Automation: 11 examples of PIM applications

What is automation? You don’t need to look far; as the name suggests, automation encompasses all processes involved in automating a task. These tasks are often repetitive and tedious, which is why it’s beneficial for businesses to automate them. Here, we’d like to outline the many benefits of automation and how, thanks to certain solutions – including those from our partner Make – you can quickly and easily implement automation. Together with our partner Axome, we’ve come up with 11 practical examples of automation that will save you time – and much more besides…

The benefits of automation

We sometimes talk about marketing automation: these are marketing tools that can automate marketing tasks such as lead generation or sending email campaigns, for example. In this specific case, automation enables marketing teams to refine the segmentation of customers and prospects, to better understand their behaviour and needs, and thus personalise interactions between the brand and them.

However, automation has more than one string to its bow and delivers numerous other benefits for all teams within a company. Automation processes save valuable time. No more time is spent on tasks that are time-consuming, repetitive and sometimes tedious. One full-time staff member – or even several – can be freed up and reallocated to tasks that add greater value to your business.

Automation also improves quality: human errors are a thing of the past. Automated processes also enhance the quality and accuracy of the products and/or services you sell. In doing so, your costs are also significantly optimised. As the time taken to complete a task decreases, so do your costs. The same applies to your business’s productivity, which increases: indeed, automated processes generally take less time to carry out certain tasks than humans do.

Flexibility is not overlooked either, as automation processes can be programmed and easily configured to carry out very specific tasks. They can therefore quickly adapt to certain constraints and a changing environment. Finally, security is more than assured thanks to automation; with full control over the automation, it can be programmed to carry out sensitive tasks without fail.

With a PIM solution, implementing automated processes is all the simpler. A PIM (Product Information Manager) enables you to collect, centralise, manage and distribute all information relating to your products. With product information that is already highly reliable, comprehensive and secure, all automation processes implemented subsequently will be able to rely on sound and exhaustive product data. It is therefore an almost indispensable prerequisite.

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11 use cases for PIM-based automation

Together with our integration partner Axome, we have identified 11 practical scenarios demonstrating how to implement high-value-added automation for you and your business using Make.

Make is an automation platform designed for all business teams: marketing, sales, IT, human resources… From your single Make platform, you can integrate your applications by incorporating your existing processes or creating new ones.

Online shop management

Once again, the possibilities are endless with Make when it comes to managing online shops using PrestaShop, Adobe Magento or WooCommerce. For example, you can create workflows to publish your Shopify blog posts across all your social media channels, automatically add new products to your Shopify store via Google Sheets, or log every new order placed via your WooCommerce store onto a Google Sheet…Here too, the connectivity between a PIM such as Quable’s, Make and a platform such as PrestaShop allows data to be retrieved and distributed in no time at all, automatically.

Enhanced connectivity, via our Shopify Plus app, also enables you to publish a wealth of product information in just a few clicks, even across multiple Shopify shops. In short, the possibilities for automating and boosting the productivity of your online shop are endless.

Advertising / Ads

Using Make, you can create a feed directly for certain platforms such as Google Shopping, enabling you to quickly publish your product catalogue.

Similarly, on social media, automating certain processes with Facebook, Instagram or Twitter allows you, for example, to quickly generate content for these platforms—such as tweets and Facebook posts—as well as trigger actions based on user behaviour in relation to content on these social media platforms: for example, generating a comment in response to another comment, retrieving data and information from a post, and so on. This functionality can also be used for advertising or shopping on social media (TikTok Ads, Instagram Shopping, etc.). Product information can therefore be sourced directly from the PIM platform.

Project management

Numerous applications and tools have emerged since the Covid crisis – and even before – to facilitate better remote collaboration between teams. Airtable, Asana, Notion, Monday and Trello are just the best-known examples, and there are many others. Creating, modifying and editing pages on this platform takes a certain amount of time. However, automating several processes with Make allows you to automatically update certain information relating to specific pages, receive notifications and be alerted when various elements are changed, and automate even the smallest tasks within the tool. Tracking tools also help you understand which features you use most and least on these platforms, enabling you to optimise your use of these tools.

Image generator from text content

Some tools, such as Bannerbear, allow you to create content for your social media or other platforms using the platform’s APIs. Images, videos, banners and PDFs are all types of content you can create using templates that can be reused endlessly. Every element of the template becomes a customisable parameter via its own dedicated API.

