How to Write Product Descriptions that sell: Tips with examples

Everyone knows the importance of good product photos on your website, but when it comes to buying decision, words become will equally important in giving context to your images and pushing customers to buy. Here the role of product description comes in. A well written product description has the power to move your customers through your sales funnel. The product description helps fill in the gaps to determine whether or not the product is the right fit for the customer.

What is a Product Description?

A product description is a copy that describes the features and benefits of a product to a customer. The goal of the product description is to provide the customer with enough information to compel them to buy the product immediately. Product description helps in educating customer, on the key benefits, unique value of the product and helps to increase your sales and build customer trust.

Many websites need product description along with product image. Some need only main points of description and some website may convert with no copy at all. There are several factors as to why the product description didn’t help in conversions. it’s possible they weren’t written correctly for the audience, they were placed in a less visible area or were written in wrong format.

Why you need a Product Description? 

Product descriptions help improve your search engine (SE) ranking. Optimizing your product description with specific keywords help improve your ranking position on Google. Product description educates your customer on the product, by offering information on the product that the picture can’t do on its own. For example, by looking at a laptop picture, you wouldn’t buy it. As a shopper, you want to know the features and technical specification of a laptop. By providing customers with key product information, you try to build customer service inquiries. It helps the customer to know whether that product is good for them or not.

Tips for Product Description that sells:

#1. Informative content :

To make purchasing decisions, people need information. An important reason, consumer visit product pages are to learn more about product features. Excellent product description can help people find exactly what they are looking for. The best product description writing focuses on :

  • What is the product?
  • Who is it designed for?
  • Why do customers need it?
  • How can people use it?

Just to woo customers, fancy language can’t compete with real information.

Example :

Dewalt product description has a lot of helpful information in a compact paragraph. Dewalt explains exactly why you would want to buy this drill. It is compact and lightweight. It has a long-lasting battery and offers excellent performance. In less than 30 seconds, the shopper has a good idea of this product. Tabs are best for providing a lot of information without cluttering up the screen.

#2. Simple and clear Product Description :

Customers like simple, clear and to the point content. For instance, product like sweat shirt doesn’t need multiple paragraphs to be written on it. Some product pages work wonders with single worded phrases.

Example :

customer who want to buy coat “complete storm protection”. These words are easy to understand and express the clear concept. Adventure lovers discover the jacket of their dreams in one sentence. If consumer decide to look for more information, what they know is just as clear as the main description.

See Nike shoe product description. “Cushioned, comfort, customized”. Run the streets in Nike. We got all the basic features and necessary info put in just one sentence.

#3. Know your target audience :

While writing product description you should be able to define which features would be of most interest to your potential buyers. This begins with understanding  your “buyer’s persona”. Your buyer persona will help you understand which features will be most valuable to your customer. While writing your product description , certain questions you should keep in mind :

  • How did this person arrive to your page ?
  • What are his/her interest ?
  • What features or benefits would interest this person more ?

With the help of these questions you will be able to write a better product description that sells.

Example :

The natural Himalayan salt lamp – light color.

Description : natural shaped Himalayan salt lamp made of 100% pure Himalayan salt rock. A gorgeous addition to naturally ionize and refresh your space. It purifies the air of your environment reducing dust and allergens from the air. May help in curing  symptoms of allergies, asthma and headaches.

Here the buyer persona is interested in all natural remedies for the home , especially to allergies. The potential buyer would be interested in learning about these remedies rather than focus on decorative feature of the lamp.

#4. Focus on product benefits :

As an e-store owner , you would like to show that your product has best quality and the most unique features. Most of the customers want to know- how a particular product can benefit them. A product benefit tells how the product helps in increasing the standard of living of the customers.

 Example : The natural Himalayan salt lamp.            

Description : natural shaped Himalayan salt lamp made of 100% pure Himalayan salt rock. A gorgeous addition to naturally ionize and refresh your space. It purifies the air of your environment reducing dust and allergens from the air. May help in curing  symptoms of allergies, asthma and headaches.

The product benefit includes purification of the environment, by reducing allergens from the air. They clearly outline the benefits of the product rather than focusing on the decorative feature of the lamp. Translating features into benefits like this will be a better product description that sells.

#5. Optimize search engine :

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the easiest way to attract new customers to your page. It’s true that high-quality content does wonders for search engine rankings. Optimization begins with keywords which are usually the search term that buyers use to find the product.

Example : “women black dress pants” , is a keyword that could easily be optimized in your online store. With a quick search for women’s black dress pant, you will see results include some variations of the keyword. When we click on one of the listings on the first page , we can see how Google uses this keyword on their site to appear in the search result. For best SEO results place your keywords in your 

  • Page titles.
  • Meta descriptions.
  • Image tags.
  • Product descriptions.

This will be your product easily searchable for those who are browsing for your product.

#6. Use good product images :

Even if master product description writing, you must still have quality images to go with it. As pictures say more than words, no product description is complete without one or more pictures. Before reading a single word, seeing the image the target customer already feels connected with the product.

