Is your product content directly affecting your sales? In my experience (and I have a lot of shopping experience), yes! When a consumer can’t go look at the product in the store, they must rely on what’s on the screen in front of them, and, if I’m being honest, as a consumer I’m often disappointed.

Product Content in Real Life

This week, it finally felt like spring at 55 degrees in Wisconsin, and I wanted to work on my patio. I realized I needed to replace my patio umbrella, so I jumped online to see which stores might have something in stock that I could pick up over lunch.  After a bit of browsing at Ace (trying to shop local), I realized I didn’t know what size I needed or how to figure that out.  Frustrated with their single image of the umbrella and unclear specs, I jumped over to Walmart and in seconds had the information I needed.  They provided multiple images of the umbrella as well as sizing information to pick the correct umbrella based on your table size.  I jumped in my car and headed to pick it up.

In this situation, product content made all the difference for a single purchase and will also drive future purchases for me.  So, what should you and your brand do?

Product Data and Content Basics

Let’s start with the basics – what is product data and content and is there a difference?

Product data refers to the specific details and attributes of a product such as its SKU number, price, dimensions, weight, material, and other technical specifications. This information often comes from the ERP and is used in inventory management, logistics, and ecommerce systems.

Product content refers to the more descriptive and marketing-oriented information about a product such as its features, benefits, images, videos, and other multimedia assets. This type of information is usually presented to consumers in marketing materials, product descriptions, and product catalogs to help consumers make informed purchasing decisions.

Essentially, product data provides the technical information required to manage and sell a product, while product content provides the more expressive and persuasive information to promote and sell a product.

The Impact of Bad Product Content

The quality of product content significantly impacts online sales and enhances brand loyalty and can have an equally negative impact if it’s mismanaged or incomplete. Poor product content could lead to:

• Decreased engagement. Bad content can lead to less engagement from consumers in the form of fewer page views, social media shares and likes, and comments or interactions on your content.
• Damaged reputation. If your content is inaccurate, misleading, offensive, or poorly written, it can damage your reputation and credibility and lead to loss of trust from your audience, which can be difficult to regain.
• Reduced conversions. Bad content can also lead to reduced conversions, as potential customers may be less likely to trust your brand or make a purchase based on the quality of your content.
• Missed opportunities. Bad content can lead to missed opportunities. If your content is not up to par, you may miss out on opportunities to build relationships with customers, grow your audience, or achieve your marketing goals.

Ensuring that you have good product content to meet your business needs requires work across people, process, and technology.  Understanding if your content is meeting your consumer needs and identifying the key areas for improvement can be overwhelming.  Our Product Readiness offer makes it simple.  We use our experience and assessment model to understand if your business outcomes and the quality of your product content is aligned.

I like to shop, and I think I am really good at it.

I have the ability to make wise and efficient purchasing decisions when shopping. This may include having a keen eye for identifying high-quality items, knowing how to find the best deals and bargains, calculating my cost per use, and being able to manage one’s budget effectively. Ultimately, being good at shopping involves a combination of practical skills, knowledge, and personal taste. In fact, I have made understanding shopping part of my job as a commerce strategist.

Shopping for me is often also a source of inspiration for new outfits, trends, and home décor. When I lived in an urban area with multiple malls, boutiques, and other shopping I used to walk around to browse, interact with items, and even layout designs at places like Crate and Barrel to further that shopping experience.  However, life changed, and I now live in a town with a population of 14K making it much harder to find inspiring places to browse locally. So, logically I turned online as so many people have over the last few years – 63 percent of shopping journeys start online.

From my perspectives some retailers are knocking it out of the park online, and some are really striking out. Why are they missing my expectations? Well, because they don’t really understand their customers at a deep level.

Lacking Customer Interaction

One of my favorite jewelry brands is one that I hate to shop online with.  They have very few pictures of the jewelry on someone, so it’s hard to get an idea of scale. When a recent purchase arrived and I opened the box, I was shocked by giant earrings when I was expecting something small.  It seems like it would be easy for them to post a lifestyle picture on their website so I wouldn’t have to drive 90 minutes one way to see the item in store and then possibly have to order it anyways because they didn’t have the color I wanted. Since moving, my value to them as a consumer has decreased and they don’t seem to care.

Positive Customer Experience

On the other hand, I recently bought glasses online for the first time and wow!  The virtual try on process was amazing (imagine if I had that for those giant earrings!) They made it easy to understand what was needed for my prescription and how to make them fit well. I love my new glasses. They also asked about the process, and I was happy to take 5 minutes to share feedback while shopping. Every time someone compliments the glasses, I am sharing where I got them. My value to that retailer is always growing and they know why.

Why Knowing Your Customer is Important

Understanding your customer is so important and it’s key to have both qualitative and quantitative data to make decisions.  Here are a few reasons why:

Meeting customer needs: By understanding your customer, you can gain insights into their needs, preferences, and behaviors, and tailor your products, services, and marketing efforts to meet those needs. This can help you build a loyal customer base and increase customer satisfaction.

