With all the talk these days about the power of data to drive business success, look no further than your partner dashboard for a wealth of information about customers and their interest in your products that can shape your strategies. We consider this registry data to be one of the most important features of your software service. That’s why we want to share some tips on how to make the most of this motherlode of information.

When it comes to harnessing that power, two things are important:

• First and foremost, the key is to ensure you are capturing all relevant data and doing so in a timely, consistent, accurate way. Importantly, you want that data easily accessible and easy to use in whatever business building initiatives you pursue. 
• Once you have a good data management system in place, you can use that customer and gift activity information to shape impactful marketing, merchandising, and sales plans.

Here we want to talk about best practices for setting up your registry data collection. In a future blog, we’ll share tips for applying the data to your business strategies. 

Best practices for registry data management

Here are a few ways other partners have made sure that they have easy access to a comprehensive, reliable source of data that will generate profitable growth.

Make sure all of your product information is accessible for registry use. This sounds rather obvious – you want to take advantage of every opportunity for a customer to select product favorites and then ensure seamless gift purchasing.

A Complete Product Feed: We rely on a connection to ensure that customers have access to your products and can easily, accurately add them to their Gift Lists. Products not captured in the feed will not scan, so capture customer gifting activity. Any/all products eligible for registry gifting should be included. We accept your product information in a few different formats (from a manual import of product details, to tapping into an existing Google or Shopify feed). That said, the consensus among our hundreds of partners is that relying on a Google shopping feed or Shopify product list is the best choice.

Keep your Product Feed Current: Once the initial feed is in place, it’s important to maintain updates that reflect inventory or price changes. Depending on your package type, we offer regularly scheduled data updates.. Of course, be sure to notify us if you change pricing strategies or inventory flows so we can respond and even reset your feed updates. In this way, gifts on registries will reflect the latest product status (for pricing and inventory availability). That’s important so the registrant can be notified, and guest views of a registry will not display an item with incorrect pricing or out-of-stock status – that way, we avoid customer disappointments.

Align online and instore product information: For partners who also have physical stores, it’s important that your products have the same barcodes (or at least a matching SKUS or product IDs) so items can be consistently captured by registrants adding gifts in any location. It works most easily when the instore POS system matches the online product platform (i.e., both are on Shopify), but the integration can also occur with ‘hybrid’ systems (i.e., you use Shopify for ecom and something else for your POS). Let us know so we can devise the most efficient registry management set up to capture data fully and accurately.

Keep us informed of business changes that affect your website platform or physical stores. The registry software is set up to seamlessly integrate with your business – whether online or in store. By design, it is agile and can adjust as you evolve your business...all you have to do is share those changes with us..

Website changes: It’s important any change in your website provider be shared with us so we can align the software configuration to match your new platform. That way, any refresh of your registry landing page and ‘add-to-registry’ button – as well as any needed migration of registry activity – can occur smoothly and avoid any disruption of service to your customers or tech issues for you.

Store changes: Similarly, if you relocate an existing store or open new locations, we need to know and update the system tracking. This is important because your in store registry software relies on a geocoding to match your location to capture activity and capture signups and added gifts to your account accurately. Data accuracy, and the insights you gain from knowing what goes on in a particular store, will help you manage business more productively.

Using the data generated by your registry activity to develop business building strategies will increase your sales and grow your customer base. And through it all, our team is here to advise and assist so you can take full advantage of all the customer info and business insights generated by your gift registry. Count on us to offer practical advice so you make more informed business decisions and develop the productive strategies that drive profitable growth.

If you have any questions in particular or want to learn more about managing your registry data, we can always be reached at marketingguru@myregistry.com