management. This enriches product data and creates product information that makes sense to customers. Category managers, product stewards, and product managers can optimise the data in a variety of ways.

3. Product experience Management. product data becomes product information, and information needs to be placed in the right context. Which product information attribute should be visible on which channel or touchpoint and in what way? Mobiles have a smaller screen size than a laptop or computer. some products cannot be sold in certain countries. A specific colour may be more popular in one country than another. in most piMs, you can set up processes to automate some of these product attributes, or create manual deviations for them. This core feature often requires insights from analytics tools to determine what content creates the best experience on a given device and sales channel. A piM structures the data to improve search functionality, helping customers to find the product they are looking for more easily.

4. Product Integration Management. Once the product is enriched, it can be distributed to all channels: websites, apps, reseller sites, marketplaces, pOs systems, and so on. This feature ensures that new changes in the product data, enrichment, or experience are automatically updated and pushed through to the channel if the change applies to it.

5. Product Portal Management. Most piM systems offer a portal for suppliers and resellers. The portal lets them add or retrieve product information. it helps to improve the time-to-market of new products, and ensures that products with flawed information are corrected and validated fast.

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MAKInG the coMMercIAL Product hub

2.1 A DiFFERENT MiNDsET Many piM owners may conclude that their piM didn’t bring them the cost reduction they had hoped for, though the cost visibility may have improved. The same owners probably noticed that fewer products were returned, and that the number of service calls reduced over time due to clear and accurate product information. But, the real success of the piM investment remains to be seen. Why is this? MDM/piM vendors observe that most companies don’t focus a great deal on revenue generation, and are more concerned with cost reduction when buying an MDM/piM solution. They don’t ask questions like:

■ How many more new products can you sell by connecting new suppliers?

■ Through which channels am i going to sell my products?

■ How many more products will i sell when my product content is personalised and placed in the right context?

■ Will creating more product variants help me sell more?

■ How can i use my piM with personal and situational factors (like age, language, weather, time, season, and location) to sell more?

it’s both unsurprising and telling that these questions rarely crop up in conversation. The business sponsors of some companies are unlikely to involve stakeholders from sales, marketing, or ecommerce departments during the piM purchase phase.

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Salmon says: With piM, don’t focus on cost reduction alone. instead, focus more on revenue generation. The basic core piM features should certainly minimise product returns and lower your service calls, but may have limited direct impact on sales growth.

so how can you make money with a piM? This should be your new starting point for your piM system. Make sure that sales, marketing and customer service become business sponsors of the piM and integrate piM as much as possible with all of your business eco-systems – preferably one at a time.

Build appealing product offerings that you can enrich with correct marketing information, making them easily available for all your touchpoints and converting channels. Most piM systems like informatica, stibo, EnterWorks, Contserv and inRiver integrate well and work with multi-domain content from different business systems, like customers, suppliers, transactions, social and supply chain.

2.2 iMpROVE iNsiGHTs THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE CUsTOMER JOURNEY piM can help you predict how successful you’re going to be in selling your products, and how you can make improvements. piM also helps you to plan the product lifecycle. Combine your piM insights with data from your commerce platform, pOs, social media, analytics, and business intelligence tools. This will give you insights on:

■ What is trending and what’s hot!

■ What your customers like; do they like product images over videos etc.

■ Do they stay longer on a webpage if you show them ratings and reviews?

■ How often customers download product manuals

■ Whether your product data is optimised for sEO, and whether your customers actually find your products.

it’s all about experimenting. How can you be different from the competition if you are not varying and testing things? Through piM you have the opportunity to become the first to sell a trending product, show compelling video that is easily shareable on social media and generates more traffic.

A/B testing is one way to find out what works. However, for each device and touchpoint, there are different ways to test to see what works and what doesn’t. Experimenting with product content is the only way to find out if you can sell products in higher volume of with higher margins. Leading companies like Amazon, AliExpress, Bol.com, and booking.com experiment almost every minute of every day throughout the whole customer journey, and with notable success.

piM can help you optimise every step of the customer journey, whether it is sEO optimising your product data during the discovery phase or sending inspirational content after the order is placed.

To grow and to sell more products, you need to experiment.