Example : Veta mix , a brand that sells grade blenders uses quality images and videos on its product page to help make the sale. You will also notice that they list the benefits within very short product description. By showing what blender is capable of in technicality and look wise the customer starts imagining of having this blender at home.

Pull up : 

The main aim is that your product description shouldn’t push your product so much as it will ignore the main points about why it will improve your standard of life. Keep your product description simple and easily understandable. It should be customer engaging and answer the queries of the visitors. Create a product description that moves people to action.

8 Ways a PIM will save your time

As the eCommerce store begins to grow, most of them face the same problem of managing and handling large scale product data. If all the product information is scattered, then the efficiency of your team will be low, errors will become common and the customer will begin to lose trust in your product. That’s why more and more online stores are implementing PIM – a management tool designed to avoid all these issues.

What is PIM ? PIM stands for “product information management”, a management tool that centralizes all of company’s product information. All the data from your product catalog is stored. There are many fields that you can add to PIM like :

  • Basic information about each product.(name, brand, price etc.,)
  • Technical information.
  • Information on sales channel and market places like (Amazon, Flipkart)
  • Stock availability.
  • Reviews for each product.
  • Product catalog, datasheet etc.,

PIM not only stores the information about your products, but does much more than that. Suppose if you have modified any product, PIM allows you to modify that product with new features on all sales channel at a time. In this way PIM can store and alter data as needed to carry out the daily tasks. So PIM acts as a middle ground. It makes importing and exporting product data incredibly easy.

8 Ways a PIM will save your time :

1. Reduces the use of spreadsheets :

Suppose if you have thousands of product descriptions to keep up to date, uploading the same on a spreadsheet would be time-consuming and also has chances of leading to human error of entering wrong data. PIM helps this type of task to be done more accurately. With PIM, users will save time by entering a large amount of data in lesser time and more correctly. This will help the right department to retrieve the correct data easily.

2. Automation :

Automation is another benefit of PIM technology. Instead of uploading data manually, companies can automatically get the correct information from different sources. As a result, you will be able to create a richer product experience, a better user experience and a high rate of return on investment. When you want to launch a new product or create offers for your product, PIM makes it easy by its automation capabilities. The automation feature of PIM takes less time to complete the herculean task.

3. Helps to optimize marketing :

As PIM centralizes all the information on your products, it provides you with information about the sales volume and other marketing statistics. It helps you to know

* which different sales channels are giving you better results.

* which keywords are working optimumly.

*life value of each product.

This information helps your marketing team to take the right marketing decisions on time. Timely taken the right decisions will increase your sales.

4. To reach milestones :

Through PIM you can track your business progress to reach your milestone in business. You can keep an eye on the product (sales), team performance and productivity. If you find certain things are lacking and creating hurdles in achieving your milestone, you can find those faulty points and rectify on time. PIM helps in time management to do such rectification. Things rectified on time will optimize your progress.

5. Unit growth :

PIM software facilitates businesses to easily assess the efficiency of various teams and units. If one unit is efficient, its data can be shared with a less efficient unit, to speed up the growth. As all the data is centralized by PIM, with less time you can enhance the growth of a less efficient team/unit.

6. Reduced errors :

As PIM store accurate information, it reduces the chance of sharing incorrect information. The reduction of errors means companies spend less on time and cost. Delivery of products, purchasing procedure and information of inventories are all optimized using the data in PIM. As a result, the customer can enjoy complete satisfaction after procuring your product. As PIM solutions are easy to integrate, companies save time and money on management and marketing.   

7. Enhances your customer experience :

As PIM maintains the whole data centrally, it is the single source of product information for each product across all the channels of marketing. When you notice any data errors, PIM will help you to improve them by eliminating the inconsistency. This will help in enhancing customer experience by quickly correcting the issues and then immediately pushing the changes to all channels.

8. To expand your business :

With PIM you can automatically publish new or updated product content to all selling channels quickly and accurately. As PIM is connected with eCommerce platforms, it allows you to easily localize product details for websites. By having PIM, you can save your business expansion cost and it is time-efficient.

Conclusion :

Finally, PIM makes it simple by providing everything in one area. It is easy to search, access, update, find and share product-related information. It makes it easier not only for employees but for teams, management, consumers and the company at large. PIM facilitates, not only manage a large amount of data but also makes it easy to work with. It’s time to conquer data and use it as a stepping stone for the future growth of your e-commerce business.

ECommerce Product Data Enrichment converts search to sales

Product data enrichment is about providing vital information of your product accurately. Customers visit your website but within no time they leave the site, as the data available of your product doesn’t keep them engage. The information of your product may not be relevant and satisfactory as per customers need. This is here, the product data enrichment plays its role and helps the online owners to convert visitors into customers.

If a visitor is not satisfied with your product data information, he will be inclined towards your competitors product-where he will get all information about what is he looking for and buy from them.

What is Product Data Enrichment ?