Building customer relationships: Understanding your customer also allows you to establish a relationship of trust and loyalty. Customers are more likely to do business with companies that they feel understand and value them.

Differentiation from competitors: Understanding your customer can also help you differentiate your products and services from those of your competitors. By identifying gaps in the market, you can create unique offerings that meet the needs of your target customers.

Increased profitability: By understanding your customer, you can identify areas where you can increase sales and profitability. This may involve offering complementary products or services, targeting new customer segments, or optimizing pricing strategies.

Understanding your customers will help you quickly pinpoint what is going well and what gaps you have with your customers and experience.  In this case, the jewelry company would increase sales if they had a virtual try on option because I would buy way more from my couch.  The glasses company can count on my repeat business and great word-of-mouth advertising.

As a manufacturer, you’re a master in your products and their production, but developing a digital go-to-market strategy to help your organization evolve is equally as important with getting your products out the door – especially if you’re considering going direct-to-customer (D2C). Targeting customers directly can provide many benefits to your business, such as building stronger customer relationships and expanding into new or underserved markets.

But going D2C isn’t as simple as it sounds. You need to assess your organization to ensure you’re truly ready to take on this transformation and confirm it will prove beneficial for your business.

Here are a few ways to determine if your business is ready to go D2C.

Looking at Your Business Internally

To successfully go D2C, you must determine if it will benefit your business overall. That means having a clear understanding of whom your audience is and if your organization’s infrastructure and technology can support this new approach.

Understanding the Customer

Going D2C means you can target your products’ end-users, bypassing third-party retailers, distributors, and any other intermediaries. Your business must think about and determine who your target audience is and what you know and don’t know about them. To help understand and confirm which audience is best to target, consider the following questions:

• What value are we going to bring to these specific customers by going direct?
• Is this a new target audience that is currently being underserved?
• Do we know what they need, want, and expect?
• How will we service them?
• What products and services would customers be interested in?
• What prices would we offer?

What will we offer them and why?

• Do we know how they want to interact with us? Do we want to enable one-time or ongoing purchases? Both?
• How do we manage this new channel and our relationships with our existing channels?
• What would the buying journey look like for both physical and digital channels?
• How would we handle returns, exchanges, and warranties?

Once you define what you want to do and how you plan to do it, it’s always a good idea to validate what you think you know with what the customer actually wants and needs. You can confirm this information by performing customer research and hearing first-hand from your target audience what is best for them.

Assessing Your Infrastructure

With your ideal target audience in mind, it’s also key to know if your organization’s internal processes can support a D2C approach. You should conduct a strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat (SWOT) analysis to understand where your business is as you formulate your D2C strategy. Some factors to evaluate are:

• Shipping and manufacturing: Do you have the infrastructure, technology stack, and business model to handle smaller shipments of product at an increased frequency?
• Product information and content: Do you have product information that is optimized for the digital experience? Do you have the means to enrich the product data to enable it as product content?
• Internal infrastructure: Do your internal processes, like returns and warranties, align with your D2C strategy?
• Inventory management: Do you have the ability to display existing inventory and availability? Are you able to serve your customers with multiple shipping and delivery options? If not, then consider utilizing a 360-degree order management system (OMS) to provide clear visibility of what products are available.

Something else you should consider when going D2C is your third-party channel partners. Do you risk affecting your relationship with these partners? How can you mitigate that risk? You may want to consider:

• Will you pay your channel a percentage of the orders that come in through direct channels?
• Could your channel fulfill the orders that you accept directly from your customers?
• Does your channel provide services that could be scheduled when you sell direct?
• Do your sell spare or replacement parts, is this an opportunity for a direct channel with less chance of channel conflict?
• Could you target a market this is currently not served or underserved?

Lastly, do you have all the right products to sell if you decide to target a specific industry? If not, investing in a marketplace strategy can help to sell your products as well as to bring in other vendors with complementary products to help you become a one-stop-shop for your customers.

Always Think About What’s Next

Answering these questions internally can be difficult, which is why bringing in a third-party advisor to help determine where your business currently stands in these areas, discuss any risks and how to mitigate them, and help figure out which technologies will best suit your strategy and business needs can be key to formulating a plan to go D2C successfully.

There are many different ways for your organization to target D2C, but understanding what it takes to do so for your unique business is what results in a successful, scalable plan. For more information on defining your D2C strategy, contact our commerce experts today.

In our final blog on insurance commerce, we build on the previous insights on strategy, customer needs, and internal readiness. We’ve always advocated a process-first mentality – and once these key inputs are ready, technology can be a great accelerator or activator of your strategy.  As we draw on the cumulative insights of insurance commerce, it’s important to think about your technology across several capabilities:

• Journey Science – how does your technology target and talk to your current and potential consumers to help them understand your products and services, understand costs and protection, and feel confident in their decisions?
• Transactions – how well does your technology make the buying process personal, real-time, and frictionless?
• Innovative – as the world evolves with more digital acceptance, how is your commerce technology leveraging adjacent capabilities such as telematics or application performance indicators (APIs)/embedded insurance to create new buying opportunities and support consumer retention.