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FIGure 1 product information Management (piM) is relevant throughout the customer journey

enGAGe■ product stories ■ inspirational or lifestyle content

uSe■ product manuals■ How-to videos■ Care instructions■ Customer feedback

buY■ product specifications■ Retailer and manufacturer descriptions■ product warranties■ packaging and shipping / handling instructions■ Related products

eXPLore■ product visualisations ■ similar products and brands■ product bundles and kits ■ side-by-side comparisons■ short-form videos ■ price comparisons■ product availability

dIScoVer■ sEO product copy■ sEO product taxonomies and hierarchies ■ publishing products out to Amazon, social media etc.

ASK■ product search for better

customer service■ product FAQs ■ product tutorials

Salmon says: piM insights help you to improve your customer and user experience. in two steps you can improve your product information page to help you sell more:

1. Combine data from different sources from Analytics (Google, Hotjar, Tealeaf) tools, CRM, ecommerce platform, etc., and convert this to useful information using business intelligence tools (Bi) or even cross tables in Microsoft Excel.

2. With the new information, create tests to see if your findings work. Most ecommerce platforms have building features to set up so called “A/B” or “Multivariate” testing. Alternatively, you can use a service like Optimizely.

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2.3 MARKETpLACEs AND sOCiAL MEDiA BECOME TRENDiNG sALEs CHANNELs Marketplaces like Amazon are becoming more embedded with organisations as a standard sales channel. in salmon’s survey of 2017 we know that worldwide 37% of all online spend was made through Amazon; in the Us alone this was 57%. This year we expect that these numbers will increase even further. Marketplaces have great reach to attract new customers. But just like your own website, these platforms require a product feed and product enrichment. A piM makes integration with one or more marketplaces as easy as feeding your mobile app with product data. Connecting to an existing marketplace like Amazon isn’t always the best strategy. some B2B and B2C companies have sufficiently large audiences or just prefer to build their own marketplace. in this case a piM becomes even more relevant and important, as it needs to onboard and process and validate product data from multiple product providers. Today, a piM can give you a chance to differentiate on 3 levels from the online marketplace giants:

1. Ability to show more and detailed product information 2. customised and personalised content, which… 3. optimises your Seo-ranking as a bonus

The battle for customer attention is the reason why marketplaces are on the rise and becoming a more relevant sales channel. The time that customers spend online and with digital interfaces isn’t growing as fast as it used to, as almost everybody is digitised in some way now. studies reveal that our behaviour spending time with digital interfaces such as mobile apps or browsing on laptops isn’t increasing at the same rate it used to. sure, people are spending twice as much time online compared to 10 years ago, but this is fueled by increasing use of tablets and smartphones, which are now commonly embedded in our society. With no sight of a revolutionary invention, such as the smartphone, we can assume that the growth will increase not as rapidly as it did in the last 10 years. From another perspective, we see that commercial offerings are increasing rapidly. Just think of the car manufacturer Ford, who want to start selling their cars on Alibaba. With the increase in offerings, and in the same short time, we want to – and can – buy more efficiently, and this is reason enough for customers to start their journey with one of the big marketplace operators.

social selling is another touchpoint that isn’t commonly used. These social channels are great influencers to help sell your products. Already by 2015 more than 50% of the people were influenced by Facebook in their online and offline purchases. When attracting specific audiences like millennials, students and even experts in B2B, these platforms have great potential. With 2 billion users, Facebook is – by some distance – the biggest channel. it’s followed by YouTube with roughly 1.5 billion users. instagram, pinterest, Reddit, and snapchat also have hundreds of millions of users.

With a piM and a little integration with marketing automation tools, you can tap into these vast audiences. social media seems to be evolving into more commerce-driven platforms as well. Facebook already has its marketplace, and we can expect more social commerce channels to emerge.

Salmon says: The world becomes very large once you add marketplaces and social media as touchpoints. Ready your piM to socialise your product data. Engage with your marketing business sponsors, and integrate with relevant marketplaces and marketing automation tools.

Marketplaces are on the rise due to the battle for customer attention

“My products are currently visible to 2 billion potential customers, and it took only one simple connection with my PIM to do this”

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Side note: trAnSForM dIGItALLY WIth PIM

digital operational excellence

■ Extended reach and access to new markets are now possible; it’s easy to upload translations and segment product data

■ Efficient product creation will improve productivity, and with the same resources, more products can be managed

■ supply chain improves because suppliers and vendors can automate their product data processes; product updates, new versions and other changes can be automated to a detailed level.

digital Product Leadership

■ Reduces time-to-market by onboarding and creating product data quickly and efficiently

■ Because of the efficient product creation, mark-up will be lower, making the retail price of products more competitive.

digital customer experience

■ products can be personalised on different factors: age, gender, location, and so on; product data can differentiate, depending on which device or touchpoint the customer is using

■ products can be categorised, indexed, and optimised to become more relevant for customers in search and navigation.