Product data enrichment is all about finding gaps and inconsistencies in product data and rectify them with up-to-date, accurate and relevant information. Product enrichment helps in providing more details of your product like, color, size, descriptions, measurements attributes etc.,

Most eCommerce owners tend to lose customers even before the checkout, as the customer find the product description- inadequate or inappropriate. Customers making online purchases are solely dependent on product data that store owners publish on product pages. Online merchants operating on leading eCommerce platforms including Magento, Zen-cart, X-cart etc., and market places such as Amazon, eBay etc., have successfully reduced the bounce rate on their online stores with the help of product data enrichment service.

How do eCommerce Product Data Enrichment increases sales

#1. Reduce cart abandonment :

shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest problems online business owners are facing. Cart abandonment refers to that customer behavior, where in a customer browse a website and after satisfaction, adds these products to his shopping cart – but he will never purchase it. 2 out of 3 customers leave the website before using credit card. This usually happens when customers are not satisfied with the product information provided by the website. Wavering thought process makes customer to abandon cart at the last moment. Adding valuable and appropriate product details also enrich their product with required content ensures that customers don’t abandon carts due to wavering thoughts.

#2. Contextual information :

in simple words contextual information means, extra information that helps you understand something better.

Consumer product companies, mostly provide inadequate product information, which doesn’t have the power to compel the customers for repeat visits. The contextual product description will help the customer to understand that by purchasing your product, it will add value to their lives. They can enjoy a higher standard of life. This makes it necessary to write the product copy in a manner where it provides all the contextual product information required. Contextual marketers deliver the most relevant information possible to consumers in the timely manner possible. Contextual information helps you gain greater intimacy with customers and target market segments more efficiently.  

#3. Product page meta data to boost traffic :

There are a lot of things that go into optimizing a website for search engine optimization. One of these is metadata. The primary job of metadata is to tell not only the visitors but also the search engines what a page is about. Customers face difficulties in finding what they want to buy. It is due to inefficient product title description and mega tags. In such cases product metadata needs to be fixed immediately. Title tags and meta descriptions are essential as

  • It is the consumers first digital touchpoint
  • Gets you more clicks.
  • It helps with better rankings.

With better ranking rate and more clicks will ultimately boost the traffic to your website, thus accelerating sales.

#4. Product categorization :

it is clear that if information is not clear, properly categorized, website visitors will rarely continue to try and find the products they want. You cannot avoid product categorization. It is the ground level work. Product categorization helps the user to complete the buying cycle, before leaving the site. If product categorization is not carried out properly, it will result in lost sales. Managing product data is all about validating and fixing errors in product categorization. Developing product taxonomies, fix product descriptions with appropriate keywords and tags and classifying it correctly will help you boost your e-commerce sales.

#5. Cross-selling and up-selling premium products :

up selling is the practice of encouraging customers to purchase a comparable higher-end product than one asked in query. While cross-selling invites customers to buy related or complementary items. Both up selling and cross selling if done properly, provides maximum value to customer and increases revenue without any extra cost. Product data enrichment ensures that, purchaser visiting your website end up finding related or alternative products along with the ones they were looking for and also in the absence of it. This can be fulfilled by exhibiting all related products on a particular page.

#6. Helps in making purchase decision :

Product data enrichment facilitates faster product discovery, accurate search results and rich experience. It ensures the customers visiting your site have no doubts in mind when it comes to making a decision to purchase. Product enrichment helps customer to find right product faster with proper product description and making the buying process smooth and simple – will leave customer with no confusion and end up the cycle by buying the product and with a good customer experience.

#7. Enhances consumer experience :

With answer to all queries that customers have in mind- data enrichment  facilitates online retailers to enhance consumer experience. When customers purchase products that add value to their lives make a big difference to your overall sales number.

Conclusion :

Product data enrichment aims at enriching your product related data with relevant information. It analyzes your data thoroughly, inconsistencies, errors and duplicate entries and enrich product descriptions with keywords to improve the search rankings of your products. Implementing product data enrichment helps you increase your e-commerce sales figures and converts product search to product sales.

How does a Product Attribute Scheme Design work as a competitive advantage?

Steve Jobs very well quoted “design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation”.

Product attributes refer to physical features, quality and design of a product that helps to attract customers to make a purchase. Physical nature, uses and benefits of the product, makes it unique and different from other competitive products in the market. Attributes include size, color, price, flavor etc., product attribute differs from product to product. For example, attributes which affects food product selection are taste, price, nutritional value and flavor. On the other hand durable products like shoes are influenced by cost, brand, color, usage, quality and durability.

Product attribute scheme design helps in describing your products, based on an understanding of your users. Designers study consumer behaviour – how the customers are making decisions about purchasing products. This will help them to design the product as per consumer taste. If the consumer gets what they are searching then they will end the purchasing cycle by purchasing the product.

Need for Product Attribute Scheme Design :

  A poor product attribute design has a very bad impact on your e-commerce business. Customers find difficulty in searching for your product due to poor product attribute this will lead to low sales and low conversion rate. For example, if visitors are coming to your landing page and leave the site before purchasing your product, it may be because they do not see the specified details that would help them choose the product they want. If customers cannot find what they need, they will move on to your competitor’s site. Such type of customer behaviour reveals which attribute needs to be given priority in the scheme design. Correct attribute design requires expert advice on user experience, PIM and taxonomy.

