Everything Has Changed

It's not often that I find an image that sums a lot of things all at once, but this final frame from the recent Apple iPhone 6s launch sums up:

• My position on why every company needs to up their game digitally
• Why organisations should focus on the customer & experience, not the device
• That change in inevitable and moving at a faster & faster pace

The 4 C’s of a Digital Platform

I've previously posted about the need for organisations to move away from just a website to a Digital Platform, so I won’t go into detail about ‘why’ you need one. However, from feedback I've had about this topic, I think I need to go into more detail about WHAT specifically one actually is.

To therefore keep things as simple as possible, I think the scope of a Digital Platform can be summed up in 4 terms beginning with the letter C:

Content:

Keeping any online property up-to-date requires a decent system for managing content. With free and easy to use CMS (Content Management System) tools available, the days of static sites are (or should be) long gone.
Note: although I know of at least 2 large eCommerce retailers who claim to manage their site content via their merchandising system, which only updates product and category information but still needs a fleet of developers to make HTML-based changes to their homepage, landing pages and anything else you would generally classify under the term content.

Commerce:

Having transactional functionality in your online platform is becoming more and more of a fundamental requirement for an increasing number of sites as they look to acquire and retain direct online customers rather than use a complex and commercially draining network of stores, partners, resellers or agents.
If you want proof of this, just look at the recent demise of the mobile retailer Phones4u in the UK. As the mobile phone operators have gotten more grown-up with their online selling and customer management propositions, then their need for an intermediate who takes commission and attempts to own the customer becomes less and less. In short, by having a mature online commerce and account management service, companies can now seriously consider or reconsider dis-intermediation in fast moving markets.
A digital platform should therefore have a host of features (shopping carts, integration to payment services, discounts & offers functionality and ‘my account’ database functionality, etc.) to enable your business to quickly allow your customers to self-serve.

Channels:

Forget that desktop-only site you've been holding onto for the last few years. The use of mobile devices to browse and buy are increasingly overtaking PC and laptop usage in all sorts of markets. Your customer is now almost as likely to be using their smartphone or tablet (in an array of sizes) to inform themselves. However, just because your mobile visitors have increased, it doesn't mean that your conversions have… as on average (in my experience anyhow) conversion rates on desktop sites accessed from mobile devices sharply decrease in correlation to the size of the screen used.

Or in other words… make sure your digital platform can deliver your content and commerce capability to all users regardless of their channel of choice.

Campaigns:

If you capture and manage customer data, then use it to communicate. To really leverage the user data contained in you Digital Platform it also needs to include (or fully integrate with) a range of digital marketing tools to get your message out and to build a relationship with your target audience. Can your platform:

• Deliver segmented marketing emails to a set of subscribed users?
• Send alerts to customers that they have left something in their shopping basket (and that they should jolly well come back to the site and buy it before someone else does or it is no longer available)?
• Send out SMS messages to those who want or need it (think how useful those text messages about that flight you booked for next week are and how they don’t need you to have a modern 4G data connection to look them up).
• Work out which of your customers are Tweeting and confirm what product they actually bought online from you?

Hopefully your answer to all of the above is “Yes”.

Build a Digital Platform not a website

I still hear a lot of businesses talk about “building a new website” or “creating an online presence”. Now by itself this is not a bad thing and these organisations will no doubt join the ranks of those that regularly move pixels about to create more impact or sell more.

But your web presence should be only one part of an entire toolbox that larger organisations should be using to influence more, engage more, sell more and retain more. But in my experience, a lot of them don’t understand that to have a joined up online customer experience and you need to have a joined up collection of tools that all work well together.

In other words you need a Digital Platform not a website.

So what can a Digital Platform do for you?

Provide ubiquitous online access
It should give as many users as possible easy access regardless of: device, connection speed and ability.

Improve the Customer Experience
It should create a relevant & consistent digital interface for each user segment, allowing all interactions to be as efficient & intuitive as possible, allowing your business to understand customers better.

