As the marketplace shifts and consumers continue to buy more products online rather than from brick and mortar storefronts, tools have been created to facilitate the digital buying experience. One of these tools is Salsify.
In the eight years since the company was founded, Salsify has been able to secure almost $100 million dollars in venture capital funding, serve thousands of happy customers, and win 11 best place to work awards. Not bad for an organization that didn’t even exist a decade ago!
In this article we’ll explain what Salsify is, the main features the platform has, and details regarding its Partner Program and pricing structure. By the end, you’ll have a good idea of whether or not Salsify will benefit your company.
Let’s dive in!
What is Salsify?
Salsify is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product that “helps brands win on the digital shelf.” The digital shelf, in case you aren’t familiar with the term, is defined by Salsify as: “The collection of diverse and rapidly evolving digital touchpoints used by shoppers to engage with brands and discover, research, and purchase products.”
The path from product discovery to product purchase isn’t nearly as linear as it used to be. Modern customers have a myriad of ways to see, research, and buy goods.
For example, a buyer can see a product in a physical store, research the company who makes it on Facebook, and then actually purchase it on Amazon. In other words, every shopper creates their own unique buying path that fits their needs.
Salsify is a product experience management tool that allows brands to create the product experiences their customers want, across every channel said customer might shop. It does this by providing its users with a variety of top-notch software tools.
The Salsify Platform
Salsify is a comprehensive solution that allows its customers to take control of their digital shelves. The platform includes many product experience management tools including:
Product Information Management (PIM)
The purpose of a product information management system is to store and manage all product details across many different distribution channels from a single centralized dashboard.
This kind of tool is important because modern business success relies on quick adaptations to customers demands, category changes, etc. Without a way to quickly (and securely!) manage product information across multiple channels, a company will fall behind.
Salsify’s PIM “combines a comprehensive set of core data services under a flexible architecture that allows you to win on the digital shelf.” This keeps Salsify customers from having to choose between data governance and speed.
With Salsify, users can:
- Increase Control and Agility: Data inside Salsify is imported quickly, even before data governance if need be. The solution also supports multiple data domains and has a handy search function to find anything inside the platform immediately.
- Reduce Bottlenecks: Different people within an organization need different things from their company’s PIM. Salsify was built to allow anyone inside a business (with the proper login details, of course) to access the content they need, reducing bottlenecks.
- Design Company Specific Workflows: Your company is unique and has developed specific workflows to help it achieve business success. Salsify is accessible by marketing, sales, and trade teams, features a drag-and-drop UI to map exact business processes, and includes pre-built workflows for common use cases.
All in all, the Salsify PIM is revolutionary and helps company’s control product information across multiple channels quickly and conveniently.
Digital Asset Management (DAM)
A digital asset management (DAM) system is any platform that allows a company to store, organize, locate, and distribute digital assets from one central location.
Your brand’s digital assets (images, videos, logos, etc.) are incredibly valuable and help your company better market and sell its products and connect with its target audience. But if you can’t find said assets when you need them, or have trouble distributing them to the right people, the benefits of owning them are greatly diminished.
Salsify includes DAM functionality so that organizations can better manage the product experience for their customers.
The system allows for automated transformations of all assets including resizing, renaming, and reformatting; includes a searchable asset database so cross-functional teams can always find the content they need quickly; and internal content tags and smartlists to maintain organization — even if your company’s asset library includes tens of thousands of images and videos.
Product Content Syndication
Most traditional syndication solutions are designed to distribute a single version of product content to retailers and other partners. The problem with this is that one version of product content rarely works for every single channel.
Salsify gives the example of a standard box of cereal. To sell this product at Albertsons, it will need 31 attributes, Kroger requires 62, and Amazon calls for 70. This means a company needs at least three different versions of its product content to sell a simple box of cereal.
Salsify presents a modern solution to this problem by combining PIM (mentioned above) and syndication capabilities into one platform.
Once the Salsify platform is up and running for your company, you’ll be able to:
- Optimize Your Product Content Everywhere: Chances are, your company doesn’t sell products from a single channel. Use Salsify to create channel-specific product content and meet changing retailer requirements and consumer expectations.
- Unify Your Company Workflows: Salsify’s unified platform can be used to manage and syndicate all product data (including GDSN and marketing content) from one location, empowering teams to quickly drive products to market and win sales.
- Create Stellar Product Experiences: Salsify gives you the tools to syndicate rich content like videos, product tours, etc. and transform product data into dynamic experiences that can be tracked, analyzed, and optimized for greater future success.
