PIM vs PXM: Understanding the Connection

What is Product Experience Management (PXM)?

Product experience management (PXM) is when you take everything you know about your products and your customers to craft personalized experiences across all touchpoints. It’s a data-driven approach that enables you to create shoppable experiences that provide each customer with the right information at the right time. Therefore, you’ll use a variety of tools and technologies to ensure each online experience is different depending on the customer.

Product Experience Management spans the entire shopping journey. From when customers carry out product searches, right through to the checkout, you’ll be delivering contextualized product information. This contextualized product information will be based on a variety of factors, such as:

• Demographics i.e., age, gender, nationality
• The channel they’re browsing on
• Their current online activity
• Previous product searches
• Previous purchase history

Using this information, coupled with quality product data, you will create completely personalized product recommendations. To do this, digital retailers will usually have variations of their product data and digital assets that resonate with their different customers based on the factors listed above. In turn, this will lead to improved customer loyalty, higher conversion rates, and greater market share.

Overall, Product Experience Management is reliant on:

Quality product content management:

This includes all aspects of your product data, including digital assets, product descriptions, materials, colors, and more. You need to enrich product data for every stage of the buyer journey, so customers have the best possible experience as they search, shop, and buy.

Contextualized information:

This is where you need to take into account the factors we listed above. Base it on your customer, the channel they’re using, and how they are or have previously interacted with your product. From there, you can adapt and optimize the data to meet their needs and expectations.

Continuous analysis:

Customer expectations are constantly on the rise, so you’ll need to regularly re-evaluate all factors that affect buying decisions. From this evaluation, you will gain actionable customer insights, enabling you to make continuous improvements to guarantee the best possible experience.

Examples of PXM

• Tailoring SEO titles and meta descriptions that display in search engines
• Having a selection of different product ads that can be used across multiple channels
• Personalized product descriptions that resonate with a consumer’s interests and activities
• Cross-selling and upselling items that match a buyer’s personal preferences based on previous browser or purchase history
• Creating personalized visual experiences like using Augmented Reality (AR) tools to showcase how furniture might look in your customers’ homes

Many aspects of PXM are reliant on you having quality product data – and lots of it. So, it’s unsurprising that Product Information Management (PIM) solutions are becoming an indispensable tool in digital commerce.

What is PIM

PIM is a centralized hub for all your product information and digital assets. Gather, store, manage, enrich, and distribute everything to your various sales channels from a single location. The main advantage of having a PIM system in place is being able to create a golden record for your product catalog. You also have massive storage capabilities, meaning you can store multiple versions of product descriptions and imagery against a single SKU.

In addition, there are also powerful integrations that give you the power to serve tailored product details to your audience based on key PXM factors. Overall, this means you’re always delivering the best product experiences. In summary, this is why there’s such a deep-rooted connection between PIM and PXM, which we’ll expand on now.

The connection between PIM and PXM

The concept of Product Experience Management has been around for many years. Creating memorable buying experiences is essential for increasing sales. But as personalization has become more important for eCommerce, PXM has emerged as a popular marketing tactic. Consequently, vendors are using the acronym to differentiate themselves.

So, the basic idea behind PIM and PXM is fundamentally the same. Both processes involve personalizing data to create richer experiences for customers. What’s more, many PIM features provide a deep level of personalization.

In addition, PIM will localize product data for buyers in different countries. This involves translating product descriptions into the different languages of the markets you serve. From a personalization perspective, localization is great for tailoring products to a specific customer in a specific location.

The experience can be bolstered further by incorporating high-res photos or videos. Therefore, you should consider altering the digital assets you display based on the consumer’s personal needs and preferences. The end result is a product experience that provides the right information, in the right format based on what your customer is looking for.

Another aspect of personalization in PIM software is scoping. You can tailor product experiences for different marketplaces e.g. B2B and B2C. For instance, you can scope data to fit the technical language specifications of B2B buyers. If you’re selling to B2C consumers, you could scope your product descriptions to feature more emotive language.

“PXM isn’t PIM 2.0. It’s PIM in collaboration with other tools and technologies such as in-depth analytics, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). If you’re going down the experience management route, you need to have data from sources that aren’t available in what we’d consider PIM information.”

Pimberly Pre-Sales Consultant

How to succeed at PXM with PIM

From a selling perspective, an awesome PIM solution is vital for high-quality PXM. Rather than being a separate system, think of PXM as an outward result. PIM is what you use to enrich product data. Instead, product experience management is how you stage the experience.

Customer information, logistics, and stock data are important as well. Essentially, you want to find out as much as you can about your customers. Find out what customers have previously ordered from your store and if anyone else has ordered similar products.

With this wealth of data, you can learn how to target your products to specific people when they visit your site or sales channels. So, not only will you have richer product data in PIM, you’ll also be creating the personalized shoppable content they crave.

PXM is here to stay, and many product teams are already using PIM and PXM software in tandem to refine their personalization strategies. That’s because both these technologies have the functionalities needed to generate engaging customer experiences.

Having high-quality and accurate product information is essential to creating experiences that are tailored to each of your customers. Create assorted detailed product descriptions with relevant digital assets to tell a compelling story and create the immersive product experiences your customers are looking for!