Competitiveness :

Products that are similar, usually are the products that are competing with one another. For example shampoo bottle. The goal of product attribute is to impress consumer enough that they pick your product over the rest. In order to stay competitive, a company needs to take it one step further and actually convince the customer to purchase their shampoo over the other shampoos. This is where companies need product attribute scheme designs by making the product look attractive, add some creative slogans and highlight the quality which other products can’t offer. To seal the deal – companies might offer competitive price, making their product simply irresistible.

Changes :

Changing product labels, and offering great price doesn’t always attract customer to buy your product. We live in a dynamic world, everything keeps on changing, so are the demands of the consumers. One year consumer may like shampoo that enhances the 9shiny texture of their hair, next year they may like a product that adds volume and increases the length of their hair. A successful product design, make changes quickly to adapt to the new customers demand. To be a competitive product attribute scheme design, need to keep up with the growing trends. To reap the benefits of the competitive market, your product attribute scheme should be more creative, add new varieties to your products, of course, competitive price is a must.

Advantages of Product Attribute Scheme Design:

  • Product attribute scheme design works as a competitive advantage as it helps you to know the changes in the consumer demand and accordingly to make changes.
  • Secondly attribute scheme helps in designing the product that matches with consumer expectations.
  • A good attribute scheme design, differentiate the company’s product with other products giving the company a competitive edge.
  • Product attribute scheme design helps in improving profit margins by increasing sales and also increases your market share.
  • A well product attribute scheme helps in easy manufacturing and distributing the products.

Conclusion : 

Product attribute helps you to identify gaps in the market, areas for improvement in product development and methods to better serve your target market to boost your sales. Consistency in attribute scheme across the entire product range will improve the customer experience leading to increased conversions and sales. Excellent product attribute scheme design is a gateway to business success. A well-designed product attribute will help you in exploring your organization’s capabilities.

Tips for prioritizing Product Content Enrichment

People are adopting online shopping like never before and the global eCommerce market size is expected to grow very high in the coming years. Current technology trends and accessibility have made it possible for every business to create an eCommerce platform in no time and start selling. As the demand for online shopping is increasing, it is necessary to see that your eCommerce site is functioning well enough.

Sometimes you may find that the content on your product page is inconsistent, lacks certain important information or deficiency in description. The product content is not optimizing your search engine ranking. Comparatively, with other websites, you may find that your website is lacking visual content, multiple product images etc. This is the time that you have to improve the quality of your online product content. If you are dealing with hundreds of SKUs (stock keeping units), the resources at your disposal may not be sufficient to enrich product data for every single product you a stock or sell.

Here are the ways to prioritize your product data enrichment for a better search engine ranking and enhancing your customers experience –

#1. 80/20 rule :

It is also known as “Pareto’s principle”. This rule is applicable in many fields like sports, health care, business etc. Applying it to the business world, the 80/20 rule suggests that 80% of your company sales come from 20% of your customers. In the sales and marketing sector, you can use the 80/20 rule as a guide with highly effective business solutions.

The main question, that most of the businesses are facing is – how to identify 20% of their main customers in order to make a marketing strategy, to achieve 80% of the result with minimum cost. Your online site may have hundreds or thousands of contacts on your product list. Keep a close watch on which customers made a recent purchase, who are frequent buyers, which ones were generous in their purchases. Which products are more in demand? Identify the 20% of your products that drive 80% of your eCommerce sales and make these products fully enriched.

#2. Customer focus:

It is important to know, which user behaviour will end up the cycle by purchasing your product. Many eCommerce websites are launched only for such selected customers who are generous in their purchase. In such cases, you can enrich those products content that is more applicable to those customers. By focusing on the products they purchase, you can increase the value of your eCommerce site and also enhance user experience.

#3. Enrich core product :

The essential products which define your brand and provide value to your eCommerce website, such products are best to choose and enrich the product content of those core products.

#4. New product launches :

When you are planning to launch a new product, make sure that your new product has relevant, current and high-quality content. Enrich your new product page with engaging and informative content, because in digital marketing ‘content is the king’.

#5. Seasonal products :

If your Online store is dealing with seasonal products, make sure that during that season your product page should be enriched with the rich and current content of the product. Since it’s a seasonal product, every season new feature will be added to your product. For example ceiling fans, refrigerators. These products are out every season with some newly added feature. Make sure you highlight your product page with that particular feature.

#6. Gated eCommerce :

If your website is accessible by only restricted or selected customers than those product pages should be enriched with relevant and informative content. For instance, I-phones are launched every year with some newly added version, so your content must have that current feature of your product, so that you can target the gated customers.

#7. Gap filling :

Identify weak points of your product content. Sometimes your product content has an insufficient description of your product then you have to enrich your content with relevant and current information about your product. For instance, if your product page is without images than you can add product images and can make it more engaging.

