UNDERSTANDING RETURN ON INVESTMENT FROM DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Digital transformation or ‘DX’ is a major focus for growth focused business leaders. Statista recently reported that global spend on digital transformation initiatives will reach $2.5 trillion US dollars in 2024, and is forecasted to increase to $3.9 trillion by 2027. With so much investment in technology, services, solutions and strategies, the question must be asked: how can you measure digital transformation ROI? What are the key performance indicators (kpis) of digital transformation?
To maximize return on investment from your digital initiatives, you must look at more than top-line metrics. Digital transformation is a cultural project as much as a technological one. Through investment and alignment across your people, platforms and processes, you will lay the foundations for revenue growth and find specific success factors such as operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
In this article, discover the steps you can take to turn digital transformation costs into sustainable growth.
Digital Transformation ROI
You can only define success in the context of your business objectives. Digital transformation efforts must go towards specific growth goals in order to deliver value. Your starting points for success, therefore, are your objectives as informed by data and analytics.
If your core digital transformation goal is revenue growth, data can highlight areas for improvement. Your metrics might show poor conversion rates and highlight that basket abandonment is limiting your return. Or, if better customer experience is the goal, you might have metrics showing that your personalized journey management efforts aren’t making an impact. Through the lens of past performance, you can make an informed decision on the digital transformation journey that suits your business best. High-impact projects provide performance improvements including:
Streamline your digital technologies and reduce platform overlap. Lower costs by sunsetting unused or inefficient platforms, and putting time back into your team with better processes and workflow. New technologies may cover functionality previously offered by multiple platforms, giving you an easy route to license consolidation while building a digital ecosystem for future growth.
Build better customer experiences with a Personalized Journey Management mini-ecosystem that delivers personalized campaign content at pace. By showing your customers what they want to see, when they want to see it, you will build loyalty and increase lifetime value in key markets.
Digital investments can improve employee productivity for your company. Work Management tools streamline resource management and task allocation while giving greater visibility over ongoing projects – making it easier to identify where time can be saved. Moreover, by automating repeat and routine tasks, you empower your team to spend their efforts on tasks that maximize their skills and bring the highest ROI.
In an increasingly digital landscape, accurate reporting and data analytics are essential for growth. With strong performance dashboards bespoke to your business, you can clearly see the metrics that really matter. And, crucially, you can leverage AI to turn your data into actionable insights which inform your next-best-actions – or even your digital transformation strategy at large.
Altogether, whether your digital transformation projects focus on your customers or your internal use of time and technologies, the headline objective is business growth. By making investments wisely, and keeping a sharp eye on value and return, revenue growth will soon follow.
How Bluprintx drives your digital transformation ROI
Bluprintx delivers high-impact digital transformations that improve ROI and hit your unique business objectives. With a Bluprintx partnership, you are harnessing a proven methodology built around the digital technologies you choose, and the outcomes you need to achieve.
Whether you have started your digital transformation journey or you’re still deciding on your strategy, we will build you a digital transformation plan that prioritizes the metrics that matter most.
It’s more than a plan for growth. It’s a comprehensive approach which secures executive buy-in, engages your people, and embeds an appetite for change in your organization. You benefit from our vision and expertise as long as you’d like it, but we’re sure to build independence and resilience into your firm – so when you want to go it alone, you’re set up for sustainable growth.
Your people, your platforms, your processes. All set up to deliver digital transformation ROI by Bluprintx.
Overcoming business inertia
Avoid common challenges which limit digital transformation ROI. Keep these factors in mind when making your investments to set your firm up for success:
“The cost of doing nothing isn’t a one off. It’s a missed opportunity that compounds over time.” Overcoming inertia is essential to the success of your digital transformation efforts. Whether it’s customer experiences you’re improving or driving ROI by cutting technology costs, accelerating your decision-making process is a huge factor. By choosing quickly, gathering data and sometimes by failing fast, you build a better picture of what works for your organization. You harvest essential insights that inform your digital transformation strategy.
The alternative is market mediocrity. While you spend 12 months picking the perfect personalization platform, your competitors are converting your customers using technology they rolled out quicker. The cost of doing nothing can barely be counted – start small, but start today and start fast.
Overcoming the cost of doing nothing means securing executive buy-in. Resistance to change is a common factor across many organizations, and it’s a real barrier to growth. Without executive buy-in your projects may lack pace, or not receive the investment they need to make the most impact. When planning your next digital transformation initiative, make time to build a strong business case and generate momentum from all your key stakeholders. Digital transformation success comes from a unified front – your business, pulling together to meet your growth goals.
Maximize digital transformation ROI by building on strong foundations. Think about how your transformation will impact on people, platforms and processes – how can you boost success and mitigate any downsides?
Digital Transformation ROI
Your digital transformation initiative can only make an impact if it is adopted and appreciated in your company. If you are introducing a new technology, or establishing a new process, investing in training and support is essential during rollout and beyond. Involve your employees early in the project if you can; you will build goodwill by showing that their opinions have been taken into account, and demonstrating where your transformation is going to bring benefits to their role. Factor onboarding into technology rollout, and make sure you have lines of communication in place for employees to give feedback and receive bespoke support. By lowering the barriers to adoption, you’ll see more value and harness the benefits of an engaged and motivated team.
Make no mistake, integration is a revenue driving digital transformation. Ensuring integration between your technologies means that data and insights flow freely across your business to provide actionable insights cross-functionally. You might have a world class Content Supply Chain driving personalized content across channels, but if you’re not feeding performance insights back into your data analytics dashboards; how will you know where to improve?
In many cases you can automate the movement of such insights. A comprehensive assessment of your platforms and processes will show where information hand-off (such as MQL to SQL conversion) can be triggered automatically to cut down on human bottlenecks. Automation is a massively valuable digital transformation initiative – think carefully about where manual input can become AI impact.
On the topic of data, it’s time to move from intuition to insight. Making data analytics visible and actionable in your organization boosts revenue growth by informing strategy based on real customer behavior, not implied or predicted activities. It might require a mindset shift, but it’s important to see the value of data at every level of your company. Data supports operational teams to maximize efficiency, managers to shift strategy for optimized outcomes, and senior leaders to access a holistic vision of business performance. Embed data at every stage of digital transformation rather than letting it be an afterthought, and you’ll profit from sharper strategy and faster decision making.
Digital transformation can seem complex in highly regulated industries – but the opportunity is still too great to pass up. Where you have compliance or governance considerations, tackle them head-on as early as possible. Plan out your digital transformation and work with your stakeholders – legal or public affairs teams – to map out an approved path.