How can you optimise your product content to boost your sales?

Your e-commerce site is up and running. You’re getting good traffic and a good number of page views per visitor. But your sales still aren’t taking off as you’d hoped? There’s often one culprit you probably haven’t even considered: your product content. Of course, you might say you’ve got the basic information customers need to place an order (basic descriptions, sizes). But is that really enough?

The customer experience at the heart of your strategy

Nowadays, the customer experience and the customer journey are key factors in the success of any e-commerce site. Customers search for, examine and compare products before making a purchase: on your site, on your competitors’ sites, and on price comparison sites. They are looking for relevant information about a product or product category. With customers becoming increasingly fickle and the lines blurring between e-retailers offering a one-size-fits-all experience, it is essential to stand out by implementing a tailored content marketing strategy.

This is where the Product Information Manager (PIM) comes in, enabling you to manage your entire range of product data – including SEO-related marketing data – within a single platform. The PIM enables e-retailers to provide customers with all product data that is up to date, well presented and accompanied by attractive visuals, so that they can make informed purchasing decisions. Here’s how the PIM can help you achieve better conversion rates.

Make sure you have plenty of product information

Don’t skimp on this. Anyone can find the information they’re looking for about a product in multiple places within seconds. So make sure you have as much information as possible about your products (and keep it up to date) on your website, so that your customers have everything they need at a glance to take the next step: making a purchase. Of course, if you manage thousands of products in different sizes, colours and shapes, that adds up to a huge amount of product information to manage. PIM allows you to manage, organise and store all this information quickly and easily within a single repository.

Showcase your products through media

Although buying products online is very convenient, there is no way to replicate exactly the shopping experience found in ‘traditional’ retail. However, you can try to replicate it as closely as possible by adding photos and videos that give a better idea of the product the customer wishes to buy. This type of content, which goes beyond simple descriptions, is a significant asset in building customer confidence and encouraging them to make a purchase. A PIM solution allows you to manage and link your media to product data with ease, always with the same aim in mind: to provide your customers with as much high-quality, up-to-date information as possible.

More choice = More cross-selling and up-selling

Once the PIM is in place, creating and managing product data – whether it comes from internal sources (ERP, CRM, etc.) and/or external sources (extranet, supplier portals, etc.) – takes place in near real time. But what impact does this have on the customer experience? With a reliable and comprehensive product knowledge base, you can develop new omnichannel strategies by distributing your information across multiple channels (mobile, marketplaces, distributor extranets, social media, etc.) whilst drastically reducing time-to-market. In doing so, you provide your customers with a better, 360° shopping experience, make their searches easier and give them more reasons to return to your site to make a purchase. You can also find out more on the ‘Codyx’ news site, dedicated to technology.

Conclusion

By improving the customer experience on your e-commerce site – providing accurate, up-to-date information accompanied by attractive visuals – you bring customers closer to you, encourage them to buy today and build their loyalty for the future. The most effective way to create this environment is to enhance and utilise your product information using a Product Information Manager (PIM). Your online shop will be more welcoming, engaging, comprehensive and, as a result, profitable.