Automation: 11 examples of use around the PIM

What is automation? No need to look very far; as its name indicates, automation encompasses all the processes of automation of a task. These tasks are often repetitive and tedious, which is why companies benefit from automating them. Here, we would like to present you the numerous benefits of automation and how, thanks to certain solutions, including our partner Make, you can simply and quickly set up automation actions. With our partner Axome, we have imagined 11 concrete cases of automation, which will save you time, and much more...

The benefits of automation

Marketing automation is sometimes referred to as marketing tools that can automate marketing tasks such as lead generation or sending e-mail campaigns, for example. In this case, automation allows marketing teams to refine the segmentation of customers and prospects, to better understand their behaviors, their needs and thus personalize the interactions between the brand and them.

However, automation has more than one trick up its sleeve and delivers many other benefits, for all teams in a company. Automation processes save precious time. No more time is spent on long, repetitive and sometimes boring tasks. A complete human resource or even several can be saved and reallocated to tasks with greater added value for your company. 

Automation also makes you gain in quality : no more human errors. Automation processes also improve the quality and accuracy of the products and/or services you sell. In doing so, your costs are also greatly optimized. As the time spent on a task decreases, so do your costs. The same goes for your company's productivity , which is increasing: automated processes generally take less time to complete certain tasks than humans.

Flexibility is not forgotten because automation processes can be programmed and easily configured to perform specific tasks. They can therefore quickly adapt to certain constraints and changing environments. Finally, safety is more than guaranteed thanks to automation, with complete control of the automation, which can be programmed to perform delicate tasks without failing.

With a PIM solution, setting up automated processes is that much easier. A PIM (Product Information Manager) enables you to collect, centralize, manage and distribute all product-related information. With the most reliable, complete and secure product information in place, all subsequent automation processes can be based on sound, exhaustive product data. An almost indispensable prerequisite.

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11 automation use cases around the PIM

With our integrator partner Axome, we have come up with 11 case studies on how to implement high-value automation for you and your company with Make. 

Make is an automation platform designed for all business teams: marketing, sales, IT, human resources... From your unique Make platform, you can integrate your applications by including your pre-existing processes or by creating new ones.

Online store management

Once again, the possibilities are endless with Make concerning the management of your online stores with Prestashop, Adobe Magento or Woocommerce. For example, it is possible to create scenarios to publish Shopify blogs on all its social networks, to automatically add new products to its Shopify store thanks to Google Sheets, to register on a Google Sheet each new order placed from the Woocommerce store... Here again, the connectivity between a PIM like that of Quable, Make and a player like Prestashop allows to retrieve data and to distribute them in no time, in an automated way. 

Increased connectivity with our Shopify Plus application also allows you to distribute a multitude of product information with just a few clicks, despite the many Shopify stores/stores. In short, the possibilities to automate and boost the productivity of your online store are endless.

Advertising / Ads

It is possible since Make to create a feed directly for some applications like Google Shopping, to quickly distribute its product catalog.

In the same way, on social networks, the fact of automating certain processes with Facebook, Instagram or Twitter allows for example to quickly generate content for these platforms, tweets, Facebook publications but also to trigger actions according to the behavior of users on the content of these social networks: for example generate a comment in response to another comment, retrieve the data and information of a post ... etc. This usage can also be deployed for advertising or shopping on social networks (Tiktok Ads, Instagram Shopping...). The product information can therefore be drawn directly from the platform PIM.

Project management 

Many applications and tools have emerged since the covid crisis and before, to facilitate better collaboration between teams, remotely. Airtable, Asana, Notion, Monday or Trello are just the most famous and there are many others. Creating, editing and publishing pages on this platform takes some time. However, the automation of several processes with Make allows you to automatically update certain information related to certain pages, to receive notifications and to be notified when several elements are modified and to automate the slightest manipulation on the tool. Tracking tools also allow you to understand which features you use the most and the least on these platforms and therefore optimize your use with these tools.

Image generator from textual content

Some tools such as Bannerbear, allow you to create content for your social networks or others thanks to the platform's APIs. Visuals, videos, banners, PDFs are all content that you can create thanks to infinitely reusable templates. Each object in the template becomes a modifiable parameter thanks to its own API. 