FIGure 2 A sample product information Management (piM) Reference Architecture

PIM

MdMData resources

PLM erP

Vendors Suppliers

Manufacturers

big data Analytics

bI

Marketingautomation crM

Syndication

MArKetInG & SALeS

Product MAnAGeMent

data integration

SALeS chAnneLS

of

in

e

Soci

al M

ed

ia P

oint of Sales ecommerce Marketplaces M

obile app

Se

o

(PoS)

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A piM is not just a tool to onboard product data and distribute it over multiple touchpoints. it’s also a merchandise instrument that drives sales.

We already know a piM helps you with ETL processes, making sure you get all the product data you require for selling a product: product name, price, description, and an image. Also, we know that a piM is capable of sending this product data to different touchpoints like a website or a pOs system.

However, most piM systems are capable of much more, especially when integrated or combined with other business instruments like a CRM, ecommerce platform, analytics suite, or a recommendation engine. You can transform a piM into a commercial product hub that is able to:

■ support the whole customer journey

■ Make content for all sales channels, touchpoints, and devices more relevant

■ Help you in the fight for the limited attention span of customers

■ Accelerate and improve ecommerce features in apps and websites

■ Quickly launch new products (fast time-to-market)

■ Control and update your product data in all sales channels instantly (e.g. trendy new content, price updates, promotional campaigns, etc)

■ Differentiate you from the competition and new challengers like big marketplace operators

■ Help customers get better understanding of what they are buying, thereby reducing product returns significantly

■ Enhance the overall customer satisfaction and experience.

With a PIM / MDM you collect, create, tune and distribute product data for the needs of customers,

touchpoints and devices, helping you to convert more.

to concLude

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4.1 TEAM Up For most companies, all these piM features and possibilities will sound overwhelmingly positive, and clear enough to develop a convincing business case. so where, and how, do you begin when turning your piM into a commercial product hub? What is the best approach? What are the costs in doing this? is your piM capable? To get answers to these questions, you need a partner with deep experience in piM. Our 2017 research confirms this, with 97% of respondents citing experience as “important” when choosing a tech partner6.

Salmon says: Make the business case to see whether the business values and benefits transcend the business penalties. Ask yourself the following questions:

the business value:

■ Will i generate more revenue if i turn my piM into a commercial product hub?

■ Will customer experience improve by enabling MDM features that help personalise content?

■ Will i generate more revenue if i differentiate content for touchpoints and devices?

■ Will resellers want to connect to my piM system?

the business deficit:

■ What if the competition uses their piM as a commercial product hub and i don’t?

■ How will i personalise my product content without a piM?

■ What will happen if i don’t differentiate content for each touchpoint or device?

We’ve seen that digital leaders that have a digital strategy plan and invest in new technology are more successful. According to MiT and Capgemini’s research7, digital leaders have 26% more profitability and 9% more revenue efficiency. salmon believes that investing in piM with a clear vision and digital plan will help companies to grow their business.

ASSIStAnce PLeASe!

6 salmon Ltd: 2017 Ecommerce platforms Research Report. Download a copy here.7 CapGemini Consulting: The Digital Advantage: How digital leaders outperform their peers in every industry.

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4.2 HOW sALMON CAN HELp salmon has a strong piM partnership with the award-winning informatica MDM product 360 Enterprise solutions. its clients include Unilever, pUMA, eBay, WAsCO, and paypal. EnterWorks is another salmon partner – a rising star in the enterprise piM domain. salmon and its partners offer deep knowledge of piM/MDM strategy, solutions design, integration, and implementation. We partner with retailers, manufacturers, and distributors to help them improve their customer experience, product data, operational processes, and profitability.

©2018 salmon Ltd. All rights reserved. All company and product names, brands and symbols mentioned herein are brand names and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

For more information,call: +44 (0)20 3858 0061email: info@salmon.comvisit: www.salmon.com

About SALMon

salmon is a global digital commerce consultancy – the biggest in Wpp’s network of companies – that defines and delivers market-changing solutions and customer journeys for the world’s leading brands.

Established in 1989, with operations in London, Amsterdam, sofia, New Delhi, Beijing and Melbourne, salmon clients include Argos, Audi, Celesio, DFs, ERiKs, Halfords, Jumbo, premier Farnell, sainsbury’s, selfridges, and sligro Food Group.