How Can a PIM Help You Grow Your Business?

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As an essential link in multichannel e-commerce, a PIM is a real ally in growing your business. A successful customer experience necessarily depends on an optimal product experience. Improving the quality of the information you share and putting it in context, structuring your organization, expanding into new territories or building a multichannel offering: Synolia, an expert in PIM consulting and implementation, walks you through the growth drivers a PIM helps you capitalize on.

What is a PIM?

Let’s start with a quick reminder of what a PIM is. Short for Product Information Management, a PIM is a collaborative tool that centralizes, harmonizes and contextualizes all the information in your product catalogs.

From managing product information to creating memorable product experiences

Originally, a PIM made it possible to 1) centralize data in a single tool, 2) enrich that data to create product pages, build a brand story and stand out from the competition, and 3) distribute all this information across the various sales channels.

But in the era of experience-driven (e-)commerce, the PIM has broadened its scope. The rise of PXM (Product Experience Management), a concept that stems from Customer Experience Management, means extending the role of the PIM to putting the brand story in context. Putting product data “in context” means using the right visuals, the right descriptions and the right attributes depending on the location, your target audiences, the message and the image you want to convey.

Since the goal is to deliver an even more comprehensive brand experience, merchants need to move from simply managing product information to creating genuine product experiences. In short, through their product pages, brands must tell a story, spark emotions and delight their buyers.

According to Gerald Zaltman, a professor at Harvard University, “95% of our decisions come from our subconscious.” So what guides our subconscious?

So how do you build an exceptional product experience? Here are a few tips.

Improve the quality of your data

Content is the foundation of a good product experience. Yet it is estimated today that 75% of global e-commerce data is erroneous* (Catherine Barba, “2020: The End of E-commerce… or the Rise of Connected Commerce?”, a report for Fevad, the French e-commerce federation).

*“Erroneous” means several things: missing, incorrect or not suited to the device it is read on.

Alarming, you say?

Very much so! Especially in online sales, where the end customer only discovers the product or service after placing the order! Fortunately, there is a solution to fight this “plague”: the PIM!

Implementing a PIM within an organization first requires taking a fresh look at your offering to identify its key strengths and what sets it apart from the competition, as well as the key information needed to engage with the end user. Pay particular attention to:

• Technical information: size, color, material
• Advice: use, care
• Marketing and sales information: media, description, price

This information will be the cornerstone of how you build your brand image with the end user.

Better-quality information means better-informed customers, a better overall product experience and, as a result, fewer barriers to purchase.

Beyond better external communication, implementing a PIM is also an excellent way to make internal work easier, by harmonizing technical information and business terminology across teams, subsidiaries, business units…

Structure your organization

Beyond product data management, a PIM is also a powerful structuring tool for the organization, while remaining flexible. Implementing a PIM is a highly effective way to model and optimize business processes without upending the company’s overall organization.
It allows you to:

• model the lifecycle of a product or service within the organization
• optimize collaboration between departments
• define each user’s scope of responsibility
• make it easier to oversee the work

Combined with an optimal allocation of rights and roles per user, implementing a PIM makes it possible to set up a structured process, from collecting information to structuring it, enriching it and finally distributing it.

Improving the quality of your data and structuring your organization with a PIM already means doing things right. But to go further and see a real impact on your business, you can do even better.

Expand your commercial reach

Enriching the product data available through a PIM speeds up the geographic expansion of a company that aims to grow internationally or into new regions.

With enriched, structured, high-quality data, a PIM lets you build on what already exists to organize your international expansion strategy or, at the very least, your expansion into new territories. With advanced user rights management, a company can open up and delegate part of the internationalization work to specialized translation agencies, for example.

What’s more, even before considering international expansion, a PIM is also the best way to adapt and improve the quality of content for the countries or regions where you already operate. For example, a brand present in a French-speaking market such as Switzerland or Quebec can easily choose to tailor its messaging specifically for those regions.

Ensure consistent distribution across all channels

A PIM also lets you tailor the required information to each distribution channel. A print catalog or product listings on marketplaces do not necessarily require the same information as an e-commerce site or a mobile app. This makes it easier and faster to develop new channels for distributing information, and therefore for selling: print catalogs, B2B, marketplaces, mobile apps, etc.

This ability to adapt product data easily, along with the opportunity to shorten time-to-market for new sales channels, is a key driver of a PIM project’s return on investment.

Have questions on this topic, or want to tell us about your PIM project? Get in touch!

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