8 Reasons To Take Your Business Online
In a previous article, we expanded on some of the measures you can take to digitize your business.
We believe that businesses will inevitably make the switch to having some form of an online presence. And it’s not only us, as 78% of SME’s believed that it’s important in 2016.
Even though the advantage of going online is fairly evident with the ongoing pandemic, we still want to bring you a few reasons why transforming your offline business into an online one increases your robustness against future calamities, as this is a reality entrepreneurs need to consider.
1. Very low costs
By going online you drastically reduce or even cut entirely your operating costs. A mobile app only needs to be maintained and servers to be paid, but that’s about it when it comes to online operating costs.
So it’s extremely cost-effective from this point of view. Most clerks and other personnel get replaced by automated processes that only need supervision from time to time, and even you can do it without needing to hire somebody instead.
2. Work from anywhere
If your business allows you to, by going online you can take your work wherever you want, be it at home or at the library, coffee shop, the park, etc.
This ability is starting to become one of the main focuses of the business market nowadays, as (lucky) people were forced to work from home.
We wrote an article on a remote work report for 2020, which you can check in order to find out interesting tidbits of information about where remote work is heading.
As for what are the top 10 best tools to use while working at home, we dedicated a whole article to this subject, which you can check here.
3. Target the global market
You can start to think about reaching customers all around the world. No longer are you limited to the physical interactions you’re so used to with your brick and mortar shop.
Sure, your approach might need some refreshing to make it speak to a global market, but it’s a worthwhile investment.
For example, on a global scale, people are looking more and more into online platforms for their honeymoon financing efforts.
Plus, there are cool strategies and diverse monetization tactics that can supplement your usual income, which can come in your aid.
These especially benefit from reaching a global market, with a wide array of possible customers for your niche.
Because of the current ongoing pandemic, online ads are at an all-time low cost, so make sure to take advantage of them while they’re at a reduced price.
4. Increased responsiveness
Company responsiveness gets an overhaul when you go digital because you start to make use of automated responses.
For example, the customer gets much more easily through the funnel from proposal delivery, to purchase option and finally to the order confirmation.
All of this without having the need for an intermediary, real person to intervene.
For example, with the proper information of the customer and the order, you just need to drop your package at an Amazon location and they will do the rest.
You can even have a chat-bot with pre-determined responses for the customer because we all know that people are feeling more comfortable chatting rather than speaking on the phone.
5. Global access, 24/7
Your business has a non-stop online neon lights sign for customers to find.
This means that your customers can find your business at any time of the day, and even order your products at the wildest times.
And since your ordering process is automated, you don’t have to worry about not being there to take your customers’ orders.
Everything is done through the mobile app, from the first interaction of the user to you sending the order.
6. No paper waste
A huge factor that it’s as important as ever in today’s society.
As paper is an important material used daily for many purposes worldwide, the global production of paper and cardboard stood at approximately 419.7 million metric tons in 2017, with a forecast of 495 million metric tons in 2030.
The ecological footprint of damaged and cleared forests is a warning signal for us all, that nature always gravitates towards homeostasis.
This means that deforestation, in turn, causes massive environmental damage, such as climate change.
It’s also our responsibility as humans to take care of the world we inhabit, and doubly so as entrepreneurs that can shift their business towards digital solutions, in order to remove as much of a strain as we can from our ecological environment.
7. Better customer service
Coupled with 24/7 availability, customer service in the form of chatbots or FAQs can resolve around 90% of customer issues (check out Chapter 15 of our book, From A to App Success – it’s free to download).
Using a chatbot as a filter with pre-defined questions and answers chimes in with your overall automation effort, meaning that you could realistically have a single customer support agent for thousands of customers.
8. Increased business robustness
A concept of Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile, robust businesses manage to handle themselves and even gain from global imbalances.
This is why we believe that an important factor in building your business is to think about how would you manage your day-to-day activity in a wide range of scenarios.
Unfortunately, the current pandemic has been a wake-up call for businesses all over the world to include robust principles and frameworks into their activity.
As bad as this may be, it plays out as a sort of business Darwinism which let’s only the robust prevail.
Ultimately, it’s important that this aspect has been brought up in the front light of the business world, as businesses will certainly rise up better and more prepared to tackle the hard and unexpected realities of entrepreneurship.
Conclusion
Going online means rethinking major parts of your business.
But it’s one of the most important actions you can undertake in order to establish yourself on the market and to prove yourself to be a worthy competitor in the business world.
We hope that the reasons we provided in this article might kickstart the process of digitizing your business and that we might actually partner together for your success.
See you in the next one!
