Predict the Perfect Product to Increase CLV

Increasing CLV, or customer lifetime value, ensures you make the most of each customer relationship.  A more engaging, intuitive experience helps create brand loyalty as opposed to generating a single purchase. The right product information software (PIM) enables you to leverage your product information to track what your customers search for, the pages they look at, and the similarities in the products they’ve browsed or purchased.

As a result, you can effectively lead them directly to THE product they have been looking for, creating a positive brand experience. Here’s how you can use a PIM to predict the perfect product for your customers and increase CLV.

1. The importance of agility in the buyer journey for CLV

Today’s customers want to feel understood. Once they experience an intuitive shopping experience where everything they need is presented before they even know they need it, they will come back to enjoy that experience again and again. In turn, you greatly increase CLV.

Customers want to feel spoken to with engaging, positive online shopping experiences. If you’ve done nothing to improve your customer’s experience, they will become bored and find the products they need elsewhere.

A wide variety of marketplaces makes online shopping easier than ever for customers but has created a highly competitive e-commerce landscape. With the combination of growingly intuitive search engines, personalization, and machine learning, if you aren’t keeping up with the latest technology, your site feels outdated.

Add to this the reduced attention spans of the average consumer, and a failure to leverage technology like PIM will leave you eating your competition’s dust.

2. Lead customers to the products they’ve been looking for

Optimizing your site for search engines is crucial to getting your site and products found by customers. If you can create relevant, unique, and well-structured product data, you can boost your SEO rankings, so customers find your products first. Optimized product content is easier with a central location for content using a PIM.

A PIM provides an easy tool for your team to enrich product data using researched search terms, keywords, and image tags.

Once this information is established, you can predict customer behavior, with a better understanding of what they are likely searching for. As a result, you can serve that product up, complete with images and product descriptions, for a more informative and enjoyable shopping experience.

Additionally, you can use search history and results pages to cross-reference less common search terms with more common terms to improve your own site’s search capabilities. All the while, you help search engines like Google find the right products on your site. When your site’s SEO is optimized, you increase CLV from a convenience standpoint.

3. Knowing your customer boosts CLV

When customers feel you’ve provided them with exactly what they’re looking for, they’re likely to keep returning. Time saved is just as valuable as money saved in the eyes of most customers. No one wants to waste time with endless searches. Instead, they want you to tell them what they need based on past behavior. This enables you to share product recommendations, knowing they will be of interest based on their purchase history.

eCommerce businesses can use personalization based on product data instead of simply choosing random products. Everything a customer sees should be related to products they are looking at, have looked at in the past, or that will make sense for something they are likely to need in the future.

Effortless shopping uses relevant data and personalized messaging to emphasize the things you’ve learned are important to your customers. For example, if a customer is interested in ethical practices and sustainability, you can adapt imagery and product descriptions to focus on these product details. On the other hand, if a customer is interested in detailed information, you can link to spec sheets or instructions so that information is always front and center.

4. PIM as your ‘crystal ball’

When all your product information is centralized, down to the most complex specs, you can know what the customers want even before they do. You can remain two steps ahead of the customer with increased agility to meet each stage of the buyer journey. For instance, you can look at previous browser or purchase histories to understand interests to serve up intelligent product recommendations you know they’ll love.

You can even use customer demographics to share targeted content, so the wording your older customers see is different from the wording used for a younger audience. A PIM provides a centralized product information location with endless description versions, so all information is presented in the exact terms each segment understands.

When you have a central hub for information, you can easily feed personalized information to each customer based on past behavior to boost CLV.