Why not maximize the power of the applications together? For example, ask the OpenAI app to write image descriptions, to be entered later in an application like Dall-e, which generates images from textual content? Afterwards, these contents can have many use cases: a carousel for your Linkedin page, a video presentation of your company, shipping labels for your packages... you are only limited by your imagination. Another option is to use the data already existing in your PIM, their completeness will only enrich the visual content to be created later.

Email and newsletter generation

These are typical examples of marketing automation. Tools like Mailjet, Mailchimp, Sendiblue or Sengrid allow you to automate emailing campaigns, SMS, Whatsapp messages and newsletters. Specific interactions of Internet users with your brand trigger specific scenarios and lead to a specific action or series of actions to convert these Internet users into loyal customers. For example, a new visitor gives his email for the first time to your brand, and the marketing automation sends him a welcome message. 

With a PIM upstream, these newsletters can also be centered on your products (addition of new products, promotions, return/end of stock...), and trigger specific actions afterwards according to the users' behavior.

Translation

Translation platforms can be used for automation. Whether it's website pages, email sequences, articles or white papers, translation is a must for companies that are going global and it takes time. Tools such as Deepl, once automated, allow you to obtain an instant translation of all your digital content in any language, once the data is retrieved from PIM in the original language.

Creation of professional supports

Platforms such as Prospero or Google Slide offer companies the possibility to generate professional materials such as presentations or others, to convince your future customers and sign contracts much faster. Many customizable templates are available and thanks to automation, it is very easy to decide which action is triggered based on the behavior of the prospect with the media. You can track many key elements for your business; how many times the support was opened, how long the prospect spent on it, and be notified if needed. Once again, the data in your PIM and/or DAM is valuable in this use case. You can retrieve your descriptive content related to the products but also the media.

Creation of visual experiences

Media is king, but it also takes a lot of time to resize and retouch to fit brands' constraints. Cloudinary is an example of creating original visual experiences; the platform allows brands to create, manage, store and transform their media. By automating the processes, each of these actions is programmable and delivery to any channel is automated. Automation once again streamlines the mechanics and actions related to media management and saves teams considerable time.

Landing page with products

Marketo or Webflow are relevant examples of landing page creation presenting products. With automation, it is possible to create landing pages in a completely automated way and thus generate a lot of content more quickly. With Webflow, the structures of the pages and web content can be much more lively and dynamic, and incorporating systematically updated data. Make enhances the power of your Webflow or Marketo website by automating actions that are usually done manually. For example, if you want to send questions to a prospect once he has requested a demo or made an appointment on your site, you can automate this task by delegating it to Make by creating a scenario.
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Inbound & CRM

Automating the creation of leads and opportunities is also a relevant action to implement regarding the inbound and CRM of your business. As with the previous examples, creating a scenario in Make triggers a process that in turn triggers an action, whether you use Hubspot, Salesforce, SugarCRM or Sellsy. For example, if someone fills out your contact form on your site (the trigger), this may result in the action of transferring their data into your CRM, and/or creating a new task in your to-do list, such as recontacting that person. With the tracking features, it is also possible to track the follow-ups to be done with prospects or contract signatures, to receive email or Slack notifications regarding these actions...etc.

Spreadsheet software 

Concerning spreadsheet software like GoogleSheets or Excel, there are also countless possibilities in terms of automation. It is possible to update databases, such as exchange rates (with the Currency application), to send Slack messages from a whole list of contacts from our spreadsheet or to import data concerning a specific subject into your spreadsheet from Gmail, for example.

Concerning manufacturers and distributors, a platform like PIM Quable easily allows to generate the FOB/DIS file in a few minutes. Coupled with automation, it becomes therefore fast to plan imports, exports and generation of this file with its partners.‍

Conclusion 

In short, Make offers the possibility to automate any action of your business and to boost your use of the PIM platform to the maximum. The number of tasks to be automated becomes infinite and so do the possibilities of integration with the multitude of applications. All domains are concerned: communication tools, spreadsheets, IT software, CRM, Sales... and many other fields of applications are possible: lifestyle applications like Twitch, Reddit, travel tools like Waze or Google Map, customer support applications like Zendesk... etc.

Moreover, even if your tool does not yet have integration via Make, it is quite possible to exploit it if its API is open and flexible, so there are really no more limits and excuses to automation.