As a brand, you already know how important it is to maintain strong relationships with retailers. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
From monitoring product listings to keeping track of pricing and promotions, plus many more tasks in between, there’s a lot to manage. And it can be difficult to know if you’re doing everything right.
To help, ChannelAdvisor’s brand specialists came together for a seminar to discuss insights on what makes for truly effective retail diplomacy. Together, they identified several best practices for highly productive retailer relationships. Here are their top recommendations:
Think like a consumer
When you work closely with retailers, it can be tempting to think about the online buying journey from the perspective of each individual retail site. However, it’s important to remember that your customers don’t make purchasing decisions based on specific channels.
Three in four consumers use multiple channels throughout their shopping journeys. That means they’re considering information from multiple listings and promotions before deciding where to buy. Viewing your products through this channel-agnostic lens will help you turn each customer touchpoint into an opportunity to convert, and can help ensure you’re providing what your retailers need at every stage of the journey.
Take advantage of automation
Managing and streamlining product content across channels is complex, but that doesn’t mean it has to be impossible. With the latest advancements in e-commerce automation, there are many ways to ensure your products will look good and perform well across all of your retailers’ sites.
If you’re currently storing product data in different locations, manually filling in retailer templates or skipping content audits, these are all signs it’s time to look into your options for automated product feed management. And if you’re looking for ways to keep more consumers on the path to purchase, shoppable media may be the way to go.
Leverage analytics
When you think of protecting your image online, what concerns you most? Are you happy with the way your brand is represented on retailer websites? Or do you cringe at the sight of inaccuracies and outdated information?
With brand analytics, you don’t have to worry about what might happen next. By monitoring key metrics on a regular basis, you can find and fix issues long before they become problems. For example, by monitoring out-of-stock reports daily, you can see which SKUs will need to be replenished soon and prioritize accordingly. Or you might choose to keep watch over price drops and increases to ensure consistency across retailers, and to keep tabs on reviews to ensure timely responses.
These types of insights are the basis for a true win-win scenario: By using analytics to protect your brand, you can support retailers without having to police them.
Above all, remember that working with retailers is an end-to-end experience. From tracking retailers with brand analytics to feeding them great content to rewarding them with shoppable media, each layer is essential to success — both for your retailers, and for your brand.
ChannelAdvisor’s e-commerce experts explore each of these areas in the on-demand seminar, Retail Diplomacy for Brands: Successfully Managing Your Retailer Relationships. In this three-part workshop, we take a look at:
- Top 3 Questions Brands Should Be Asking to Enhance the Demand Funnel
- A Strategic Guide for Streamlining Your Product Data to Retailers
- How to Protect Your Brand With Powerful Analytics
Each session is less than 30 minutes, and is packed with insights you can use to strengthen relationships with retailers in productive, profitable ways. Watch the seminar on demand.
Can’t view the entire three-part series all at once? Start with the four-minute recap of the most important takeaways:
