At the heart of digital business design is a process that attracts people, satisfies them, and gets them to do something that has value for our business. We call this the ABCs of digital business design: acquisition, behavior, and conversion.
The first step is acquisition, or attracting visitors online. The good news for digital entrepreneurs is there are over four billion people connected to the Internet worldwide. That’s a lot of potential customers and partners. The bad news is there’s lots of competition: somewhere between one and two billion web sites, around 5 million apps on the two major app stores, and the giant tech platforms that capture so much attention. A digital business needs to make careful choices about the sources of customer acquisition, such as search results, advertising, and social media, and how to focus on the right targets.
The second step is behavior, or how a visitor will be satisfied at a digital business. Visitors arrive with some intent or goal for their visit, and their actions at a digital presence will hopefully satisfy that goal. A digital business design describes the most important thing a visitor must be able to do on a digital prototype.
The final step is conversion. A conversion is a specific action that defines a successful visit to a digital business. For a store, a successful conversion might be a final click to confirm purchase. For an advertising-based business, an ad click might be the conversion. A conversion is any action that can be tracked digitally, and creates some value for our digital business.
Every step of the ABC process is easily tracked by web analytics. Analytics can tell the digital entrepreneur exactly where potential customers are coming from, what they do on a site or app, and most importantly which customers sources and behaviors lead to successful conversions. By speeding up the learning process, digital entrepreneurs can not only try out their ideas, but actually make them better.