Top 10 Reasons to Acquire a Product Information Management Solution (PIM or PXM)
Implementing a PIM or PXM* solution will bring numerous benefits to your organization, in terms of improving efficiency, increasing sales and conversions, reducing returns, and promoting customer loyalty through more accurate, more complete, and more engaging product content. Here we explore these benefits in more detail.
1. A Centralized Hub for Data
Data silos are the number one inhibitor to commerce success regardless of your business model. Adopting a centralized PIM eliminates silos and facilitates efficient internal and external access to approved content. Through effective workflow, data quality, and governance tools, a PIM ensures that disparate content is transformed into a company-wide strategic asset. Seamless integration capabilities ensure that your upstream and downstream business applications such as ERP and e-commerce are supplied with timely and accurate content.
2. Error-free Product Data
Businesses and consumers are demanding more and more information prior to making purchase decisions. Couple this with more suppliers, more data formats, and differing supplier taxonomies and you could have millions of data points to manage, normalize, and enrich with your own brand voice. This is where PIM excels by providing automated onboarding of supplier data, applying data quality rules, transformations, and corrections so your business users have the best possible starting point for enrichment and waste less time correcting inbound product data.
3. Faster Time-to-market
Completing product information with rich descriptions, full attribution, and multiple digital assets is often done on-the-fly as products are finalized for launch. Small teams with limited resources just cannot keep up with the demand for product content and are forced into publishing products before they are 100% buyer ready.PIM enables you to integrate supplier data faster and automate enrichment based on business rules. It also expedites processes by providing greater visibility into product data quality and completeness.
4. Create Channel-specific Assortments with Customized Content
Serving both online and offline channels with the relevant product assortment, channel-appropriate attributes, and messaging adds an extra layer of complexity. Many organizations cannot afford to dedicate the required resources and staffing to meet content and delivery deadlines. Manual processes can be error-prone, extremely time consuming and, quite simply, overwhelming for most marketing teams. With a PIM, you will;
- Improve engagement and conversion rates, and ultimately increase sales, with more relevant assortments for individual channels or partners.
- Personalize and target your messaging to further improve engagement and conversion rates.
- Reduce internal production costs for each marketing channel.
5. Easier Translation and Localization
It’s a great feeling when your product content is complete and approved in your home market/master language. But what processes do you use to localize the context and translate it to support global sales? Managing translations in-house can be slow and inefficient, and accuracy and brand voice can also be compromised. Streamlining this process by managing content enrichment, translation, and localization (cultural and legal nuances) concurrently in one integrated platform will vastly improve time to market and help provide the ultimate competitive edge you are looking for.
6. Publish with Ease
Publishing from a PIM is easy. Print or web, catalog or brochure, even data export to a customer’s e-commerce portal—a PIM allows you to configure and feed product information from the data repository to an e-commerce storefront as well as publish to print or electronic catalogs. An ERP system or spreadsheet cannot. This flexibility enables businesses to target messages to specific audiences with exceptional efficiency and to archive publications for updates and reuse.
7. Create Actionable Insights from Analytics
The ability to track the effectiveness of your products, your taxonomy, and your enrichment effort is key to ensuring success. PIM enables you to test your search facets and filters using Elasticsearch to present your PIM data in the same way that your website presents your products to customers. Visual analytics guide users to address missing attributes that drive your online findability, and workflow combined with task lists enables them to distribute work amongst team to promote efficiency. PIM’s data integration tools also enable you to blend PIM data with other data sources such as Google Analytics and financial data to provide actionable insights into your product performance.
8. Improve Customer Experience (CX)
PIM enables businesses to curate and enrich channel-specific product assortments along with contextualized product content to appeal to specific target personas and/or demographics. Personalizing the customer experience in this way promotes higher conversion rates and reduces shopping cart abandonment. Giving customers the right information at every stage of the journey delivers the best possible buying experience and builds trust and long-term success.
9. Increase Sales and Profits
All the PIM features and benefits mentioned above will enhance your multichannel offering and improve conversion rates, cross-sell and up-sell performance and, ultimately, drive sales revenue. PIM can be added to boost your already successful e-commerce and/or catalog efforts, or it can be the vital foundation to a new platform or digital transformation, increasing the likelihood of success and ROI.
10. Boost Performance
Good PIM isn’t just about data, it’s about maximizing the productivity of your team while improving their job satisfaction. With PIM you will reduce redundancy, rework, and repetition, and ensure you’re no longer beholden to error-prone, complex spreadsheets. Streamline your market launch activities and keep everything moving from one step to the next with task lists. Maintain your product content in a single, trustworthy source so you can spend less time searching for the latest update and more time focused on increasing your market reach and boosting overall performance of your team.
Jason Simpson, 9th February 2024
Why Choose Agility PIM Over Another PIM
Agility PIM from insightsoftware is a user-friendly application designed for efficient workflows and easy integration with multiple systems. It offers a seamless integration process, with fully documented APIs, enabling workflow-driven delivery to e-commerce solutions.
Agility PIM lets you create a single repository of product data for multichannel publishing to ensure your customers will encounter impeccable consistency, no matter where they look. With Agility PIM you will reduce redundancy, rework, and repetition, so you’re no longer beholden to error-prone, complex spreadsheets. Simply put, Agility PIM flexibly scales to empower users across a variety of industries with a single, reliable view of their product information.
Are you Ready for PIM? Take our 3-minute PIM Readiness Assessment to see the value a PIM solution can bring to your company.
*At insightsoftware, we believe that PIM and PXM are the same thing, a good PIM covers the full spectrum of functionality from the ‘buy side’ of the business to the ‘sell side’ and everything in between. PXM is more concerned with how the software is used – it attempts to differentiate the solution towards the sell-side, to create a new market segment. We think this is unnecessary and confusing to potential buyers.