Businesses that weren’t born ‘digital-first’ may feel like they’re always behind the times, constantly playing catch-up with the rest of the market.
But just because the landscape you launched in to is very different to the landscape we see today, doesn’t mean you can’t embrace digital and make it part of your DNA. A digitalisation roadmap, in particular, can bring your e-commerce offer up to speed, fast— and with control.
What is a digitalisation roadmap?
A plan for how your business is going to adopt digital solutions or digital transformation.
It’s a high-level document that covers your digitalisation goals and the timeline by which you want to meet each of these objectives.
If your organisation is planning on undergoing digitalisation, then a digitalisation roadmap should be a key piece of your strategy. It can take vague digitalisation goals (“We need a better e-commerce experience”) and makes them concrete (“Let’s launch a v2 of our website”).
What are the stages of digitalisation?
1. Define a strategy
The first step in a digitalisation roadmap is to define your strategy, a.k.a. your approach. You can think of this as the angle you want your roadmap to attack from.
Where does your e-commerce journey let customers down currently? In what areas are your key competitors seriously out-performing you? Which technologies, integrations and APIs could add value to the customer experience?
Consider your market and your customers’ needs, then decide on an overall strategy via which digitalisation can help you claim competitive advantage.
2. Discover ideas and test them
Next, you need to pin down specific ideas for accomplishing your digitalisation strategy. If strengthening the connection between your customers and your brand is a key objective for your on-going e-commerce digitalisation, there are several ways this could be achieved:
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You might invest in an AI chat feature to run 24/7
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You might create self-service documentation for customers or users to troubleshoot on their own
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You could even double down on personalisation — using behaviour analytics to customise the content your customers see.
The goal in this second step is not to set all of these (and more) as goals in your roadmap. Instead, you should be looking to establish a few that make sense for your website, brand and customers. That not only includes goals that meet your customers’ needs but also goals that you can feasibly reach.
3. Scale up what works
The third step is to scale up what works. Once you start implementing digitalisation solutions, evaluate them periodically to see what’s working.
If something is bringing value, then do more of it, and if something isn’t, figure out why or cut it altogether.
Further resources on your digitalisation journey
There are some fantastic resources out there for creating a digital transformation roadmap McKinsey is a first go to for this. There are some great digital roadmap examples and templates to be found from all sorts of organisations, tools like Roadmunk has some great resources for this as well as digital strategy roadmap templates, digital strategy roadmap pdf, digital transformation plan examples.
Craft and execute your digitalisation roadmap with expertise
A carefully and strategically developed roadmap can improve your e-commerce experience in myriad ways. We’re talking better customer support, unique on-site experiences, staying at the leading edge of emerging technologies and — ultimately — closing more sales.
If your business is just beginning its journey to digitalisation, Thunk is here to help. Our team of experts can help you craft your digitalisation roadmap. Then we’ll help you build the tools and solutions you need to make your goals a reality.