Top 10 Basic Components to build a SMART website
Updated: Jan 29, 2021
All major players in internet business segment have forayed in to a conceptual product called 'Digital Marketing Cloud'. A marketing cloud is nothing but a collection of application capable of 'talking' to each other, providing end to end solution to a brand/company to build online presence with e-commerce, customer management, promotion, acquisition, listening, analytics etc. in real-time.
Companies like Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce and Google have acquired various companies having internet products and services related to Content Management, CRM, Analytics, Advertisement servers, Campaigns, Visitor Profiling, Social Listening etc.
Marketing cloud is playing major role in the process of Digital Transformation and building smart applications. While not all companies can afford these solutions, mid size companies can look at following list of a la carte components, building which they can leverage benefits. I am calling it a la carte as mid size companies can choose what is available at low cost or has better functionality than the others.
Top 10 basic components to build a SMART website
Strong CMS delivering Platform agnostic application
Data Management
Reporting & Management Dashboards
UI , UX & CX – User Interface, User Experience & Customer Experience
Visitor Segmentation
Intelligent Online Advertising
Personas & Customer Profiling
CRM
Safe & Secure
Cloud based scalable infrastructure
Strong CMS delivering Platform agnostic application
A device & platform agnostic website delivers consistent experience to visitors across devices seamlessly. A right choice of Content Management System based on the growth strategy, target consumers and technology trends can help an organization reap benefits in term of real-time content push, acquisition campaigns and promotions. A company can choose from paid or open-source CMS options available in the market.
Data Management
This is about having a strategy to listen, store and use digital footprints of customers. A comprehensive Data Availability and Management Processes for pre-processing, displaying and pushing back data to back-end systems makes the application safe, secure and useful. Use of acquired data becomes useful for mining & reporting for real-time business decisions.
Reporting & Management Dashboards
It is all about making data readable and 'reading' data to take timely business decisions. A comprehensive web reporting system with management dashboards helps marketing and operations teams to take right decisions. For example, A promotional campaign can be further promoted or tweaked looking at the performance dashboard. A company CXO can look at the revenue generated by a product, during a time-span, in a specific category against similar competitor products in the category. All this in real-time!
UI , UX & CX – User Interface, User Experience & Customer Experience
UI design focuses on visual design or skinning the wire-frames, where the creative designer plays with colours, shapes, layouts, typography and more. It is related to branding, colours, typography, iconography. The design team refers all these branding related aspects from a brand guidelines document.
UX - User Experience Design starts with research followed by analysis and strategy. It is all about finding solutions, documentation, dealing with Information Architecture, Data, Wireframes, Prototyping, Decision making & similar logical attributes. It defines the structure of the product, funnels, scenarios, data flow & development plan for development team to use while defining the development sprints.
CX - Customer Experience in digital context is everything the user uses and experiences during interacting with brand's digital assets. How pleasing and easy the interaction with the digital asset happens defines the quality of customer experience. Effectively UI + UX + Data + Advertising + Branding + Sales process + Business strategy + Pricing + After sales service + Support and other things result in effective CX (Customer Experience).
Visitor Segmentation
Any company looking at building online presence should research & finalise visitor classification & segmentation. Market research, Primary and secondary data and Focus group studies can help in segmentation.
Personas & Customer Profiling
Data collected from focus group interviews, existing consumer data and other methods to understand primary and secondary ‘users’ of the website. Defining consumer personas and profiling help in understanding the characteristics and behaviour of specific target groups and their ‘needs’ & ‘wants’ from website.
Intelligent Online Advertising
Campaign design, CRM integration, funnel design and performance evaluation system to monitor and optimise desired business goals of revenue generation.
CRM
A choice of strong cloud based scaleable CRM system integration helps in enabling business processes like new customer acquisition, service, intensification and retention.
Safe & Secure
An online system should be designed with focus on data security, fraud detection and prevention mesures. The system team should have real-time, periodic checks in place to foresee threats, should have Incident tracking and SOP to resolve and stop its re-occurrence.