Pull up:

Prioritizing product content aims to boost more sales and increased revenue. Google analytic helps in identifying products with low online conversion rates. Once you identify the products – you can enrich the content of those products, helping you to increase conversion. Similarly, PIM also helps you in improving the quality and consistency of your product page, by enriching the content with more images, visual information and current eye-catching trends. Engaging content will attract buyers and convert them into online sales.

What is Product Information Management [PIM] for eCommerce

ECommerce businesses can have a massive amount of product data, including descriptions, measurements and inventory. A product data management system organizes and regulates this product data making it uniform and easily accessible.PDM system also makes it users friendly and available to customers as they browse your website.

Product information management is commonly known as PIM. It is a process of collecting and managing all the needed information from descriptions to images and more- about a given product in one central place. As updating of product information is possible through PIM, the efficiency of product information can be increased. PIM also facilitates to add new products to your online platforms. It ensures that your customers have to access to the right information about your products when they are ready to purchase.

Information stored by PIM :

PIM solutions store all the required information on the product, including description, taxation, composition, technical information, hardware versions and other types of information. It also store rich media files such as images, videos. The list of product information management tool depends on the particular business needs and can vary significantly.

When to use PIM :

  • There’s a need for data rich information.
  • You have multiple suppliers and source of distribution.
  • PIM is very useful when price and product catalog has to be updated frequently. 

When not to use PIM :

  • If you use one platform or one distribution channel.
  • Number of products your store is dealing with is very less.
  • If you are working with one or two manufacturers.
  • If your product doesn’t need rich data description. Less information of the product gives a clear picture to your customer. 

Key take aways :   

  1. PIM facilitates your brand awareness and provides excellent customer experience which in turn increases your sales and revenue. 
  2. Having a quality PIM platform is a major step towards creating omni channels consistency.
  3. PIM is a part of master data management.

Benefits of PIM for your eCommerce business :

#1. Establishes a single source for product information:

PIM exports the primary records of your products quickly to your eCommerce website, market place and social media shops. Any corrections, updates, or adjustments made in records, will automatically be done by PIM across all platforms and sales channels.

#2. Go to market faster :

whether you’re launching a new product or sales channel , you are in the market is determined once you start generating revenue. Automatic workflow reduces the need for manual data entry. Allowing team to launch and maintain new products and sales channel faster.

#3. Improves quality and consistency of product data : 

Incorrect or incomplete product data will not only reduce your sales but also the user’s experience. PIM facilitates you to edit, add and review data in one system you will improve the quality and consistency of your product data. Any changes made in the PIM system can be published across your eCommerce platform. Your accurate, up to date information will help you build brand image of your product.

#4. Creates more effective marketing strategies :

customers experience which the co provides is as important as its products and services. In this era customers using multiple channels, it is important that customer experience across different channel should be unified. PIM by establishing one source for your product data will allow you to enhance the user experience, by providing accurate and current information of your product at every step of the purchasing process.

Conclusion:

PIM centralizes product information for all other business applications. Product data pushed through PIM to multiple storefronts and sales channels providing the richest shopping experience possible. You can add selected products directly to your eCommerce from your PIM system and reuse product data and attributes from your PIM system in your eCommerce to save valuable time and money. Thus PIM can help grow and optimize your eCommerce business.

Which solution is best for managing your Product Data?

The growth and long term success of e-commerce business depends on effective product data management solutions. Product data management [PDM] is a structural approach to help control, access and share large quantities of crucial data, that provides significant value to your business. It is important and tedious to maintain and manage this product information.

What is data management ?

Data management is the process of collecting, storing and using data efficiently, securely and cost effectively. The main objective of PDM is to collect and connect data from different sources and use it efficiently during decision making.

Effective data management is a combination of best practices, processes procedures with the help of effective tools, to control and manage data resources effectively. Today’s data managers need a system that is versatile enough to meet all of their employees access needs with full data security.

Tools for effective data management:

#1. Users tracking and analysis tools :

Customers surveys or interviews are valuable tools in their own way. They will tell you only what your customers say and think and help you analyze what those customers actually do

      But the users tracking and analysis tool  intelligently  gives you an insight- how your user or your website visitors are actually engaging with your product and your content. Tools like pendo or amplitude can uncover important realities about what is good or inspires your users and what is not. Companies like Accenture use Amplitude and companies like Atricem use the Pendo tool.

#2. Road mapping software tool :

Road mapping tool is used for project planning, progress tracking, activity coordination and team collaboration. This software is a must on any list of product management tools. Best example for a road mapping software tool is product plan. 

 Product plan is a great tool for managers who prefer to create an overview of their project. It allows us to create road maps quickly and easily. It communicates plans for future work to the team and builds up a consistent and standardized work process. 

#3. Customers survey tools :

Through customers survey tools  you can send the survey out to your customers and easily track and analyze the results. For gathering quick answers to important user questions, these tools are extremely helpful.

Web based survey tools like survey monkey or type form, have so many types of pre-formatted questions that whether you want to offer multiple-choice questions, drop down lists or just open comment fields. These tools help you to do surveys in minutes. Even emails, online surveys are easy, convenient and inexpensive that it can be tempting but they may upset your UX if not executed properly.

