PXM Know-How: PIM System To Improve Your Shoppers Product Experience
Recently, product experience has played a critical role in creating a brand personality, nurturing the right emotional connection with customers, and their unique brand experience. Learn the fine art of product experience management, explore its benefits and possible challenges and get to know how modern technologies can help you craft the best product experience for your clients.
What Is PX?
Product experience (PX) is the client’s impressions and feeling, thoughts, and motives from the first acquaintance with a product/company to the finishing step of a service provided to the customer. It is a part of the customer experience that is directly related to the buyer’s interaction with a product.
What Is PXM (Apart From CXM)?
3+1 Flags Of Quality Product Data
Every second of the buyer’s interaction with the product shapes the overall product experience. PX heavily relies on the quality of product data and its accuracy. Here are the top tips to create product content that turns the product experience into a pleasant adventure.
Cover The Basics First
Today’s shoppers expect a comfortable, personalized shopping experience with an unlimited range of products and a user-friendly online store interface. If you claim to be a successful and strong brand, you must not only meet these requirements but exceed them. The information about the product is the first place to do it. It needs to be put in such a way that there are no questions left. The description has to include important details, feel complete overall, and be time-relevant.
Consistency Rules In Omnichannel Strategy
Nowadays, more than half of the online stores are represented on multiple channels. It makes complete sense to leverage what you already have (a good product) and showcase it to a new audience. The challenge is that you’re working with a large volume of data, first. Different channels attract different audiences, second. You need to adapt the message while staying true to the product’s essential features. It should look the same from every description you put out to the market even if tailored to a specific audience. The omnichannel product experience strategy is about adjusting “how” you communicate, meanwhile “what” (the essence of the product/service) is a constant.
Implement A Multidimensional Approach
Now that we’ve covered the basics, we can build upon the foundation of the quality product data. Imagine a concise description with a photo (a good one but still an only one) and the one with a video with a change of angles and added measurements. The second option is what you can refer to as enriched data. This approach means going the extra mile to simulate a feeling of interaction with a product.
Make It Easy To Find & Nice To Interact With
The customer who gets lost on the site equals a loss for the business. To minimize the confusion, make sure that the product info is easy to find and interact with. Structuring and organizing it helps as well.
A few tips on that:
- group technical specifications into sections with subheadings;
- use design elements that improve readability, such as color alternation;
- use tooltips whenever the value of a characteristic is not obvious. You can add an icon with a question or information symbol for this;
- don’t neglect the detailing feature – so the visitor can zoom in on the details of interest and get a closer look at them. Use the ability to zoom in on hover rather than clicks.
What Can PXM Do For You?
PX management is not just about giving your customer an enjoyable experience. It influences the state of your business in the long run – it’s a guarantee of increased sales, customer loyalty, and much more.
Match Up The Expectations With The Product’s Properties
The more comprehensive is the description, the more multifaceted image appears in the viewer’s head. This means that creating such is in the retailer’s interest in the first place. It isn’t a failure to lose a customer if your kind of goods isn’t exactly what they’re looking for. It’s much more damaging for the business to have a customer who made a purchase only to find out that it mismatches with their needs.
To avoid a misfortune like this, keep this list of filled-out product cards in mind:
- explain why (in which cases) this product can be necessary and how to use it;
- indicate the advantages over similar products;
- have all the main characteristics such as price, weight, composition;
- focus on the target audience and write in their language;
- have content that confirms this information, i.e., reviews, certificates, etc.
Provide 100% Relevant Product Data To Each Distribution Channel
The total product experience managing ensures that every channel gets the relevant information, tweaked to the particular way of content consumption. This way dictates the specifics of perception. However, if the content is identical, Instagram users and website visitors won’t be feeling left out with a fraction of what is described on the other resource. It requires attention to each platform and knowledge of how to present the data most suitably.
Increase The Conversion Rate Across The Sales Channels
Product experience metrics include conversion rate across the sales channels. Actually, it’s one of the most important indicators since it’s hard to resist an emotional temptation. The great product information does exactly that, it tells a story that evokes emotion, trust, and an idea of a better life.
To achieve it, use descriptions to tell the potential customer:
- how the product looks with a certain color;
- how it smells;
- how much it weighs and what it feels like;
- other details that can’t be extracted from a photograph.
Remember: an effective description sells benefits, not just features.
