Why a T-shirt must go omnichannel – and how, demonstrated by 5 use cases
Three key takeaways from this blog post:
Fashion brands that go omnichannel reaps benefits across the funnel. Not only do they experience an increased brand and product awareness, but they boost sales through increased basket size.
The three primary marketing technologies are necessary to go omnichannel as they each differ depending on what data or content they manage.
Functional capabilities and integrations with customer-facing channels such as CMS, eCommerce, and even Photoshop and PowerPoint are a few of the use cases needed to kick-start the omnichannel journey for fashion brands.
Today's consumers live in a world of constant connectivity.
They engage on several devices and switch between these within seconds.
And they seek information online before going to a physical shop to buy a product.
Research made by Harvard Business Review on 46,000 customer purchases suggests that 73% of these customers used multiple channels during their shopping journey.
Thus, consumer-facing retailers need to respond with a seamless shopping experience and break channel boundaries.
Offering a compelling omnichannel experience can be used to blur the lines between online and offline shopping across channels.
Fashion brands must focus on winning the omnichannel game to stay ahead
Most fashion brands consistently experience an increase in revenue generation from online shopping.
This trend has been going around for almost decades, and the pandemic accelerated the trend even more.
Previously, the majority of consumers would shop offline without researching online.
Today, however, it is now the everyday norm that fashion consumers go to a store after researching online.
However, this does not mean the end of brick-and-mortar retail.
For most fashion companies, a physical store is still indispensable as customers still use a combination of offline and online channels when they shop.
Research made by McKinsey reveals that the average omnichannel customer purchases 70% more often than an offline-only shopper.
It is fair to say that not only does omnichannel help increase the awareness of brands and products, it also boosts sales and basket size. What's not to like?
Well, going omnichannel is easier said than so. In this blog post, we will discuss what fashion brands need to consider related to marketing technology capabilities in their pursuit to deliver on a full-funnel strategy that meets expectations from omnichannel buyers.
The challenge of understanding and choosing platforms in a complex martech landscape
Fashion brands often find themselves with many SKUs that need an ever-increasing number of digital assets, from product photos, model videos, and to even 3D models based on 360 spin table photos.
Many fashion brands struggle to identify the right technologies to control their digital product content.
One factor is the capabilities behind each platform but ensuring that the platforms can communicate with and work with each other is paramount.
Or, to put it technically, ensure they have the integration capabilities needed to support creating and distributing digital assets across the entire content lifecycle and between all the systems.
The three primary but non-exhaustive marketing technologies necessary to go omnichannel are DAM, PIM, and ERP – and they each differ depending on what data or content they manage:
| Digital Assets Management (DAM) | Product Information Management (PIM) | Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting of core asset (Images, Videos, Documents and other artwork) | Hosting of core product information | Stock |
| Type of media (JPEG, PNG, AI) | Color | Price |
| Alt text | Title | Location |
| Brand | Material | |
| Angle (front & back) | Description | |
| IP rights | Sizes (Small, Medium, Large) |
Thus, the quest for creating a seamless shopping experience with different technologies across channels lies in the realm of the content ecosystem. An ecosystem designed for creating, managing, and distributing digital content.
Let us walk through the requirements and steps necessary to become omnichannel for a fictional fashion brand.
A T-shirt's omnichannel journey
Imagine a company that designs, manufactures, and sells a T-shirt - let's call it the "T-shirt Company".
The T-shirt Company has launched a new T-shirt and wants to promote and sell it through multiple channels; website, eCommerce, print, and retailers' own online and offline channels.
These channels share a common need for them to promote the T-shirt: A digital asset.
The T-shirt Company needs a digital asset management system to facilitate content creation easily and accurately.
A digital asset management system is a platform that have the ability to facilitate content creation, store digital content in a secure and centralized location, and distribute it across channels.
First, the T-shirt Company needs to take a picture of their physical T-shirt. One image of the front and one of the back (and make sure to get a picture of the tag). The two pictures are then distributed to their in-house graphic designer for finalization before uploading to the DAM.
Second, metadata is added to the asset for enrichment (which is necessary for later distribution, more on that later). It is descriptive data that provide information to enrich the image.
The metadata could be:
Product ID
Color of T-shirt on photo
Angle (front & back)
Size
The true value of metadata within a DAM platform makes it easier to search and share marketing content, manage collections, preserve visual resources, and centralize rights management – it acts as the ID for a given digital asset.
In addition to adding metadata into their DAM system, they need to add product information from the product information management (PIM) system. Product information entails the product title, description (materials), color, and size.
What is PIM?
A product information management system helps retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers control their products in a central place. It provides a single source of truth of the product and all its product information.
The power of integrating PIM and DAM is the ability to manage both data (product information) and content (the product-related digital asset) simultaneously – which is essential for an omnichannel strategy.
