How to Digitise Your Business

Knowing how to digitise your business is a must for new and existing businesses as e-commerce continues to grow. Utilising digital tools to create an engaging digital presence will give your business opportunities for growth as it reaches out to customers locally and around the world.

Integrating digital technologies into your business could transform the products and services you offer as well as the way your customers interact with your brand. This is in addition to the influence digital technology can have in streamlining your business processes.

Top Tips for Digitising Your Business

There are many ways businesses can go digital in 2024. Though the following tips could all help your business evolve, it’s not necessary to implement all of them at once.

1. Launch an E-Commerce Store

Customers are buying more and more online. This makes knowing how to incorporate e-commerce into your website a must. There are many ways to set up a simple and easy-to-use e-commerce website. This, paired with a social media presence and digital advertising, can make your e-commerce website a success.

2. Digitise Payments

Digitising the payment process is another vital facet of digitisation. This can come in various forms, but the objective is the same: to offer more and better payment options to your clients.

Businesses that accept digital payments via multiple channels, for example in-person, online and mobile payments, need to overcome certain complexities that come with this process. One of the most important is choosing a payment processor. This is a critical decision that can affect various parts of the business. Choosing one that can scale with you is crucial for your business’s long-term future.

The payments industry is constantly innovating and developing new ways to pay. This includes options like payment by text, digital wallets, and QR-code payments. Keeping up to date with new payment methods is a great way to appeal to a wide range of customers.

Why Do You Need a Payment Processor to Digitise Payments?

Receiving card payments in-person and online (rather than cash and cheques only) requires a merchant services account. Your payment processor will either have one that all of its merchants share (in the case of a merchant aggregator) or will provide you with a dedicated merchant account.

As your business expands, you may also need to be able to accept multi-currency and international payments. To answer customers’ ever-evolving demands, business owners should keep themselves informed about payment trends and think about their customer base when choosing a payment processor.

What Should I Look for in a Payment Processor?

Payment processors allow businesses to accept different forms of payment from customers from all around the world. Your payment processor should offer the following services:

• Facilitate Transactions. When a customer purchases something from your online store, the payment processor transmits the transaction details to the acquiring bank and card-issuing bank via the card networks on your behalf.

• Authorisation and Authentication. Your payment processor will request authorisation from the issuing bank to make sure the customer has enough funds. The customer’s identity and the validity of the payment method will also be verified. This helps to prevent fraud.

• Encryption and Security. Your payment processor will use encryption and tokenisation to transmit each payment securely. Check that the processor is PCI compliant to ensure a secure environment for your transactions.

• Customer and Transaction Data. Producing data about customer payments is a key part of a digital-focused business strategy. With this data, you can generate sales reports and track sales and trends. Keeping your customer data clearly laid out will also help your marketing department make strategic decisions.

• Fraud Detection and Chargeback Protection. Fraud scrub technology monitors potentially fraudulent transactions and helps to prevent chargebacks. This will reduce your exposure to fraud and help to prevent sanctions for excessive chargebacks.

• Support for Multiple Currencies and Different Payment Methods. Being unable to handle different payment methods can lead to higher cart abandonment rates. Opening up your business globally (online) means you must be able to process transactions in different currencies and offer several different payment methods.

Though card payments are still preferred over mobile payments in Europe, the percentage of mobile payments is rising quickly. Being able to process all payment types will help you appeal to a wider range of customers than simply offering payments by card.

3. Develop a Strong Digital Marketing Strategy

Once you have an e-commerce website and can accept electronic payments, one of the most important aspects of your business’s digital transformation will be to establish a strong online presence with a well-informed digital marketing strategy. To promote your business online effectively, consider the following:

• A mobile-optimised website. It’s important to make sure your customers can access your website from their mobile devices. Don’t count on your customers all shopping on their laptops or desktop computers.

• E-mail marketing. Using email is a great way to keep your past, current, and potential customers up to date with business news, offers, and new products. A successful e-mail campaign requires storing your sales data in a customer database. A global payment gateway will help your business with this, as well as give you the ability to facilitate recurring billing for regular customers and subscribers.

• Social media marketing. Using various kinds of digital platforms to market your product or service is a must for businesses that want to go digital. Take the time to understand different social networks and how to make the most of them for building brand awareness and interaction. Though many businesses hire somebody who specialises in social media marketing to look after this part of the business (especially for larger companies), you can get involved on social media yourself fairly quickly and affordably right from the start.

• Analytics. Analytics is becoming more and more important in the business world. Analytics can help you understand your target audience, how people engage with your campaigns and how successful your campaigns are.

• Blogging. Adding a blog to your website is a great way to raise interest in your product or service and connect with potential customers. Blogs can be informative, educational or sales-driven. Any blog articles that you write must be optimised for Google.

• Ads. A good digital strategy must include budgeting for ads. You can advertise on Google or social media to divert more traffic to your website or online shop. Digital marketing has become the most popular advertising medium in Europe and represents 37.2% of all revenue. Your business will want a piece of that!

• Search engine optimisation. SEO is a vital part of any digital marketing strategy and can contribute to business growth. Understanding how to optimise your content—website, blogs, and ads—or paying a professional to do it for you, will help you reach more customers through organic search. Whether you outsource or take care of SEO in-house, learning the basics of SEO, including keyword research, content generation, and linking, will help your marketing campaigns greatly. After all, what good is it to create great content if no one sees it?

Why Invest in Digital Marketing?

For some more traditional businesses, the digital world may be intimidating. It’s normal to feel overwhelmed or not know where to start. However, simple first steps like entering the digital space with an optimised website and gradually increasing your online presence can eventually make e-commerce an important part of your business model.

Using the right digital tools to reach your business objectives has several advantages:

• Creative solutions help businesses reach new customers.
• You can increase brand awareness.
• Many businesses with successful digital marketing strategies increase sales.
• You can build relationships with your followers and gain valuable customer feedback.

Because social media is used by people from all around the world, businesses that market themselves online have unlimited potential customers. Unlike brick-and-mortar businesses that are limited to customers in their area, marketing online opens up your business to the world.

4. Use CRM Software

CRM (customer relationship management) software can be used in various ways to keep your business organised. Different CRM platforms are geared towards different priorities or objectives; these could be effective digital marketing strategies, providing a better customer experience or streamlined customer management.

Many businesses find that using CRM software can help them organise different parts of the business from a central location, allowing them to serve their customers better. This can then help you build a larger base of loyal customers.

5. Create an App

Developing an app could be the step that sets you apart from your competitors. It doesn’t matter if you’re a traditional, brick-and-mortar business or a high-tech startup; creating an app improves your customers’ experience and promotes customer loyalty.

An app essentially gives customers a quick and easy way to engage with your business. If you provide services, an app can be used to schedule services, communicate with workers or report a problem. If you sell products, your customers can place orders quickly and easily via the app. An app also gives you a direct way to communicate with your customers. You can use this to alert them to new products, offers, or competitions you’re running.

An app also has the advantage of increasing brand awareness. When a customer downloads your app, they see your logo many times a day. This is akin to an additional (effortless) marketing stream.

Maximise Your Potential by Digitising Your Business

Taking the first steps towards digitising your business is an exciting process that can take your brand to the next level. Though many of these steps are possible for everyone, some businesses may benefit from asking for help from professionals for some aspects of their digital journey.

Because digitisation can lead to a growth in sales from all around the world, being able to process payments from all of these potential customers is vital. A reliable payment processor can support your business as it goes from strength to strength in 2024.