When it comes to technology and innovation, almost anything is possible, which can actually be a risk. With software and technology, it is critical to ask two questions:

• Can we do this?
• Should we do this?

Some of the key considerations to help answer these two questions include:

• Understand and define commerce capabilities and requirements.
• Define the future state reference architecture
• Evaluate and prioritize the existing roadmap
• Then select and implement the right technology platform

Building on our four-part approach of strategy, customer, internal readiness, and technology will help better position carriers to support the insurance product-purchasing journey for both agents and direct customers with an intuitive, experience-driven buying journey.

If you’re an insurance carrier that wants to invest and enable these trends but doesn’t quite feel ready or equipped to provide this unique customer experience throughout the commerce journey, then download our guide, Commerce Experiences and the Rise of Digital-First Insurance, and connect with Beth Duerr and Brian Bell on LinkedIn for further communication and questions and read more from our understanding the insurance and commerce process series.

How close are you really to your customers? In this fast-changing consumer environment, staying close to the customer is critical. The relationship and understanding of your customer should be used to drive strategies across the entire organization.  

We all get high-level behavioral segmentation studies and marketing personas, but they don’t get us closer to the actual customer. In reality, do we know how that is really going to help us with the conversion rate? Not exactly, but understanding the individual buying journey and creating trust through the entire buying process is what will help drive conversion and loyalty over again.  

Your starting point 

Having empathetic knowledge of your customers and delivering tailored real-time solutions will build on the noble purpose of insurance – protection of your consumers’ unique risks – and gain competitive advantages in a digital offer environment. You can do this by leveraging data and intelligence to be data-enabled and driven as well as platforms and technology to deliver real-time connected experiences and frictionless services. And most importantly, use authentic, relevant brand messages and experiences that are tailored to your audience and authentic in your tone.  

To get this deep understanding of your customers, you’ll want to focus on getting the voice of the customer (VOC) through surveys and one-on-one conversations. Then, create empathy maps that help you understand the expectations of your customers and then create informed personalized experiences. Finally, develop buying journeys that show your understanding and empathy across all the touchpoints of the buying journey.  

Commitment to Your Customer Starts From Within 

By becoming customer-obsessed and showing empathy through the entire buying journey, customers will start converting and developing loyalty well before they reach the shopping cart.  

For more information on enhancing your commerce strategy with the assistance of rising insurance trends, download our guide, Commerce Experiences and the Rise of Digital-First Insurance, and connect with Brian Bell and Beth Duerr on LinkedIn to engage with them further on the growing relationship between commerce and insurance.     

Last week, we introduced our blog series on insurance commerce. We discussed the need to consider all the commerce activities that take place before the customer engages in a purchase.

First, You’ll Need a Strategy

There are many versions of the famous quote that says, “Strategy without execution is a dream, and execution without strategy is a nightmare,” but the intent is clear – a sound strategy is required to achieve expected results. For insurance commerce, desired outcomes should consider converting the customer to a policyholder and delivering a journey that makes them confident in their purchase and more likely to become loyal to your brand.

We’ll discuss setting your commerce strategy as the foundation of your insurance commerce discipline to achieve the desired outcomes of customer conversion and retention.

Some key elements and levels of maturity to consider when designing a commerce strategy:

• Market Opportunity – How well do you know your market opportunity for existing products, and how well are you leveraging digital tools and innovation? How are you leveraging opportunities to grow your business?
• Competitive Market Situation – What is known and validated about what direct competitors are doing in this space? How are you leveraging these insights to be competitive and create differentiation?
• Your Go-to-Market Strategy – How are your go-to-market strategies responding to support the evolving digitally enlightened customer? Are they the same as they have been for the last 10 years with just a new website, or are you truly embracing the digital-first approach to help your consumers engage, discover, ask, use, and buy?
• Goals and Objectives – Finally, how do you measure success? You’ll want to inspect what you expect. Who is setting cross-functional commerce goals that are aligned to business outcomes? Consider leading and lagging indicators to help inform if you are tracking the desired outcomes of conversion and retention. Items such as website content traffic, customer satisfaction, and household relationships are great leading indicators to help inform conversion and retention.

Our Key Takeaways with Strategy

Focusing on these elements of commerce will lead to a strategy that engages the consumer along their entire journey, not just the shopping cart.

For more information on enhancing your commerce strategy with the assistance of rising insurance trends, download our guide, Commerce Experiences and the Rise of Digital-First Insurance, and connect with Brian Bell and Beth Duerr on LinkedIn to engage with them further on the growing relationship between commerce and insurance.