Furthermore, it drives internal best practices to ensure one version of truth for all assets and content.
But for PIM and DAM to seamlessly communicate with each other, an open application programming interface (API) is required.
Some DAM systems, such as Digizuite's DAM platform, have prebuilt connectors to PIM systems and distribution channels that are paramount for fashion brands, such as the T-shirt Company, to go omnichannel.
Once the digital asset has been enriched and completed, the T-shirt company can start taking its first steps towards its desired omnichannel state: Seamlessly distribute its T-shirt across its own and partner channels.
Getting started: Five use cases that pave the way for omnichannel
To truly showcase how DAM supports the T-shirt Company's road to omnichannel, let's dive into five use cases that demonstrate how DAM's functional and integration capabilities realize the omnichannel ambition, alongside PIM and ERP.
Please note: The below use cases do not capture all the channels and content needed to become omnichannel truly. There are many channels to pursue, but the below use cases are good starting points.
Use case 1: CMS
Once the T-shirt Company has entirely created the digital asset of the new T-shirt, enriched by DAM, the natural first step is to distribute it to their CMS platform.
With Digizute DAM who has a native connector to Optimizely and Sitecore, the image of the T-shirt and its metadata is sourced directly from the DAM system – a seamless integration.
Metadata including title, description, product name is used to generate meaningful figure texts and alt texts on the webpages improving both accessibility and SEO performance.
Use case 2: eCommerce
Beyond CMS, the T-shirt Company also needs to make the product available on their eCommerce platform.
Knowing that their eCommerce platform is quite advanced, it requires not only DAM and PIM to meet omnichannel buyers' expectations but also a seamless integration to eCommerce.
As the digital asset is sourced from the DAM, product information such as title, materials, and sizes is sourced from PIM. Stock, price, and location are sourced from the ERP system.
The combination of the martech platforms allows the omnichannel buyer to immerse him/herself into the product.
Through photos, 360 spins, and model videos (DAM)
Explore the products' materials, sizes, and more (PIM)
See availability and price (ERP)
With home delivery or click and collect - across desktop, tablet, and mobile.
The interplay between the platforms gives the consumer a seamless, omnichannel experience.
And it allows the T-shirt Company to do so efficiently and smoothly through digital workflows – powered by the platforms' integration and automation capabilities.
Use case 3: Partner's product catalog
The T-shirt Company has an extensive partner network consisting of small and large retailers. Several of these still have printed and online catalogs as part of their promotional toolbox.
And as a customer towards these retailers, the T-shirt Company needs to accommodate their needs.
The most utilized platform to develop printed catalogs or brochures is Adobe InDesign.
Once more, the DAM is connected to Adobe. This makes it easy for external partners to edit the T-shirt image in Photoshop before implementing it in the catalog.
Use case 4: Brick-and-mortar promotion
Most of the T-shirt Company's retail customers sell products on both digital and physical shelves.
Regarding the latter, they compete with other competing retailers on the street, trying to draw window shoppers into actual purchasing shoppers.
Beyond mannequins, it is popular to have large screens in the store displaying digital content. Some keep it simple by having a self-running PowerPoint leveraging Digizuite’s Microsoft Office Connector while others have instore digital signage systems.
Use case 5: Sales enablement
For the T-shirt Company to grow even more, they need to ensure their sellers are thoroughly trained and enabled to differentiate how they interact with potential buyers.
After all, retail customers are overwhelmed with information and don't want to spend more time than necessary with sellers. The sellers need to demonstrate and visualize their current products or future collections.
Also, a seller can ruin the meeting experience entirely if he/she spends more time than necessary to find and share the right content. The need to find the right type of content in a sea of different images and videos of a fashion brand's collections is imperative for sales success.
This is where the DAM acts as visual support for the sales team, in other words, as a distribution channel, beyond as a platform for content creation facilitation and content management.
Fashion brands can do so with a mobile DAM app, including sophisticated search capabilities (metadata filtering). It helps elevate the selling experience and makes it easier for the seller to quickly find the needed content for a given product during a sales interaction - where time and the potential buyer’s attention span are limited.
A content ecosystem and DAM is the moral of the story
That concludes the story of how T-shirt Company can begin its journey towards omnichannel excellence - and how platform interplay and integrations play a crucial part. But the story is not over.
To claim omnichannel excellence, the T-shirt Company needs to ensure its content is available to its audiences in other channels such as social media, ad networks, and email.
Nonetheless, the purpose of the story is to highlight the benefits of having a DAM system including an open API:
Assist in organizing and keeping track of assets and data
Ensure seamless integrations with other systems and platforms
Provide smooth distribution of assets internal and external
Improve SEO with well-defined data
Fashion brands must choose an efficient but also flexible DAM system to take them to the next level: becoming an omnichannel company. Read about Digizuite's best-of-breed DAM solution here to learn more about our platform's functional and integration capabilities.
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