Growing an Ecommerce Function
As one of the first ecommerce-dedicated hires, Perino initially focused on collecting and managing the content created by Ghirardelli’s internal brand marketing team and its external content development agencies by leveraging Salsify as its system of record for all product information. Having the assets in one accessible place and organized to internal standards helped the teams work together and understand what needed to be developed or updated.
Since Perino joined Ghirardelli, the company has expanded to managing more than 650 SKUs on six retailers, including Walmart, Target, and Amazon. Ghirardelli also expanded its digital shelf strategy to include a number of leading grocery retailers and delivery providers like Albertsons, Kroger, and Instacart, as well as leveraging the Salsify Open Catalog.
Streamlining Syndication to Walmart and Beyond
Ghirardelli began using Salsify’s direct connection to Walmart in 2020. The team at Ghirardelli credits a cross-functional approach for their success, considering the close partnership between Salsify and Walmart. With Salsify’s direct connection to Walmart, the team gets new products live in half the time, Perino says. The team refreshes content regularly on an as-needed schedule, depending on product launches, product updates, or seasonality.
After such success with Walmart, Perino and her team focused on additional priority retailers, including Amazon, Target, and Kroger. As a first-party seller on Amazon, Ghirardelli initially used templated exports and an asset channel to provide the written content and images into Amazon Vendor Central (AVC) and had to map to existing taxonomy that Amazon has for several SKUs.
With the launch of Salsify’s Amazon Selling Partner API direct connection, the team is now able to streamline the syndication of images and marketing copy automatically sent to AVC.
With the Amazon A+ connection, 97% of the Ghirardelli products on Amazon also have enhanced content, which transforms product pages into engaging shopping experiences to drive conversion. This includes all the everyday confection and baking items and all seasonal items.
Today, Ghirardelli’s confection and baking products are sold in more than 75 retailers across the U.S. and Canada. Ghirardelli helps internal teams, specifically their sales teams, access and download ready and complete content through Salsify's catalog solution.
These catalogs provide self-service access to curated product data from a trusted data source as a means for sharing product information with retailers and distributors alike. With self-service access to up-to-date product information and images, sales can share feeds directly with a retailer or drop information into a retailer’s platform as needed.
A Strategic Approach to Target and Content Refreshes
As the Ghirardelli team expanded its syndication efforts, Target became another primary retailer. Using the Salsify direct connection to Target and working closely with the Target account team, Perino was able to map their existing product content to get 75 SKUs live on Target.com within five to seven days of syndicating, compared to a process that often took several weeks.
The Salsify connection allows the team to always work off the latest template schema from Target, validate that their content meets their changing requirements to ensure it’s correct, and have confidence that Target will accept it.
Another complexity with Target was a requirement on what potential allergens each product contains. While most retailers of consumer packaged goods (CPGs) require this ingredient information, Target makes a distinction between which allergen a product definitely contains as well as those that it may contain due to proximity or exposure during manufacturing.
Ghirardelli sent data from its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and was easily able to transform it in Salsify to meet these specific requirements.
In addition, the team was a pilot customer with the new Target Partial Content Refresh connection with Salsify. It allows the team to save at least 15 to 30 minutes per SKU each time they make seasonal changes or content updates. There are a variety of small but significant updates to improve relevancy or refresh attributes. With partial content refresh, baseline content can stay the same, and updates focus on what needs to change.
From Halloween through Easter, the team works in close partnership with brand marketing, creative agencies, and regulatory teams to create and deliver seasonal campaigns, effective search engine optimization (SEO), and seasonal copy to meet internal standards and drive sales for each holiday. The team integrates performance analytics, which suggests changes to a product title or hero image that could improve results.
Recognizing the need to engage shoppers throughout the entire purchase cycle, the Ghirardelli team also invested in Salsify Enhanced Content, which allowed them to quickly publish below-the-fold content layouts at scale for their priority SKUs to drive more engagement and give shoppers more context as they made buying decisions.
Sixty percent of the Ghirardelli catalog on Target has enhanced content. Leveraging layout templates that incorporate a blend of evergreen brand content and product-specific content, the team can update multiple products at scale.
"Having a platform like Salsify has really helped to expedite things. We now have a source of truth and can provide content to these retailers in a much more streamlined way with consistency and accuracy."
— Pam Perino, Ecommerce Content Manager, Ghirardelli Chocolate Company
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