Turn Buyers Into Engaged Fans Of A Brand/Product
Getting conscious of the product experience management lets your brand earn the fans long before the final purchase. The audience always comes back to the place where they get interesting and useful information, and of course, they remember the person who helped them. Sustained loyalty to a particular product ensures increased sales. Companies with a loyal audience can spend less on marketing and promotion, set the most favorable prices for the business, retain customers in moments of crisis, and be recognized and coveted despite the reputational machinations of competing companies and detractors.
What Are Main PXM Challenges?
The challenge lies in its benefits. It’s a few minutes for the reader to get an overview of the product and it’s much more time for you to create an appealing image of a product. It includes:
- organizing the whole process into a defined and structured workflow for it to be effective;
- distributing the data across the right channels and in the right format;
- working on constant actualization and updating of the content according to the new product experience insights.
How To Improve Your Customers’ Product Experience?
Check Out The Popular PIM Solution’s Functionality
Some brands manage product information using spreadsheets or platforms created for product managers which is usually not combined with marketing systems.
Employees of online stores have to constantly enter thousands of lines of different information into project and digital asset management tools to ensure eСommerce syndication. This tedious and time-consuming work increases the risk of providing inaccurate information to customers.
It’s worth using a PIM solution to solve this problem which is the automated process of collecting, processing, and disseminating required product data. PIM, product information management software aims to protect and improve the quality of product information available to internal and external employees, systems, and partners.
Organize The Product Data With PIM
Effective product information management is critical to multi-channel marketing and sales. The PIM system is used to receive and store all product content including:
- product descriptions;
- product pricing information;
- items;
- digital assets (including images or PDFs).
The product experience tools centralize, synchronize, and integrate product content information with all components of the commerce technology stack such as the order management system (OMS), internal and external software.
Work Further On Enriching & Personalizing The Product Content With PIM
The content classification structure makes it easy to retrieve product data from central repositories. The main goal is to provide the end consumer with more detailed information. Establishing the system that makes all the administrative work allows for a focus on the product content and the time saved can go into both qualitative and quantitative improvement. This greatly increases conversion rates.
Control Your Product Data Quality All Along The Way
Having a product database in one place means more control over it, before and after syndicating product information. It’s particularly convenient for complex product content for its effective management.
Companies often present products that consist of a large number of combinations (e.g., a clothing set of pants, shirts, and shoes) or different variations (e.g., T-shirts in different colors and sizes). To effectively handle these assets and subsequently be able to transfer them through different output channels, you need to use PIM. This experience management platform becomes the source of “master data” that is easily editable and put out to the world of marketplaces.
Product Experience Management FAQ
PXM vs PIM – What’s The Difference?
The main thing to understand is that it’s not PXM vs PIM, they are actually interconnected terms.
In a nutshell, PXM comes with an analysis of marketing information about the product with different variations of its characteristics, taking into account the rules of publication of external sources, CA segmentation, and positioning.
PIM is a product information management system. It allows you to upload, edit and synchronize data from CRM, CMS, ERP, and other systems and furtherly deliver the processed data to external systems and sales channels.
Where To Get The Ideas To Improve Customer Experience With My Products?
First, from the workflow itself, check if there are any things that can be simplified or upgraded. Second, you can look into the data to see if there are any repeated errors to fix or ask for feedback from your customers. Finally, PIM software is the way to go to save time and minimize the risks, especially when dealing with huge volumes of product information.
Do I Need Any Specific PXM Software?
Depends on your work process and priorities. If you’re aspiring to maximize the automation potential, it’s a great decision to choose a specific PXM solution. You’ll also thank yourself for the purchase in case you’re:
- the manufacturer/brand of goods who wants to fully own the information about your product range, open new sales channels, and expand internationally;
- the distributor who needs to process large volumes of data quickly, expand product offerings, and be consistent across all sales channels;
- the retailer who studies the user experience for each sales channel and is eager to accelerate product launch, create an omnichannel experience, and increase revenue.
Where To Go From There?
Now that you know what is product experience, you can’t ignore its importance. Rather than waiting for when it becomes a critical issue, get ahead and deal with it sooner than later.
The PIM solutions like Gepard platform can help you out with that. It brings disparate information together and gives a single hub to manage it. Apart from the objective information, used to describe brand products, it stores the digital assets. These include videos, photos, 360° images, illustrations, and logos. Importing or attaching them to the profiles in the system and using them in combination with other types of information allows to support customers, improve the market presence, and describe the offer.
You don’t need to worry about the product attributes specific to a market or geographic location as well. The localized language variations, translations of units, and adjusted currencies will help you meet the unique needs of existing markets by expanding easily and quickly into new territories.
To see if that works for your business, request a personalized demo. You won’t regret a chance to learn how to efficiently organize your product data to create an excellent product experience.