PIM is not just a “product information management” tool; it goes beyond storing information and combing through uncooperative data. A PIM is a growth catalyst of an eCommerce business looking to redefine the way they manage their business.
Investing in a PIM is a collaborative decision that involves a bunch of stakeholders – their needs, challenges, business goals, and desired outcomes. Clearly, a PIM is not an impulse buy. Thus, it becomes important to not only be wise with choosing the right PIM but also in adhering to the best practices while evaluating, implementing, and assessing a PIM.
Today, we’re going to look at five best practices for a PIM platform and snackable tips to action on these.
Let’s dive right in!
PIM is not just a platform, it’s a vision
At its core, PIM is more than just technology; it beholds a broader vision for managing product information across an organization. It’s about redefining how a company organizes, enriches, and delivers product data to enhance customer experiences, optimize product content, and streamline operations.
A PIM makes an impact on the way every department functions. Whether it is the way marketing teams improve their copies, or catalog managers improve their efficiency with maintaining product information, or the way IT teams securely manage their data.
As a part of a company’s vision a PIM should:
- Reform customer experiences
- Involve every stakeholder and educate them about the vision
- Bring a cultural shift to help every employee work towards a vision
- Transform the way of managing product information
- Have zero tolerance for data inconsistencies, errors, and data decay
- Make productive collaboration a part of their working style
Actionable tip: A PIM is not the sole responsibility of one department. It is a cross-functional effort where IT, marketing, eCommerce, and other teams understand and share the vision. Instill this idea in your organization and help your employees understand the value that the platform brings to your business.
Have a PIM strategy and objective in place
As an organization, it is important to collectively understand why a PIM is required for your business and how it is going to impact you. Understanding the objectives of a PIM platform is not just the c-suite’s job. Every stakeholder who is a user of the PIM and their work is directly impacted (positively of course!) by the implementation of a PIM like PIMworks needs to participate in crafting the objectives. Here are a few examples of the objectives of a PIM platform:
- The number of hours that I want to save in manual data tasks after implementing a PIM
- My channel expansion plan and how is PIM going to enable that
- What is customer experience in the context of product information and how am I going to improve it with a PIM?
- What are the KPIs of each team involved in using a PIM and how is the performance going to be measured?
- The action plan for building a strong presence in the search engines
- Bringing order and structure to category and taxonomy management
Actionable tip: Conduct internal workshops and sessions to involve every stakeholder affected by the PIM process and document the objectives. Document the learnings, get everyone’s consensus, and regularly review and adjust these objectives to meet your dynamic business needs.
Train your teams to adapt PIM
Some organizations need intensive training to use a PIM platform so that they can make the most of it. Here are some training ideas:
- Identify the roles and responsibilities of the team members involved in using the PIM
- Create training modules that meet the unique needs and interests of each team member. For instance, an IT team member would ideally need to understand integrations while a marketer needs to understand content management
- Plan workshops with the PIM vendor to help with the training
- Give your teams resources like manuals, articles, video tutorials etc. to refer back whenever they need it
Actionable tip: Evaluate the training cost and the need for training within your organization before implementing a PIM.
Choose the the right PIM platform
That seems like a popular platform and they have a very fancy website. Let’s invest in their PIM platform! This is a huge mistake when it comes to choosing the right PIM platform. There’s no one size fits all PIM in the market and no PIM platform is read-made for every business case.
Every business and their requirements are unique. So it is important to assess business goals, current needs, and then choose the right PIM platform that can cater to your needs before jumping to conclusions based on popularity of a platform.
To help you choose the right platform, talk to your PIM provider about your needs and the challenges that you want to solve. Listen to their approach to help you solve your problems. The best practice is also to get a free trial or a free demo of the product to help you understand the product’s fit to your personalized needs. Here are some criterias to consider while choosing your PIM platform:
- Scalability of the platform
- Integration capabilities (two-way sync)
- User-friendliness
- Free demos and trials
- Good customer reviews
- Cost and budgeting fit
- Customization options
- Platform performance and speed
- Key features
- Product roadmap
- Dedicated customer support
Actionable tip: Start by understanding your organization’s specific PIM requirements and objectives.
Use a PIM to optimize customer experience
At the core, a product information management platform helps eCommerce businesses with a single source of truth for their product data and make syndication to multiple channels as easy as a click.
But, there are certain things that need not be explicitly seen as challenges but can make a significant impact on your business and revenue – and that’s customer experience. What a PIM essentially does to your business is, it helps you optimize your product catalogs and make it search-friendly, enriches it with comprehensive information, makes it engagement-worthy with media assets, and also consistent and error-free.
While these are some good challenges that a PIM solves, a PIM also helps in improving customer experience:
Rich product catalogs + media assets + consistent/correct data = Better customer experience.
Although this looks like a add-on benefit, you must put in dedicated efforts to improve customer experience with a PIM and here’s how:
Actionable tip: Utilize a PIM to:
- Localize your product information in any language
- Segment your audience to personalize your catalogs
- Create variations of product content within the PIM system
- Use analytics to measure the impact of your personalization efforts
Final thoughts
Product information management platform is never a set-up and forget model. It requires constant improvement and adaptation from both the customer and the vendor to maximize ROI.
By adhering to the five best practices outlined in this blog and putting the actionable tips into motion, you can unlock the full potential of your PIM system. The PIM best practices are not what a business needs after the implementation – it begins at the point of consideration and evaluation itself.
Don’t stop with implementation of a PIM – measure the performance critically and improve continuously.
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