#4. Recording app for customer’s interview:

When you speak on the phone with customers for some queries, it’s always a great idea to record a call. You never know when a customer will offer a valuable insight like why they are using your product. Tools like, Go To meeting or zoom makes it easy to record those conversations and references them later.

Go To meeting provides a fast, easy and reliable professional online meeting solution that enables customers to meet face to face and communicate virtually. Zoom brings teams together in a frictionless and secure video environment. This platform provides video meetings, webinars on all devices. 

#5. Team messaging tools :

With the outbreak of pandemic, a lot of people started working from home. These business messaging tools helped teams to stay in touch and stay productive even if they can’t come to the office. When your product data starts giving trouble or gets underway, you will want an easy and immediate means of communicating. There are certain tools that allow easy and centralized team communication. Slack and confluence are best examples for team messaging tools.

Slack is a channel based messaging platform. With slack, people can work together more effectively, connect all their software tools and services and find the information that they need to do their best work-all within a secure environment. Confluence is a collaboration tool that helps teams to collaborate and share knowledge, data efficiently.

#6. Flow charting tools :

Creating a customer journey map is helpful in giving your company a clear view of your customers full experience with your company. Journey maps focus specifically on UX of using your product. It shows all the main points of the visitors, from the first visit to your website till purchasing and using your product.

Flowcharting tools like Microsoft Visio and OmniGraffle help in mapping out the specific aspects of users’ experience with your product. These flow-chart tools help you to uncover insight and helps you to develop your future strategies through your product road map.

#7. Product management tools :

Product management tools help to simplify the tracking and documenting details. For example Trello is visually appealing and is known for its fun use of cards, lists and boards. Trello is easy, free and flexible to manage your projects in an organized way. Gantt chart is an open source software that allows its users to identify problem areas in the workflow. Another PM tool is Jira. It’s excellent for team collaboration. This tool helps you track and monitor the entire product creation process. Jira can be used on a server, a data center platform and in the cloud. Other popular project management tools include Microsoft project, Pivotal Tracker will help you to execute on your road map and keep your backlog organized.

#8. Presentation software tools :

Tools like PowerPoint, Google slides and keynote can all be used to create presentations. You can make your presentation more engaging by including images, creating movements. Vision decks for example can be a powerful way of communicating your product vision to your clients/customers and earning their buying decision.

Conclusion :

While there are many tools out there to handle different products management requirements, the choice of product management tool/software depends upon your specific needs. Product management users must use the right product management tools and product management software. There are many product management tools and product management software that you can try first, before moving on to paid ones.

Guidelines for improving your website’s user experience

Your website is the most powerful tool for online marketing. It is your salesman 24/7 at your disposal. A business website can leave a lasting impression on a customer, whether good or bad depends on a lot of factors.

       When you open and see Google Analytics, you see that people are visiting your website, but they aren’t doing what they are supposed to. Your website didn’t create much of an impact on their minds. If you put consistent effort into improving the users experience [UX] of your website than everything will flow smoothly and can enhance conversion ratio. 

What is UX ?

Digital trends are rapidly changing and can make your website feel old and outdated. To overcome this challenge, there are some ways and tips to improve your UX, to make it more helpful and useful. UX is the process of increasing user satisfaction, by improving the usability, accessibility and efficiency of user with the website. A good UX means :  * The user visited your website.

  • Scrolled through different pages.
  • Understood what the website is all about and
  • Finally got what they wanted.

Tactics to improve your website’s user experience

      A visitor is always on your website with a mission. Now it is up to you- how easy you make it for them to accomplish that mission. So here are the tactics that will improve your website UX and help users find the products more easily.

#1. Have a plan :

Now that you know that your site needs some improvements, it’s time to work to tackle them. Start research your customers journey from the time they visited your website to the moment they became a customer. While doing research, think about which pages they are going to view, what content they would like to read, what offers will convert them into customers. Understanding these things will help you to design your website accordingly. Knowing the needs of the customer, will help you know the key points of your website and can make changes accordingly.

#2. Simplify your design :

To have best UX, your website should be clean, in proper order and clutter free. Visually your website should be simple, as it will be easily understood by the user. Web visitor usually visit website to seek answers and not for creativity. So avoid complicating the website with designs. When you want a particular action to be taken by a visitor coming to your site, make your site hassle free with less clutter. Every page should have a single goal. The check out page for instance, contains only what is needed for the process of checkout.   

#3. Interactive content :

Using interactive content will make your site design fun and drive engagement. Keep churning out the new content. Nobody wants to visit a stale website. So keep producing a steady stream of content to keep the site relevant and current. High quality and informative content boosts the UX and in driving massive traffic to the site. So it is well said “content is king”. To enhance the UX try adding videos, games, quizzes. Make your content simple and clear. It should be accessible to a wider audience. Visitors should be able to engage with content after a quick glance.

