eBook
How to Drive Better Customer Experiences and Incremental Revenue with Product Information Management
Who’s this eBook for, and why should you read it?
To compete and thrive in today’s competitive and increasingly digital economy, your product information management process must stand out from the crowd and be everywhere it’s needed faster. If you’re responsible for making that happen for your organization, this eBook is for you.
You’ll learn which technology platforms are essential for success and which strategies you need to implement to drive better customer experiences and incremental revenue. Throughout this eBook, you’ll hear from your peers about the benefits they’re experiencing with Precisely EnterWorks—an industry-leading product information management (PIM) and multi-domain master data management (MDM) platform.
“The EnterWorks system has made a significant difference in how our company distributes product information and digital assets to fulfill the ever-changing needs of Fender’s employees, business partners and customers worldwide.”
PIM Team Lead FenderWhy PIM is no longer a nice-to-have
If you’ve been part of the product value chain over the past few years, you’ve seen firsthand the dramatic change in how consumers and businesses buy products. That change combined with an explosion of SKUs means that manufacturers, distributors, and retailers must now manage vast amounts of product information to successfully sell products today across digital and brick and mortar channels. And there are many technology platforms out there that can help you do this, along with an alphabet soup of acronyms, including PIM, DAM, PDS, PDM, PXM, MDM, and more.
Both industry analysts and practitioners agree that if you deal with lots of products, there’s one platform you can’t do without and one acronym you’ll grow to love—a product information management system or PIM.
Key Product Information Management Benefits
A fully-featured PIM system delivers many benefits, including enabling you to:
✔ Get new products and content to market faster
✔ Drive better customer experiences and brand loyalty Increase initial and ongoing revenue streams
✔ Drive down operational costs
✔ Scale up your product catalog
✔ Quickly test and expand into new channels and geographies
With so much at stake, how do you choose the right PIM system to meet your specific goals? In this eBook, we’ll answer that question by focusing on two crucial success strategies:
- How to ensure your product content complies with the five Cs principle
- And why you need to think about more than just product content to maximize success
“EnterWorks is at the center of our Global eCommerce Strategy.”
VP of eCommerce
Leading CPG brand
Turn more shoppers into buyers with the five Cs
To compete and thrive across your sales channels, you must craft great product stories and tailored offers that comply with what we call the five Cs principle. We’ll walk you through each of those Cs in turn and share with you the benefits your peers have experienced putting this strategy into practice.
“PIM enables us to share content between multiple applications—where the products are romanced with rich content. Our consultants now have the online ordering site as a rich shopping experience that’s on par with other leading websites.”
PIM Product Owner
Leading CPG brand
Compelling
Your product content must tell a compelling story in today’s hyper-competitive world. In digital channels, consumers and business buyers use your product information to make purchase decisions for a product they can’t touch and feel. And the competition is only a click away. Is your content compelling enough to ensure that the decision they make is in your favor?
The right PIM enables you to quickly produce and distribute compelling product content across brick and mortar, digital, and print channels—and direct and indirect sales models.
With PIM, you can go beyond providing basic product data and efficiently deliver persuasive romance copy, impactful product shots and videos, and other compelling content that turns shoppers into buyers.
Digital Asset Management, or DAM technology, plays a vital role in this area. Integrated with PIM, a DAM system enables you to store, organize, and syndicate product images, videos, reviews, manuals, and even virtual 3D and augmented reality experiences. With the ability to do things like transform images, generate variants by sales channel, and manage SEO and other metadata, a DAM is an essential part of any product information management platform.
Complete
When launching a new product or making updates, your content must be complete—to help your customers make the right buying decision and to meet the specific requirements of your sales channels.
The right PIM platform provides powerful capabilities to ensure your content is complete by channel—enrichment, completeness reporting, and workflows.
“We use the feedback and systems that EnterWorks provides to validate completeness. The platform provides the capability to understand where your data is, its validity, what’s missing, what’s incorrect, and what doesn’t fit in the business process you have established.”
Vice President of Technology
HDA Truck Pride
Correct
Accurate product information is essential to achieving and maintaining customer trust, avoiding costly downstream issues, and making informed business decisions. And this is another area where the right PIM solution is invaluable.
With PIM, you can build in business rules to ensure your content meets your data quality standards. Data stewards or other team members can quickly see the quality of your content by channel using visual dashboards and reports and take the necessary action to correct errors. Automated workflows and approval loops ensure that only data that’s passed your quality gate gets syndicated to your internal business systems and external channels.
Getting to this “single source of truth” for your product information is one of the primary reasons companies invest in a technology platform. And the benefits of this centralized source of trusted data extend beyond improving customer experience, avoiding downstream costs, and making better decisions—fixing errors once saves time, improves team morale, and reduces operational costs.
“If you have a lot of people doing manual processes, it’s so easy to introduce errors. We know if the data is in PIM, it’s correct. We can use it in our publication guide and don’t have to spend hours re-approving content. And if we have to correct an error, we correct it once.”
Business Analyst
Manufacturer of healthcare products
“With EnterWorks PIM, we collaborate with suppliers using the Vendor Portal to create and enrich our data for a consistent customer experience across our print and digital publication channels.”
Strategic e-PMO
Wholesale Distributor
Consistent
Your customers engage with your product content through a variety of channels—making it critical to deliver a consistent, on-brand experience across touchpoints. Achieve that, and you can avoid confusion, increase sales, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce returns.
With the right PIM system, you can build and implement sophisticated rules that automatically transform your data to maintain consistency and meet brand guidelines. And because the PIM feeds both your internal systems and sales channels, you can be sure that your product content is consistent whether it appears in a printed catalog, point-of-sale system, your website, or on a channel partner’s digital property.
