CONTRIBUTION BY ANTONIA RENNER – PRINCIPAL SOLUTIONS MARKETING MANAGER at INFORMATICA
Shop.org is the place to meet the top influencers and practitioners from the digital retail community.
Retailers and brands must transition from simply selling to customers to establishing relationships with them through personalized digital experiences driven by relevant content. Customers expect to be inspired, influenced, engaged and reassured that they have selected the right supplier and product. Customer experience defines a retailer’s success and this experience is the leading brand differentiator in a buying decision, leaving behind criteria such as product and price.
Readily available, rich product data helps to engage customers for a rich digital customer experience.
This can be challenging for retailers who have disparate product information across multiple systems and channels. In fact, merchants lag when it comes to cross-channel commerce: 51% of merchants cannot support mobile commerce, and 80% don’t integrate product information across web, mobile, applications and physical stores per 1WorldSync’s “Charting Course for Global Commerce“. *
For consistent omnichannel management, retailers must consolidate complex product information, descriptions, and digital media assets from multiple systems and departments to fuel their different sales channels and marketing systems with consistent and high-quality information.
The next wave of leading brands and retailers understand the need to unleash the disruptive power of data to drive customer engagement. They use master-data fueled solutions as a single source of truth to stay ahead of the competition. Some best practices:
- Fuel differentiated customer engagement with trusted, relevant and governed customer, product and supplier data.
- Successfully publish consistent and high-quality product data for unified omnichannel experience.
- Deliver high-quality service, personalized offers, and relevant cross-and-up-sell enhancing customer loyalty.
- Access editable channel previews to better envision the customers’ shopping experience, ensuring consistent branding and leading to higher conversion rates.
- Easily connect all key sales channels, e-commerce systems, e-procurement systems, e-marketplaces, catalogs, mobile devices or data synchronization.