#4. Optimize website speed :

If your website isn’t fast enough, most people will leave it almost immediately. Almost half of web users tend to leave if a website doesn’t load in three seconds and this will definitely have a big impact on your conversion rate. Site speed is one of the main factors for ranking websites in search engines. There are many tools available to make your site lightning fast, like web page test, Google page speed, yslow and others. 

#5. Mobile friendly design :

More than 50% of all internet traffic is from mobile devices. Google also has shifted its algorithm towards mobile users. The websites that perform best on mobile will enhance your website user experience. We live in a multi screen world. This is great. But when it comes to websites, we have to make sure that our website looks great on all of these screen sizes. That’s why it is important to make your website responsive. Responsive design helps solve many problems:

  • It adapts to screen size.
  • Improves user experience.
  • It is cost effective.
  • It is easier to manage

You can check whether your website is responsive by resizing your browser size. Your website should automatically adapt itself.

#6. Easily navigable :

website’s navigation is tied in with the user experience and your conversion rate. Bad navigation will lead to people leaving your website and not coming back- while good website navigation will not only keep people engaged on your website but also help convert more users. Best example for easy navigation is Amazon home page, everything is easy to find. At first glance you can see offers that are relevant to you, as well as any deals of the day or last minute deals. All you have to do is to click on them to see the offers. The easier you make it for them to navigate through your website, the better and better the chance they will convert.

#7. Use of white space :

white space is any empty space: on the sides, between paragraphs and around product images. White space has a significant impact on both user experience and your conversion rate. For instance use of white space can

  • Help you highlight a specific message that you want your visitors to see.
  • Draws people attention to something if you want people to notice something specific on your website [like an offer/discount],use white space around it.
  • It helps you to better organize your content and elements.

#9. Customers review :

when people search for products on platforms like Amazon or Flipkart, they tend to see the product reviews that contains mostly four or five stars. These reviews are from people who wrote out their experience with a product. Adding such reviews to your website helps the customer to gain trust in the product, which in turn pushes the customer to purchase it. As long as the reviews/testimonials are genuine, your website will surely enhance users experience and help in conversion too.

Conclusion:

To have a strong and positive impact of your website on visitors, your website should be speedy, mobile friendly, easily navigable, and a clean and clear website design, easy to understand. If your website is efficient and effective with your customers need, you will definitely be high. Year by year , you have to apply new strategies of improving your website. Improvement of website is necessary as expectations and technology keeps on changing from time to time.

Steps for Data Cleaning and why it matters?

In the world of data processing there is one saying

   “Garbage in – Garbage out”

It means your results are only as good as the data you’re using to get them. Incorrect or inconsistent data leads to false conclusions and false conclusions have bad impact on your business. This is true if you are a researcher, small business owner or a large enterprise.

If you make your decisions based on incorrect or inconsistent data, you can be sure that the business results will not be good. You may lose clients, business opportunities, time and money.

Data cleansing is referred to as data cleaning or data scrubbing. Data cleaning are steps to clean data before using data for analysis. This is accomplished by removing or modifying data that is incomplete, incorrect, irrelevant, duplicated or inaccurate. This technique minimizes the risk of wrong or inaccurate conclusions or results.

Steps for cleansing data :

The techniques used for data cleaning may vary according to the types of data your company stores.

Following are the basic steps for cleaning data :

#1. Removing duplicate or irrelevant data :

Duplicate observations will happen most often during data collection. When you combine data sets from multiple places or receive data from clients or multiple departments, there are chances of creating duplicate data. Deduplication of data has to be considered in this process.

Irrelevant data are those observations that do not fit into the specific problem you are trying to analyze. For example if you are analyzing data regarding young customers, but your data set includes older generations, then in such case you have to remove those irrelevant observations. This can make analysis more efficient.

#2. Structural errors : 

There are different types of structural errors from typos to inconsistent capitalization. This can create problems when categorizing or grouping data, so they need cleansing. For example “gender” is a categorical variable, usually of two classes, male and female, but you may encounter more than two different categories of the variable such as : *m; *male; *F; *fem. Data cleansing helps to recognize such mislabeled or inconsistently capitalized classes. Also review you data collection and data transformation process to prevent data issues.

#3. Handling missing data :

‘Missing data’ is a tricky issue. Just be clear that you cannot simply ignore missing values in your data set. Deciding whether to drop, impute or flag missing data. Using/not using the missing data affects the accuracy of your analysis.

  • Imputing : It means working out the missing value based on the other data. The pattern will be re-created that the observations have already created.
  • Dropping : Dropping observations that have missing values when analyzing statistical data. Study shows dropping is better than imputing values.
  • Flagging : Flagging means telling your ML algorithm about any missing value. Flagging is done when the data is missing continuously, rather than randomly.

#4. Filtering outliers :

Another thing you have to remember during  the process of data cleansing are outliers. Outliers are values that are totally very different. For example, you are researching your app user’s age and find entries like 72 and 2. The former might be a senior citizen who is up to date with the technology. But the latter is mostly likely an error since toddlers don’t use apps. If an outlier proves to be irrelevant for analysis or proves to be a mistake, it should be removed, in doing so you can increase the performance of the dataset.

