Channel insights and price intelligence promote omnichannel commerce

What is the role of price intelligence in providing a good customer experience?

Prices have a direct impact on your bottom line, as the price you charge should provide a return on investment that keeps your business profitable. Beyond that, your prices are also your reputation. With 94% of online shoppers investing time to find the lowest price for the product they want, the key answer lies in perceived value. If a customer believes spending their money on your product/service will provide them with enough value based on their needs, they’ll be happy to make a purchase. That’s why pricing flexibility and responsiveness to market changes are critical for businesses to stay competitive. Online retail giants already use big data to price their products. For instance, Amazon changes its product prices 2.5 million times a day through analysis of customers’ shopping data, competitor’s data, and its inventory.

Therefore, you must constantly evaluate and update your prices to convert shoppers into buyers without compromising your profit margins. Price intelligence is a data-driven and proactive approach to changing your online prices across your product categories to offer the best prices in the market. This is possible through a dynamic pricing strategy – timely comparisons and analysis of the prices, deals, offers, and discounts of your competitors. It allows you to share accurate, consistent pricing across all your channels, a key part of product syndication. Furthermore, providing personalized and relevant promotions can lead your customers to feel important and catered to, fostering customer loyalty.

The components of price intelligence: the capacity to monitor, track, and analyze market price data.

What are the challenges and pain points of omnichannel commerce? — Evaluation, analytics, and reporting

The complexity of omnichannel commerce is growing, but the challenges remain: identifying relevant sales channels, increasing competitive pressure due to fluctuating consumer confidence, extreme market developments such as supply chain bottlenecks, adapting to requirements in different countries, and more. Similar to traditional brick-and-mortar stores, competition for space on the digital shelf is fierce. To be the best, you need to consider how your products appear on search results pages, online marketplaces, and anywhere else potential customers might find your products.

That’s why it's vital to seize and respond to valuable information promptly. By gathering market intelligence, brands can perform a market analysis to generate decisive insights and to derive strategic actions. In omnichannel commerce, market intelligence means collecting, analyzing, and interpreting market information – including competitors and industry trends – based on product and price data from marketplaces, price comparison sites, and online stores. The goal is to enable well-founded decisions on pricing, product development, and sales through the systematic collection and analysis of the market environment.

How to create a successful omnichannel commerce strategy — With channel insights and price intelligence

Brands with a top omnichannel customer engagement see a 9.5% yearly increase in annual revenue, compared to 3.4% for poor omnichannel brand strategies. Moreover, customer retention rates are 90% higher for omnichannel vs. single channel. Organizations that focus on driving action based on insights are able to create a holistic picture of the marketing performance, improve the user experience, and optimize business processes. In fact, compared with low-performing companies, high-performing organizations are 2,6 times more likely to treat data and analytics as core assets that create a competitive advantage.

But before you rush to grow your omnichannel capabilities, you must step back and consider the underlying drivers of value for your specific business. Organizational silos and data integration gaps often prevent companies from turning their omnichannel vision into reality. Omnichannel commerce requires more than a one-way push of data to digital channels and marketplaces. You must be able to analyze streaming data, integrate data inputs from different channels, and access valuable insights. For instance, without data-driven insights into how your SKUs appear in relation to the competition, you could be missing out on opportunities.

To offer a cohesive shopping experience, omnichannel pricing is also imperative. It boosts the engagement rate, purchase frequency, average order value, and customer retention rate. With the right pricing strategy, you can track and analyze prices across your industry, allowing you to make informed decisions. By implementing price intelligence and collecting channel insights, you can gain a competitive edge, improve your profitability, and better serve your customers.

Here are a few key steps to provide a seamless omnichannel experience:

1. Consolidate your data
   Siloed data and poor data quality are often the deathblow for omnichannel strategies. On average, companies have more than 2,000 data silos, each housing information that is inaccessible to other parts of the business. By consolidating data in a central place, you can create a unique master record. This gives enhanced data quality, reliability, and accessibility of product information at scale. Consolidated and streamlined data increases the efficiency of processes throughout the whole company with improved time-to-market and reduced cost.
   
   
2. Enrich your data
   Your product data must fulfill and surpass the benchmarks for enhanced, robust, and descriptive data. In the omnichannel context, data enrichment ensures that the product data includes all the attributes a buyer will need to make an informed decision based on accurate information. It’s the process of filling in the blanks for your potential customers. Instead of sharing a product with only a text description, or photo, you can include details such as measurements, color variations, related products, and accessories.
   
   
3. Integrate experiences across channels
   Creating an integrated omnichannel experience begins with your data infrastructure: connecting all tools and systems within your tech stack and building pipelines to transfer the data generated in these tools to a central hub. Even more effective would be integrating the actual customer experience. Map out the customer journey, identify the content the customer needs, and then define how you can meet those needs. The goal is to provide a seamless buying experience, no matter how customers interact with you.
   
   
4. Measure where and how customers interact with your brand
   An omnichannel strategy doesn’t mean your brand should be active on every single channel that exists. It’s about understanding which channels your customers prefer, using both quantitative and qualitative analysis. This process includes synthesizing all relevant information into real-time customer profiles (consolidating data from every touchpoint, whether it’s customer support chats, sales interactions, service requests, etc.). Then, you can automate which channel you engage with specific users based on their behavior.

Boost your omnichannel strategy with Contentserv

As online sales are speeded up by digital-savvy shoppers, businesses are struggling to keep up with the volume of product information and digital assets needed to support their omnichannel marketing and sales programs. Some are still managing product data manually without the proper systems and connections in place. Manually updating product information is a slow and expensive process prone to data errors. This is where a Product Information Management (PIM) solution comes to the rescue.

Unlimited integration possibilities for PIM

Contenserv can help your business create an integrated technical ecosystem between your PIM and other applications so that you never have to worry about real-time accurate product information, shipment details, inventory, and prices. When you add integrations and connectors to the equation, you can significantly leverage the value of your product data. From eCommerce, translations, digital assets, print, and more, you can find what you need, thanks to Contentserv’s vast network and exclusively built PIM integrations.

Our PIM will fit seamlessly into your existing technological ecosystem and help you unlock future growth. The Product Experience Cloud by Contentserv enables you to integrate your product information management system with other business systems and applications. With these integrations and connectors, you can reliably synchronize product data across all your channels, resulting in the delivery of accurate, consistent, and rich content for an omnichannel experience. This helps improve the management and consistency of product catalogs, allows organizations to reach new markets, and get new products online overnight.

Data is key for businesses to grow and prosper. Your organization needs to make informed decisions based on accurate information. With price intelligence and channel insights, you can stop relying on guesses or gut feelings, and start harnessing the power of data.