Product failures happen all the time. There are those that get off to a great start but fail to sustain themselves. And those great ideas that don’t become popular. What do you do with such products? Do you take them off the shelf? Or do you revamp or refurbish or re-launch them so you can offer your customers products they can really benefit from?
The life of an unattractive SKU is indeed bitter and lonely. The good news is, there are ways to breathe life into that scenario. There’s much to learn from failures and insights that can be used to improve your product and customer experience.
Let’s look at 5 ways to get lonely products into appealing transactions:
Embrace analytics: If you think analytics is only for chatbots and Machine Learning algorithms, you’re wrong! Analytics can also revive your lonely products. You can use historical data, statistical algorithms, and Machine Learning techniques to best assess the steps to revamp your product. By leveraging such deep data, you can:
- Understand current challenges with customer segmentation, product features, marketing campaigns, market mix modeling, and more.
- Devise solutions to boost sales performance.
- Evaluate if you have a good understanding of your audience, if your sales forecasts are on point, and if you are pricing your products correctly.
- Identify and analyze what your audience thinks about your product, maximize cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and enhance Customer Lifetime Value.
- Leverage data from churn analysis to understand why you’re losing customers and how to stop that.
- Understand if your sales teams are doing their jobs efficiently and devise strategies to improve sales effectiveness, predictability, and productivity.
Tweak the product strategy: If your products are not receiving the attention they need, maybe it’s also a good idea to re-evaluate and redefine your product strategy. This is where you go back to the beginning to reset the overall direction for your products and create a new game-plan. Revisiting the foundation of your product strategy suggests you must:
- Understand the core purpose of your brand and product and the value you want to deliver to your customers.
- Assess your current target audience and analyze if your products make more sense for another target segment.
- Evaluate the product messaging. If your messaging isn’t driving the value you expect, adjust it to appeal to your target demographic.
- Look at channel performance and identify gaps. If required, offer an omnichannel experience or try targeting one segment on a primary channel and another on a secondary channel.
- Develop a product content-centric digital commerce strategy and roadmap to improve customer experience.
- Evaluate your current merchandizing strategy as well as your digital product content processes and governance to identify areas of improvement.
Use the latest technology for PIM: The product information you use to describe your product must have much more than basic product specifications, features, and functions. To revamp your lonely products, you need to effectively aggregate and manage your product information to enable high-quality customer experiences. Using advanced tools for PIM is a great way to improve the appeal of your products. Using the latest technology, you can:
- Constantly drive efforts in unearthing value from your growing volume of product information and build an accurate and synchronized view.
- Accurately and efficiently aggregate and manage product content and build a data model that meets the specific needs of your customers.
- Use a range of workflow management tools and offer a single view of content across suppliers, partners, customers, and distributors.
- Incorporate an array of content types including documents, images, audio, and video files into your product information and associate items through different relationships.
- Import relevant product data from internal and external sources and deliver accurate, consistent, and updated product content to multiple platforms.
Re-design the product content: If you want to improve the appeal of your products, you must provide the right information at every touchpoint of the buying journey. In today’s digital era, customer experience drives real success. And much of the customer experience is driven by their ability to browse and search for products that meet their needs. Thus, accurate and consistent product content becomes critical. Precise and truthful content engenders trust and helps customers make purchasing decisions that work in your favor. If you’re looking to re-design the product content, make sure to:
- Use modern technology to build and normalize your SKUs, develop rich content, and optimize your data models.
- Focus on quality metrics to measure the accuracy, efficiency, and consistency of your product content and make necessary changes.
- Publish the improved content across different channels and use translation/localization if needed
- Constantly monitor, manage, and improve product content through site analytics, SEO optimization, A/B testing and more.
Revamp the customer experience design: Another major reason for the poor appeal of your products is the inability to offer a reasonable customer experience. Designing an experience that aligns your products with the needs of your customers is critical for loyalty and advocacy. When you are in the process of rebuilding your products, focusing on customer experience design is a great way to enhance their attractiveness. To focus on customer experience design, you must:
- Focus on making it easy for customers to find the product information they need when they need it. The aim should be to help them progress in the buyer journey.