10 Essentials for Growing your Digital Business in 2016

You may have heard some of these before, some are more vital than others no doubt, at least a couple here are business-critical, yet all can and likely will contribute to your business being more successful this year - either by elevating its market presence, or introducing efficiencies and economies of scale with greater flexibility and speed of change / reaction, as well as increased productivity.

Responsive Design

If you haven’t done it already, now’s the time. Your first and most likely contact point with customers is still your website - and you really should have it working optimally across all devices - from mobile through to desktop. Search engines are also giving preference to mobile-optimised sites (responsive) so this really is in your best interests whichever way you look at it.

HTTPS on all pages

In the past an SSL certificate applied on Registration, Login, Ecommerce and Account pages was deemed sufficient. In the wake of incidents like Sony’s and Talk Talk’s security breaches / hacks last year, it’s now advisable to have HTTPS on every single one of your web pages. Search engines are supposedly giving preference to HTTPS pages too now, so like Responsive Design, it really makes sense to get this done quickly.

Less reliance on Cookie Plug-ins

Most companies don’t fully understand the workings and efficacy of privacy-tools and ad-blockers, which nowadays block a lot more than simply just ads. Anything and everything served up by 3rd party cookies is at risk, which means you need to increasingly single-source content and functionality through the same front-end - something that the Affino Unified Digital Business Platform does rather well. Even with single-sourced content you need to be careful how you name files and features, as certain ad-blockers target all things which they deem might be privacy sensitive - including things like share links and social media. Most are not aware of just how many of their customers deploy ad-blockers (as much as 50% in some cases), as typically the first thing that is blocked is all the tracking and analysis.

More Automation

This is to a large degree dependent on your digital infrastructure and platform capabilities. Affino has 50+ built-in Conversion Events which can be triggered individually or in sequence, with notifications and incentives and including monetary credits. Only the largest companies can afford to staff and service their businesses wholly 24/7; smaller businesses need to rely on automation which should be able to handle many / most of the essential customer service tasks beyond normal office hours.

Seamless Customer Experience

Once again a subject very much to do with your infrastructure - presenting your customers with the recognisably same interface at all stages in their journey and at at all points of contact; allowing them to start, continue and conclude their actions and transactions across devices and platforms. Too many systems rely overly on third party functionality which hampers seamlessness, and is vulnerable to ad- and cookie-blockers q.v..

Better Engagement

Engagement relies on a number of different technologies working in harmony - giving customers / users multiple forms of contact and participation - driven by smart content, incentives and automation. Of course there is nothing like a personal response to any form of query / encounter, but in the absence of on-duty-staff, your web presence must be able to handle and deal positively with at least the first line of enquiry.

Single Customer View

For Affino there are two sides to Single Customer View - presenting everything the customer needs within a wholly integrated and seamless interface / experience. There is also the admin perspective, where in Affino you can have a total singular overview of every key customer contact, action, participation and transaction - all on the same interface screen.

More Personalisation

Tailoring the experience for each user - where they can set viewing, subject and category preferences for what their areas of interest are - meaning they only get the most relevant high-value content, and you in turn can know exactly whom you are targeting, in which location, when, and with what.

More Intelligence

Having a complete overview of all your key business activities - through contact, action, participation and transaction. You can track and trend all your key business activities (KPIs) down to an individual customer level and what their total involvement is with your business. This is something which can be very difficult to achieve, unless you’ve got a solution like Affino - where all these elements are baked into the core of the system.

More Scale

This is another side of and an addition to Affino’s own automation, which we run through our highly evolved Amazon Elastic Server Farms setup. Utilising auto-scaling and auto-recovery systems to react to ever-changing market conditions, so you can easily and rapidly ramp up from local to national, onto International and Global. Your next big growth market may be just across the border ...

Postscript

There are various ways to go about sourcing solutions to all of the above scenarios, the simplest by far is to settle on the Affino Unified Digital Business Platform which has been engineered with all these points in mind, and has been in constant forward development since its launch in 2000.

Speak to our Commercial Lead Jonathan Collins on +44 (0)20 3393 3240 or contact him via jonathan.collins@affino.com to get a clear idea of how the Affino Platform can get you to the forefront of your sector.