Dec 16, 2019
Check out Akeneo’s 12 Days of PIM-Mas to see what gifts has our product information “Ziggy Claus” has brought for all the good boys and girls around the PIM world!
This year, however, there’s also a new carol you may hear, particularly if you encounter carolers with a passion for omnichannel commerce and digital transformation. Or should we call it a new version of an old classic?
No matter what you call it, the season’s latest and greatest holiday song making its way around the offices of Akeneo and its partners and customers around the world is all about one thing: Product Information Management (PIM). Now, we’re happy to share these 12 Days of PIM-Mas with product information enthusiasts around the world.
Just like in the classic Christmas Carol, there’s a gift ready to go for each of the 12 days. But, rather than poultry in fruit trees and golden rings, we’ve got some gifts that should help get you in the holiday spirit by solving your biggest product information problems and challenges.
So, what gifts has our product information “Ziggy Claus” brought for all the good boys and girls around the PIM world? Let’s find out…
First and foremost in Ziggy Claus’ bags of gifts this year is a truly valuable gift for brands and merchants the world over: product information accuracy.
A robust PIM system gives you a single source of truth for product information. This single source of truth can then be used to enrich all of your product catalogs on all channels for each locale with the accurate, compelling product information that forms the building blocks for a captivating product experience.
With this product experience acting as your foundation, you can create enticing and exciting omnichannel experiences not just around the holiday season, but 365 days of the year.
Once you’ve crossed a single source of truth for product information off your wishlist, you’ll unlock a host of new potential and possibilities. That includes easier and more efficient cross border expansion!
Cross-border commerce requires that you speak your new customers’ language. This goes beyond simple translation and also includes making other changes to product catalogs. That means adapting your product assortment, digital assets, product descriptions, units of measurement, and even packaging to meet the norms and regulatory requirements of your new market.
It may sound like a daunting process, but a gift of PIM from Ziggy Claus can help you deal with all of the changes needed to succeed internationally. Akeneo PIM’s localization features, along with its well-stocked marketplace of connectors and integrations, can help you handle cross-border commerce easily and efficiently.
Selling in new markets isn’t the only expansion that Ziggy Claus and his PIM presents are here to help with, however. Opening up new sales channels is also made far easier with Akeneo PIM.
Each channel has its own unique properties, rules, and best practices, and your product information needs to be put in context for the specificities of your new channel. When selling on social media networks like Pinterest and Instagram, for example, you’ll need to adapt all of the elements of your product information, including digital assets and product descriptions differently than when selling via desktop eCommerce sites or mobile apps. Even individual social media networks or marketplace platforms can have their own unique requirements, making it even more important that you adapt product information when selling on multiple channels.
No matter whether you’re selling to consumers or other businesses, you can’t have a good customer experience without a good product experience. Take control of your omnichannel product experience with Ziggy Claus’ gift of omnichannel optimization.
Successfully expanding to emerging digital channels requires compelling and dynamic digital experiences. Offering these in an omnichannel world requires forging an emotional connection with your customers across all channels and touchpoints.
This is especially important around the holiday season. Emotion can weigh even heavier on customers’ buying decisions during this festive time, so it’s crucial that your team puts your assets in the proper context to create relevant and timely experiences for customers. However, it’s also important to adapt your digital assets all year round — after all, no one wants to watch a video of a snowy mountainside in the middle of the summer.
This all likely sounds like a daunting process, but Ziggy Claus may not be able to help with. But that’s where you’re wrong! With a timely gift of Akeneo PIM from Ziggy Claus, our digital asset management capabilities can help you manage all of your digital assets. Take control of your digital product experience by managing assets independently from products, allowing you to automate actions to edit them, saving precious time and resources when enriching products.
Now that your product information is correct, consistent, complete, and ready for expansion to new markets and emerging channels, it’s time to pick up the pace. That means accelerating time-to-market by freeing up your marketing team from menial, tedious tasks, and gives them more time to focus on creating the optimized omnichannel experiences we discussed earlier.
Fortunately, Ziggy Claus’ PIM present has just the thing — automation and a Business Rules Engine. Akeneo PIM’s business rules engine allows users to create smart product attributes that will be automatically completed according to a rule. It can also help you create content for attributes, and automatically classify products.
That way, you can move faster and ensure the quality and accuracy of your product information.
Now that your team is more efficient through automation, what else can they do to work smarter? Fortunately, Ziggy Claus and his magical PIM have that one taken care of.
With Akeneo, your PIM is now more than a container, it can also deliver product data. Akeneo’s Product Data Intelligence solution, Franklin Insights, is designed to automatically match input product attributes with your catalog product attributes, suggest new data you can include, and validate existing attribute values you have. Once you’ve subscribed to a product identifier, your product data will be continuously updated to ensure the highest data quality.