No matter where you sell your company’s products — from marketplaces like Amazon to retailer sites like Target to social media networks like Instagram — Salsify will help you quickly get your product content live and allow you to capitalize on every channel.
Enhanced Product Content
The combination of graphics, video, 360 spins, and comparison charts can improve conversions by up to 10%. To put that into perspective, a company that sells $100,000 worth of products every month could boost that number to $110,000. Over the course of a year, the business would make six figures in additional revenue.
With Salsify, it’s easy to add product images and other assets into templates, create enhanced content pages for multiple products at once, and send said content to retailers across the net.
Global Data Synchronization Network
Commerce has changed in radical ways over the past few years. Most customers see shopping at physical storefronts and digital shops as two parts of the same experience. Unfortunately, most Global Data Synchronization Networks were built for brick and mortar stores.
Salsify has a vision to unify offline and online commerce through GDSN. It does this by offering its customers a few top-notch features and capabilities:
- A Unified Platform: All data, both operational details and marketing content, can be syndicated from the Salsify platform. This allows Salsify users to unite their work teams, release new products faster, and complete content across multiple channels easier.
- Interoperable Data Pools: Oftentimes brands find themselves having to pay multiple data pools to properly syndicate their data. Fortunately, Salsify’s GDSN data pool is interoperable, allowing Salsify users to exchange data with all trading partners.
- Complete Transparency and Control: Every trading partner has their own GDSN data requirements. The Salsify platform allows its users to automatically validate their data for accuracy. If an error message is received, the tool will immediately determine why and notify the correct team member in real time.
GDSN requirements can be incredibly complex. Simplify the entire process with Salsify.
Customer Chat
E-commerce has many benefits, but it also has a few drawbacks.
For example, sales associates aren’t able to meet with customers face-to-face and facilitate buying decisions. At least they weren’t able to before…
Salsify’s chat functionality allows company representatives to converse with customers via a chat window — directly from product pages of retailers like Target and Walmart! This enables them to assist customers in real time and learn detailed insights from the interactions.
It also integrates with the customer service chat tool you’re already using for simple setup. Are you an Olark, LivePerson, or LiveChat user? Then setup couldn’t be easier.
In-Depth Analytics
Lastly, Salsify provides its customers with in-depth analytics because data is the lifeblood of modern business. When you have better insights you can achieve better rankings and make more sales.
The platform features brand compliance features, the ability to grade your product content against industry best practices, view tailored SEO recommendations and compare your company’s current search rankings against your competitors, and much more.
Learn deep insights about your company so that you can improve sales and revenue numbers as quickly as possible with Salsify.
The Salsify Partner Program
The Salsify Partner Program is a “global ecosystem of partners equipped to help their clients win on the digital shelf.” By becoming a Salsify Partner, your company will be able to incorporate the Salsify’s product experience management platform into its service offerings for its clients.
There are three levels of partnership available:
- Salsify Business Partners: This is the entry level of partnership. It allows companies to execute referral agreements and participate in the partnership engagement process.
- Salsify Enterprise Partners: This next level of partnership allows partnering companies to co-market, co-sell, and work inside of Salsify on behalf of their customers. Partners at this level are also eligible to receive on-site training at Salsify.
- Salsify Global Partners: Lastly, we have the Global Partners level, which requires a dedicated Salsify practice to support customer lifecycles. Partners at this level are also eligible to receive customized training and certification from Salsify.
Well-known brands like Accenture, The Refinery, and Amplifi are Salsify partners and use the platform to help their clients provide better product experiences to customers.
How Much Does Salsify Cost?
Unfortunately, the Salsify website doesn’t list pricing information, though it does state that it provides “packages for small to large enterprises,” and “configurations that scale as your business grows.” Based on this information, we believe that Salsify has a flexible pricing structure that will fit your company’s needs both now and in the future.
Will Salsify Benefit My Company?
This is always a sticky question. Whether Salsify benefits your company or not completely depends on who your company serves, what it sells, how effectively it’s able to integrate the solutions, and a thousand other things.
BUT, we can say that Salsify has a strong history of helping other organizations take control of their digital shelves and increase revenue in meaningful ways.
We encourage you to get in touch with the Salsify team and discuss your needs, Salsify’s solutions, and the software’s pricing structure. Armed with these details, you’ll be able to decide if Salsify is worth the investment for your company.
Win with Salsify
Salsify is a powerful software solution that empowers thousands of companies to win on the digital shelf. It’s combination of complex capabilities and intuitive interface help to satisfy the organization’s growing customer base and achieve higher levels of success.
Is Salsify right for your company? We can’t answer that question for you, but we hope this article has provided you the information you need to make an informed decision. Good luck!