Seamless customer experiences are essential to meet modern shopping demands. As markets and buying behaviors continue to change, the only constant is the need for speed and agility.
Omnichannel commerce allows customers to engage with brands across channels. Whether a customer engages with a brand in-store, on a direct-to-consumer (D2C) site, on social media shopping options like Instagram, Amazon, or any other channel, the experiences must be engaging, relevant, up-to-date, and consistent.
As the lines between channels continue to blur, brands must have four essential omnichannel commerce requirements to find success on the digital shelf.
What Are the Essential Tools to Support Omnichannel Commerce Requirements?
Omnichannel commerce requirements can best be supported by investing in technology that brings together the multiple threads that make up your go-to-market strategy. A commerce experience management (CommereXM) platform can help you increase operational efficiency, grow market share and sales, and speed time to market.
Here are just a few of the capabilities that can help you streamline your omnichannel operations to find success on the digital shelf.
Product Information Management (PIM)
One of the biggest challenges facing brands — especially those with an extensive product range — is managing product information. This essential data is often owned and maintained by different people across the organization and needs to be accessed by both internal and external stakeholders before being sent to the various sales channels.
This product information could also require adjustments to account for regional or channel-specific nuances — much of which frequently change, requiring strict governance and protection to ensure each product listing is ready for publication.
Brands must simultaneously ensure product information is accurate, secure, and accessible to the right stakeholders and maintain agility for quick changes.
The omnichannel commerce requirements for product information can be some of the trickiest to manage, but you don't have to choose between data governance and speed. Multiple versions and layers of product information can be supported with an enterprise-level PIM system.
Salsify's PIM system provides the capabilities and technologies that enable speedy access to product information without sacrificing control over the end state. It's a single, central source of truth to collect, manage, and enrich product information and distribute it to the right places.
A cloud-based, enterprise-level PIM system brings access for multiple stakeholders while allowing for localization and channel-specific nuances. The result is a faster time to market, future-proofed flexibility, and a more compelling product experience for all involved.
Enhanced Content
Engaging product content is essential for a top-performing omnichannel commerce strategy. As more consumers turn to digital shopping channels, brands that fail to deliver high-quality product content risk losing sales and market share.
According to the Salsify 2020 Consumer Research Report, a staggering 79% of shoppers have not purchased a product due to a problem with product content.
A breakdown of some of the most common issues illuminates the importance of enhanced content, such as image galleries, videos, comparison charts, downloadable PDFs, and more:
- Not enough information;
- Low-quality or too few images and videos;
- Hard-to-read product descriptions or details; and
- Inconsistent product data between sites.
Enhanced content can help brands across most categories increase conversion by 10%, according to 2020 Salsify internal data. As competition on the digital shelf increases, standing out online will become more crucial than ever before.
Salsify Enhanced Content offers brands the ability to create and send enhanced content quickly and at scale — essential modern commerce capabilities. This allows teams to adapt to changing markets and buying behaviors with agility, capitalizing on new opportunities and capturing market share.
Activation
A set-it-and-forget-it approach does not work for omnichannel commerce, as the needs of the digital shelf continually change. Shoppers demand engaging content experiences. Retailers have unique requirements. Distributors have increasing digital demands.
All the while, your competition isn't standing still. Brands must have the ability to activate high-performing product experiences across every channel.
With activation, your team can gain the ability to manage, publish, and adapt product experiences at the speed and scale required to win on the digital shelf. Product experiences are not just a matter of moving data in spreadsheets across the internet. Continued performance growth requires an ongoing, coordinated effort of managing, publishing, monitoring, and measuring.
Salsify Activation helps teams manage brand experiences effectively, speed time to market, better tell your brand story to win customer loyalty, and respond quickly to market changes.
Digital Shelf Insights
Perhaps the most essential omnichannel commerce requirement for success is access to robust analytics. Having streamlined, engaging product content activated across your priority channels is excellent — but it's equally important to understand how it's making an impact.
Digital shelf analytics help teams drive agility and action, as it helps them monitor market activity that can inform optimization and activation efforts. These insights help teams understand market signals and empower ecommerce teams to respond quickly to information and adjust strategy as needed.
Salsify Insights offers a dashboard that equips teams with a holistic view of product page performance. It also provides a wide range of reports and modules that help teams develop a deeper understanding of the buy box, content, product reviews, and more.
Omnichannel Commerce and the Future of Shopping
Wherever you’re selling — be it D2C, through retailers or marketplaces, via social commerce, and more — omnichannel commerce requirements call you to leverage technology. Success in today’s market can live or die by the strength of your insights, the level of enhanced content you can deliver, and the tight hold you have on your content.
Watch our on-demand webinar, “Moving at the Speed of Commerce: Introduction of Salsify Commerce Experience Management,” to learn more about the new opportunity for brands to win on the digital shelf.