Improve revenue
It should maximise any online revenue opportunities through better marketing campaigns, improved conversion and opportunities for additional revenue optimisation

Improve insight
It should allow you to understand digital visitor behaviour with the intention of informing and optimising future digital activity.

Provide consistent content
It should allow the central management of content (text, imagery, etc.) across all online devices and interfaces.

Multi-screen shopping - useful infographics

I've used a new Google service to produce an infographic (actually 4 separate ones) that outline how the multi-channel shopping experience has changed.

Is there a future for tablet computing?

I got asked yesterday what I thought about the statement made by Thorsten Heins ,the Blackberry CEO, that tablets are not a good business model. Mr Heins claimed that there will be no need for tablets  in five years and consequently the news sources have said he’s either a complete loony or a wise technological sage. “So is he completely barking?” I got asked by this friend…. Well yes and no.

As you may have read in an earlier blog, one of my future predictions is that technology will become more complex and yet more usable (complex in the number and types of devices and systems, usable in their interfaces), with the speed of change only increasing too. This speed of digital transformation should manifest itself in the ability of technology suppliers to design, build and launch devices much quicker… meaning they are both more responsive to customer demands and able to plug identified gaps in their products portfolios.  In effect… this all means that we should get more devices, more quickly and doing more things in more ways (that’s a lot of ‘mores’!).
 

So what does this mean for the tablet, a market sector that has only really existed in its current form for only 3 or so year? Well in my opinion it means the complete fragmentation of the tablet market into a range of smaller, bigger, wider, slimmer devices that more closely fit the task(s) required of them.  The computing market has been in a state of flux for some while, with different machines rising and fading in popularity as processors, displays and batteries all increased in specification and capacity.  So will the Tablet continue to exist? Yes, in the short and medium-term. But in the longer terms...  the tablet as we know will it evolve and diversify until the word means as little as “personal computer” does these days.

Note: I was wrong about the take-up and scale of the iPad market when it launched. I could therefore well be wrong now...

Abandoned basket emails... one thing I forgot

Isn't it always the way? You write a nice long posting on a specific subject, giving some useful tips along the way.... and then once it's written and published you remember something else that will be obvious to your readers.

Well, it's happened to me (again) with my latest opinion piece on optimising Abandoned basket emails. As it was only after I listed out my 6 suggestions for improving these emails and committed it to publish last night, that I realised I'd missed and obvious one.

So as well as: Experiment with subject lines, Experiment with the time of sending, Send more than one email, Use your email service provider, Experiment with layout, imagery & palette and Track links... I forgot to include "make sure your email is mobile compatible".

You see that although a lot of people just shop on their PC's and tablets, with mobile eCommerce lagging a little way behind.... they still carry their mobile with them. So if you're going to send an email reminder to them several hours later, to let them know they have left an item or two in their online shopping basket, there's a good chance they are out and about, or at least not in front of their main terminal. So if you want them to read that email and then go on to buy the product(s) you need to make it as compatible as possible for all devices.

The problem with collecting data

Data gets collected all over the place these days:

• Customer feedback questionnaires regularly request and assess views and opinions
• Website analytics capture everything from machine preferences through to individual clicks on each page
• Audience research shows the number of adverts watched in a single evening and the retention of those products the following day.
• In-store ethnographic research identifies trends in purchasing behaviour and the effects of pricing, product selection, promotion and placement.

But businesses and their agencies need to move away from the habit of just retaining data from single channels (e.g. website analytics. TV viewing figures, etc.) and transcend the basic online only attribution models that are currently out there.

They now need to understand the entire user journey that leads not just to a transaction, but to a longer-term relationship. Only then can business truly understand the influence that different devices, channels, proportional activity and other factors (such as peer recommendations) have on purchasing and subsequent behaviour.

But who is linking these sources and others together? Who is trying to pull together the collective understanding from each of the different communication and commercial channels?