Contextual
As we’ve walked through the other Cs, you may have picked up on our fifth and final C—contextual. The right PIM enables you to create content that’s compelling, complete, and correct in the context of each sales channel.
The content you need to provide to your POS system is different than what’s required by your eCommerce platform or by the GDSN data pool that feeds your retail channels. Trying to manage all of that without a PIM system is incredibly time-consuming and leads to errors, omissions, and content that’s underwhelming.
But there are more dimensions to tailoring your content than channel type and channel partner. What if you could easily tailor offers by customer or location? How about tailoring the type of content you create and syndicate by brand or product line?
To do that, you need to think beyond the narrow constraints of a traditional PIM system. And that leads us neatly into the next section of our eBook.
Go from product information to product intelligence
To craft tailored offers and compelling content by customer, location, and other dimensions, you need to go beyond product information and get to a higher level—product intelligence. It’s time to raise the stakes.
In this section of the eBook, you’ll hear how you can create relationships between your product data and other types of data—like your locations, customers, and vendors, so you can improve customer experience and drive incremental business.
Craft personalized offers and content
Let’s say you sell personal care products across the United States. Climate, culture, demographics, consumer preferences, and price sensitivity vary greatly not just by state but by specific locale. To maximize your success, you need to tailor your product assortment and create compelling offers and content tailored to each location—whether your channel is a brick and mortar outlet, a printed flyer, or a digital destination.
Which bottle of sunscreen you sell and when, how you describe it, the product shots and the price point should be tailored to the specific location and channel. And with digital channels, you can tailor your offers and content down to the personal level.
So what data do you need to do all that tailoring, and what does it have to do with PIM?
For the example we just described, your product teams need to have details about your customers and locations at their fingertips as they make merchandising decisions and craft content. And for that, you need to choose a PIM with full multi-domain data management capabilities.
The ability to surface up analytical data along with trusted data about your customers, locations, suppliers, assets, and other areas—all in the context of your products is incredibly powerful. This ability to use cross-domain intelligence is a compelling reason to choose a PIM platform that is also a fully-featured multi-domain data hub.
Use cross domain intelligence
Know what to sell where, when, to whom, and at what price—and deliver compelling, tailored content with a PIM that’s also a multi-domain data hub.
Make more of an impact with a single platform
In the rush to solve your pain points around product data, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. As we’ve already discovered, thinking beyond product data enables you to craft more tailored offers and content—but the benefits don’t stop there.
When you buy into a PIM that’s also a multi-domain data hub, you can drive better business outcomes across your organization—and at a fraction of the cost of buying separate products to manage each data domain.
This is a great point to make to your data or IT teams if you’re having issues getting budget. Chances are, if you’re struggling with getting high-quality data across all the systems it needs to go, other departments are feeling the same pain.
Here are just a few benefits that come with having a centralized source of truth for your most important business data:
- Get higher ROI on your marketing campaigns—by improving delivery rates with cleaner customer data.
- Make finding white space easier—by giving sales an accurate picture of products owned by account.
- Make more informed decisions—by getting reports built on high-quality, de-duplicated data.
- Optimize supply chain processes—by getting trusted supplier data across all your systems faster.
- Reduce downstream shipping and invoicing errors—by getting products and invoices to the right place with accurate ship-to and bill-to data.
“EnterWorks has helped us tremendously. It’s pretty much the foundation for everything we do.”
Strategic e-PMO Wholesale Distributor“We wanted one source of truth for all the foundational data we need. For us, this included product, trading partner and pricing information.”
Director of Supply Chain Systems & Standards
IPC Subway
“We are looking to standardize all our product, customer, contact, and finance master data. So, we’re truly looking for a single platform that can be our MDM multi-domain solution. EnterWorks was the only platform that could meet all of our requirements.”
Sr. Director, Enterprise Master Data
Multinational media company
“We started with our product management piece; more and more domains made themselves known. You become a victim of your success very quickly as you centralize this.”
VP, Data Management & Operations
Multinational media company
“When we started this journey, we really thought we were looking for a product information solution. But we discovered that EnterWorks went beyond product information and could do so much more.”
Product Information Manager
Gourmet Foods
Customer insights
We hope this eBook has shown you how choosing a fully-featured PIM that’s also a multi-domain data hub will enable you to get to market faster, drive better customer experiences, increase revenue, and reduce costs.
We thought we’d leave you with a few last words from our customers about the benefits they’ve realized with our software. We extend our thanks to them and invite you to reach out to us to discover how we can enable you to achieve similar results.
Why choose Precisely EnterWorks as your PIM?
Our platform contains everything you need to compete and thrive across all your channels—at the speed the market demands. We provide all the features and functionality you would expect to find in a fully-featured PIM and Digital Asset Management platform.
But here are a few things that really set us apart from the pack.
We enable you to:
- Go beyond PIM with a flexible, future-proof multi-domain master data management hub.
- Go faster, be more agile, and make an impact at scale with a platform designed for business teams.
- Get trusted product data wherever it needs to go faster with rich syndication capabilities.
- Print accurate, up-to-date marketing materials faster with best-in-class print automation.
- Work smarter and get more done with a range of AI/ML technology.
- Collaborate seamlessly with third parties and great content faster with a secure portal.
- Enable internal teams to sell and serve better with trusted content with an easy-to-use portal.
- Handle complexity and scale with a platform that’s enterprise-grade.
- Get to value faster with expert services, accelerator packages, and a configure, not code approach.