Why not maximise the power of these applications together? For example, why not ask the OpenAI app to write image descriptions, which you can then input into an application like Dall-E, which generates images from text content? This content can then be used in a wide range of ways: a carousel for your LinkedIn page, a video presentation of your company, shipping labels for your parcels… you’re only limited by your imagination. Another option is worth considering: using the data already stored in your PIM; its comprehensiveness will only serve to enrich the visual content you create later on.

Generating emails and newsletters

These are typical examples of marketing automation. Tools such as Mailjet, Mailchimp, Sendiblu or Sengrid enable you to automate email campaigns, the sending of text messages, WhatsApp messages and newsletters. Specific interactions by website visitors with your brand trigger specific scenarios and result in a precise action or series of actions designed to convert these visitors into loyal customers. For example, a new visitor provides their email address to your brand for the first time, and the marketing automation system then sends them a welcome message.

With a PIM in place, these newsletters can also focus on your products (new arrivals, promotions, returns/out-of-stock notices, etc.), and subsequently trigger specific actions based on user behaviour.

Translation

Translation platforms lend themselves perfectly to automation. Whether it’s website pages, email sequences, articles or even white papers, translation is an essential step for businesses expanding internationally – and it takes time. Tools such as Deepl, once automated, therefore enable you to obtain an instant translation of all your digital content into any language, once the data has been retrieved from the PIM in the original language.

Creating professional materials

Platforms such as Prospero or Google Slides enable businesses to generate professional materials, such as presentations and other documents, to win over prospective clients and secure contracts much more quickly. There are numerous customisable templates available and, thanks to automation, it is very easy to determine which action is triggered based on the prospect’s interaction with the material. You can track numerous key metrics for your business – such as how many times the material has been opened, how long the prospect spent viewing it – and receive notifications where necessary. Once again, the data in your PIM and/or DAM is invaluable in this use case. You can retrieve not only your product descriptions but also your media assets from there.

Creating visual experiences

Media is king, but it also takes a great deal of time to resize and edit to meet brand requirements. Cloudinary is an example of creating original visual experiences; the platform enables brands to create, manage, store and transform their media. By automating processes, each of these actions can be programmed, and distribution across any channel is automated. Automation once again streamlines the processes and actions involved in media management, saving teams a considerable amount of time.

Product landing pages

Marketo and Webflow are relevant examples when it comes to creating landing pages showcasing products. With automation, it is possible to create landing pages in a fully automated manner, thereby generating a great deal of content much more quickly. With Webflow, page structures and web content can be much more engaging and dynamic, incorporating data that is systematically updated. Make enhances the power of your Webflow or Marketo website by automating tasks that are usually carried out manually. For example, if you want to send questions to a prospect once they’ve requested a demo or booked an appointment on your site, you can automate this task by delegating it to Make through a workflow.‍

Inbound & CRM

Automating the creation of leads and opportunities is also a valuable step to implement for your business’s inbound marketing and CRM. As with the previous examples, creating a scenario in Make triggers a process which in turn triggers an action, whether you use HubSpot, Salesforce, SugarCRM or Sellsy. For example, if someone fills in the contact form on your website (the trigger), this can result in their data being transferred to your CRM and/or a new task being created in your to-do list, such as following up with that person. With the tracking features, it’s also possible to monitor follow-ups to be carried out with prospects or contract sign-offs, to receive email or Slack notifications regarding these actions, and so on.

Spreadsheet software

When it comes to spreadsheet software such as Google Sheets or Excel, the possibilities for automation are also endless. You can update databases, such as exchange rates (using the Currency app), send Slack messages to a whole list of contacts from your spreadsheet, or import data on a specific topic into your spreadsheet from emails in Gmail, for example.

For manufacturers and distributors, a platform such as Quable’s PIM makes it easy to generate the FAB/DIS file in a matter of minutes. Combined with automation, it therefore becomes quick and easy to schedule imports, exports and the generation of this file with your partners.‍

Conclusion

In short, Make offers the ability to automate any business process and maximise your use of the PIM platform. The number of tasks that can be automated is virtually limitless, as are the possibilities for integration with a wide range of applications. Every area is covered: communication tools, spreadsheets, IT software, CRM, sales… and many other fields of application are possible: lifestyle apps such as Twitch and Reddit, navigation tools such as Waze or Google Maps, customer support apps such as Zendesk… and so on.

Furthermore, even if your tool does not yet offer integration via Make, it is entirely possible to utilise it if its API is open and flexible; there are therefore truly no limits or excuses left for not automating.