This way, you can make sure you have the most up-to-date, accurate, and compelling product information possible
Managing product information is, of course, an essential ingredient for omnichannel and international success — but companies with the most compelling omnichannel experiences go even further.
When it comes to fashion and apparel, home furnishings, and other high-level products, for example, form often matters as much as function. Customers in these and other industries expect and demand to be able to easily find and research products from unique brands, designers, collections, colors, and more, using features like shop the look. B2B brands, meanwhile, also need to manage information about suppliers and brands that can support your existing product information, and can also seek to offer product configurators and other tools to help buyers envision how a product will look once installed.
Ziggy Claus has just the solution. Akeneo’s Reference Entities feature can help you organize your product catalog around pieces of common information shared among products, including everything brands and designers to materials, colors and more. Your team can use these reference entities to easily and efficiently link information to relevant products in your PIM system to create content-rich product pages. You can also link enriched information to your product, including colors, ingredients, materials, and care instructions for a faster, easier enrichment process.
Need a little help making sure your omnichannel platforms sing like Christmas carolers? No problem, Ziggy Claus has just the thing.
Akeneo’s open-source product information management solution allows you to connect your PIM instance to fit your every need. Akeneo’s inspired integrations and dynamic and exciting ecosystem, meanwhile helps you connect top the top eCommerce platforms and extensions to make sure all your sales channels are holiday season ready.
Plus, you can get access to Akeneo’s diverse and active community of PIM enthusiasts and evangelists. Get help with product information management challenges from more than 3,000 active members and keep your project moving, or pitch-in with advice or insight to other community partners. Because what would the holiday season be if you didn’t share it with others?
No one wants to wake up on Christmas morning to find the wrong present sitting under the tree — and thanks to Ziggy Claus, they won’t have to.
When your product information is unclear or inaccurate, customers don’t get what they feel they paid for, and will rush to return products. While some returns can be chalked up to buyer behavior, according to many analysts, the vast majority of returns — nearly two-thirds, in fact — are the result of bad and inaccurate product descriptions or assets, which leave shoppers with the wrong impression or idea of what they purchased.
The answer to reducing returns lies in Akeneo PIM’s ability to ensure only high-quality data is available and reduce returns by up to 40 percent!
Speaking of spending the holiday season with those close to you, we all know that “teamwork makes the dream work” when it comes to holiday shopping success. Ziggy Claus has the trick to make your dreams soar to new heights this year!
Make sure your workflow is as smooth as silk this holiday season while accelerating time-to-market, and eliminating errors and inconsistencies with PIM. With better governance over processes and a more streamlined flow, organizations using a PIM report significantly faster time-to-market — like the case of Australian retail giant Myer, which saw time-to-market accelerate by 400% after adopting Akeneo PIM.
What’s more, with Akeneo’s Teamwork Assistant, Ziggy Claus help fosters collaboration across your teams of elves by tracking product data completeness to ensure no incomplete makes it to your sales channel. But that’s not all — by helping you audit your enrichment processes and notifying your marketing team when a product is missing attributes, needs translation, is ready to be exported in your eCommerce or is added to the PIM.
By combining his offerings of better cross-border and omnichannel operations, reduced returns, accelerated, workflows, and more, Ziggy Claus can offer the give your company the greatest gift of all: increased sales and conversions.
By providing higher-quality and more comprehensive product experiences that include impactful emotional information, you’ll convert customers at a higher rate. What’s more, when this data is put into context for the channel — by adapting and adjusting digital assets media and product descriptions to meet the specific needs of each channel — it can boost your conversion rates even further. And, thanks to those reduced returns, your revenues can grow as high as Ziggy Claus’ reindeer fly!
Add it all up, and a dedicated PIM solution can help your team increase conversions by as much as 40 percent!
Thanks to Ziggy Claus, you can settle in for your long winter’s nap confident in the knowledge that you have the answer to an issue with any of your PIM presents: Akeneo’s dedicated and dashing user support team!
Each Akeneo Enterprise Edition license comes with an SLA-backed support agreement, a dedicated Customer Success Manager, and Project Success Assistance. No matter what issue you have, how it happens, or when it happens, Akeneo will be there to help with everything from implementation to workflow to export.
With Ziggy Claus and his happy helpers at Akeneo at your side, you can make sure you don’t get left out in the cold this holiday season!
Perfect your product information and build dynamic product experiences this holiday season all year long with Ziggy Claus’ greatest gift to B2B and B2C merchants and manufacturers big and small: Akeneo PIM! Get in touch today to get started on your PIM project!
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