#5. Standardization of data :

Cleansing your data includes standardizing it, to have a uniform format for each value. For example, all values of height should be in the same unit, so you may need to convert from feet to meters or vice-versa, to achieve uniformity. 

Make sure that you use a standardized unit of measurement. These include weight, distance and temperature. As for dates, choose either the USA style or the European format.

#6. Validate the data :

In the conclusion of the data cleaning process, you should be able to answer these questions:

  • Does the data make sense?
  • Is the data is appropriate with regard to its field?
  • Does your data help to develop your next theory?

False results, as a result of incorrect data, may inform poor strategy and decision making. Conversely, data cleansing can help achieve a long list of benefits which may lead to maximize profits.

Pull up :

Monitoring errors and better reporting to see where errors are coming from, Making it easier to fix incorrect or corrupt data for future applications. Clean data helps in taking effective and efficient decisions, resulting in increased productivity and revenue. Using tools for cleansing will make for more efficient business practices and quicker decision-making. Therefore cleansing data from time to time is advisable, for a good result.

Why all eCommerce merchants need Product Catalog Management?

ECommerce  trends are changing with the changing world. Every customer demands high quality, consistent product information before they purchase anything online. Thus eCommerce merchants have to meet this demand to stay ahead of their competitors. Here comes the role of catalog management.

          Product catalog management is a marketing strategy for organizing standardizing cleansing and publishing your product data for enhancing high sales of the product. A product catalog is a type of marketing broucher, that lists product details that helps buyers make a purchase decision. These details include product features, descriptions, dimensions, price, weight, color, availability, customer reviews and more.

          The best example of a product catalog is the Amazon market place, where you can get bundle of information in a single click. For example, if you want to buy a wrist watch- Amazon lists all the information that you need like it is for male or female, brand name, color of the dial, price, availability, offer/discounts, reviews and more. A product catalog is needed for both B2B and B2C domains.

Who needs Product Catalog?

Product catalogs are useful to several business users and groups such as sales reps, buyers, store and warehouse managers, field marketers, external parties such as agencies, partners.

Reasons why you need a product catalog

 #1. Help Retailers :

To overcome certain challenges like selling across multiple channels, updating products constantly, expanding product catalog, dealing with suppliers data and keeping data quality consistent. ECommerce catalog management helps merchants to build a good foundation for their business.

#2. Enhance users experience :

customers browse a product  on an online market place and may navigate to the business website for further information to help them in making a purchase decision. Here the product catalog helps the customer by providing accuracy and reliability of product information. As customer satisfaction has become the moto of today’s competitive eCommerce business. Thus eCommerce businesses must ensure consistency and accuracy of their product information across the multiple sales channels and platforms to provide a consistent customer experience.

#3. Improves conversion rate :

The main aim of product catalog management is to convert the visitors into a loyal customer. When customers have all the data that they need, they can make decision and buy the product, Thus increasing the conversion rate. A clear product catalog helps the customer during their browsing period and also helps them to buy the product of their choice.

#4. Enhance branding :

managing the entire product portfolio information is a challenging task and time consuming. Poor product categorization may leave a bad impact of your website. Thus may cause disappointments and inconvenience to the customers. As a result you may lose a potential customer of your brand. Difficulty in accessing your product data may affect the buying decision and you may lose a loyal customer. Product information documents are useful to promote a company’s brand. Using distinct colors, images, logo helps in enhancing your brand. A well organized product catalog system enables the customers to explore the products online with ease and optimized their experience.

#5.Helps in growing your business :

A good product catalog management will help in growing your business. A good product catalog allows you to support a bigger number of products; that you will be adding as per the changes and demand in the market. Excellent product catalog makes it easy for you to add more products; and push them to your sales channels without any problem.

#6. Generates sales offline :

Today, buyers research products online and make purchases offline in malls, shops, events etc; in such instances, it is important to help customers with information on their mobiles, iPads to fasten their buying process. Websites, landing pages with a clear product catalog enables customers to do research; and collect information about the product and thus making up their mind to buy the product.

#7.Omni channel experience :

managing catalog across various channels is a complex process. It is important to efficiently manage product data and maintain consistency across different channels to ensure shoppers find your product easily and have a great users experience. A proper catalog management should be built effectively to allow you to easily access product information from suppliers and publish it across different platforms. Thus catalog management allows you to maintain consistency across different channels enabling you to offer omni channel experience.

#8. Challenges :

Product catalog management is highly essential for retail brands to survive and strive in the ever changing business environment. There are certain challenges associated with their ever changing business. For instance today’s customers have shifted from desktop applications to multi-device and multi screen usage. Your product should be accessible across multiple platforms. Retailers face secondary challenge of optimizing t6heir product-catalog. Frequent updates related to the products such as changes in price, addition of new features etc, should be done at regular intervals.

Conclusion :

Efficient catalog management services help optimize time and cost in managing large volume of product data. Well presented products, appealing designs and relevant description optimizes the online store on search engine and also simplifies navigation. A well organized catalog enhance business growth.