Why Is DAM Critical for eCommerce Success?

In today’s fiercely competitive eCommerce landscape, websites are required to constantly improve user experience and provide customers with relevant offerings. A key component of eCommerce marketing is its media. Specifically, product images and videos that demonstrate, inform and generate engagement. 

All of these media files can quickly accumulate and if not organized well, can create a messy CMS. Digital asset management practices and tools help eCommerce owners and admins leverage cutting edge technologies to ensure the security, management, accessibility, and storage of their digital assets.

What Is Digital Asset Management (DAM)?

Digital asset management (DAM) is a set of tools and practices that enable you to manage and optimize your digital media, including images, video, branding materials, and documents. DAM solutions can help you collect, store, catalog, and share content according to business rules that you define. These systems enable you to control who is using digital assets, track asset use, and maintain a searchable library of assets.

What Are the Key Features of DAM?

• Manipulation—DAM solutions enable you to ingest and manipulate data. For example, cropping, editing, or manipulating the metadata of assets.

• Security—solutions include built-in encryption and access controls to protect assets from theft or unauthorized used or modification.

• Content delivery—solutions can include features for content delivery or streaming of data. This ensures that users can download assets when needed and that they get the format that suits their needs.

• Version control—solutions include features for version control, enabling you to store multiple versions of assets for archival or for use with different business units. Version control features also provide data loss prevention features that help ensure assets are not damaged by modification and that older versions can always be retrieved.

• Accessibility—users can search or browse for assets and see previews of media before downloading. All assets are tagged with metadata to enable searching by keywords or asset details. Some solutions have AI-based searches that can automatically identify and tag media to match queries.

• Storage—solutions store and catalog assets, enabling you to control where and how assets are stored. Some solutions also include tools for searching for media assets across your systems to ensure that none are overlooked.

4 Reasons DAM Is The Key To Your eCommerce Success

For modern businesses, digital assets are valuable commodities that need to be carefully leveraged. This is particularly true for eCommerce businesses that rely on digital media to display products and services in the best possible light. For these businesses, DAM can offer significant benefits, including the following.

1. Helps you achieve brand consistency

A unified brand image is necessary to display professionalism and reliability to customers.This means ensuring that you create assets according to consistent standards and consistently use branding and marketing materials.

DAM solutions can help you ensure this consistency by enabling you to restrict where, how, and by whom assets are used. You can also use solutions to track use and make sure that you replace retired assets as needed. These capabilities help you ensure that assets are used according to their purpose and that none are abused or abandoned.

2. Makes marketing faster, easier, and more efficient 

Marketing is a significant budget line for many organizations, and takes a lot of work. With DAM, you can reduce this work by delivering more organized and managed assets. With clear cataloging, it is easier for you to see what assets are available and how you have used marketing materials in the past.

Additionally, DAM solutions can make it easier for marketing teams to collaborate with artists and other business units. Through version control, tagging, and analytics, teams can evaluate assets, define use cases, and uncover patterns relating to media effectiveness or use.

3. Provides real-time data

Data is a major driver of improvement in the digital world. Collecting and analyzing data on your assets and their use can help you ensure that assets are used correctly, gather user feedback, and effectively monetize licensing.

DAM solutions can provide real-time data on user searches, actions, and media delivery. Depending on the tools you integrate, you can also aggregate data from your sites or social media campaigns about user interactions and effectiveness. This data enables you to enrich assets and more easily analyze asset value.

4. Enables customer personalization

Customer personalization enables you to leverage customer data and preferences to deliver content and products that meet their needs more closely. This typically increases customer engagement and can build brand loyalty.

Through data collection and the ability to serve content on demand, DAM systems can help you automate the process of customer personalization. These systems can enable you to integrate personalization algorithms to automatically select and serve the asset that best matches a customer’s needs. 

Evaluating DAMs for eCommerce

If you decide that it's time to adopt a DAM solution, you should take the time to evaluate your options carefully. While these solutions can provide significant benefits, implementation takes time, and you want to optimize your costs. The following DAM considerations can help you identify the best solution for you.

How easy is it to use?

Solutions need to support all asset formats that you are currently using and should support fast migration, preferably with asset discovery features. Solutions should also make it easy for asset managers and end users to search for and contribute media. Single panes of glass are best.

Does it support bulk operations?

There are many times when you need to manage assets in bulk, including initial migration, when assets are retired, or when new media campaigns are started. Solutions should support the ability to perform bulk operations based on asset details (such as date or owner) or metadata.

What metadata limitations are there?

DAM solutions rely heavily on metadata to make them effective. The ability to classify assets and enable searchability is directly tied to metadata. Because of this, it’s important to understand how the system supports the addition or modification of metadata. You should also consider if there is a limit to the amount that can be stored per item or catalog.

What organization options are there?

One of the primary functions of DAM solutions is to enable you to organize assets meaningfully. If you have to use rigid folder structures or are limited in how you can link assets to multiple uses or users, you cannot organize as effectively. When choosing a solution, prioritize those with a list-based approach. This model makes it easier to use assets in multiple places without having to create multiple copies.

Conclusion

DAM practices and solutions can help eCommerce sites improve many aspects of their asset management. In particular, DAM systems provide security, content delivery and manipulation, version control, and accessibility capabilities that are not available in typical CMS. AI-based DAM solutions also add features for personalization and smart searching and tagging. As more join the eCommerce landscape, good digital asset management practices can help create competitive advantage for businesses.