One size does not fit all for customers digital experiences anymore, no matter your industry or market. How you present and promote your merchandise in digital markets is going to move your business to the next level and set a solid foundation for being ready for what the future holds. Being able to succeed in digital merchandising requires a mix of both artistic expression and scientific analysis, along with complete alignment of your other company pillars. After all, without the right strategy, user experience, operations, technology, and marketing in place you will fail to convert the browser into a buyer or up-sell your current customer any day. By approaching digital merchandising with this in mind and taking a holistic view at your data, you will be able to resonate with your unique visitor profiles and offer a superior digital merchandising experience.Echidna’s principal leadership comes from decades of experience in dealing with large product catalogs, multiple sales channels, and infinite customer-personas while working at companies like Walmart, Best Buy, Target, and Teleflora. Using these past experiences and understanding current market trends and technology, the merchandising pillar within the Digital Journey Maturity Model was created to help enterprises in improving their process around:
-Visual Merchandising -Catalog Management
-Product Attribution -Product Relationships
-Pricing & Promotions -Digital Assets
These processes intertwine themselves into all other areas of your business, so it is important barriers and silos are a thing of the past.
Examples of digitally maturing the merchandising pillar include:
- Working alongside sales and logistics to implement correct product attribution that will inform these departments across all channels and improve customer experience and delivery efficiency.
- Through technology and processes of understanding how products relate to one another, you will able to effectively associate products that should be sold together to increase order conversion and AOV.
- With a proper analytics tool in place, being able to leverage relationships between product views and conversion and digging into why some highly viewed products were not selling well, for instance, or why some items were hot sellers even though they were attracting relatively few views.
- Being able to offer dynamic marketing promotions and competitive pricing that will drive digital demand and brand loyalty, which is extremely important when competing against large marketplaces like Amazon.
- Updating merchandising, marketing, and commerce technology to ensure they have capabilities to offer standard, promotion, contractual, and/or quantity based pricing tiers is invaluable.
Dynamic merchandising is at the center of the buyers experience. After all, without the right products, placement and content, digital commerce will fail to convert visitors into buyers. The most successful company’s approach digital merchandising with the proper mix of technology, algorithms, and people to ensure their customer engagement is high, while site and cart abandonment is low, and with converting a top goal. As your company digital matures, you will need to revisit and rethink your merchandising strategy to ensure it’s benefiting both the customer journey and your brand.