With continuous improvement you get so much more out of your website, online-shop or app. More leads, more sales, more revenue. Or more donations. More of whatever is essential to you.
In this article, I’ll introduce you into my proven 5-step-process, how to do and reach this. This knowhow is based upon my 20+ years of experience.
What is Continuous Improvement of websites, Apps and Online-Shops?
First of all, what are we talking about?
Continuous Website Improvement is the process of improving your website, app or online-shop in small steps.
One after another. Ongoingly. Instead of doing a classic relaunch every now and then years. This offers more sustainable success, control and steady innovation. It enables you to take advantage of ongoing new data insights after each little step. With these, you are able to derive informed decisions for each next further step.
The Problem of not having a well-oiled process
Are you tired of feeling like your website/app is a never-ending puzzle? Too many pieces to keep track of, too many cooks in the kitchen, too many conflicting goals, too many stakeholders not being aligned?
You start with the best intentions: “Let’s just tweak this page”, “That new feature will boost sales”, or “If we add this type of content, people will love us!”.
But before your next blink of an eye, your website has become a chaotic mess. Updates get lost in process, team members have too different ideas about what to prioritize, and that perfect user experience? Forget about it.
9 (!) advantages of Continuous Online Improvement
This post is a recipe for both: Firstly, breaking free from the digital madness. Secondly, it can replace those unhealthy classical website relaunchs every 4-7 years, with a better well-planned approach. It helps you to keep advantage over your competitors and to stay ahead. Continuously optimising your website, app or shop brings crucial advantages in the following points:
- Control your finances better.
- Clarify your goals – Define what success means for your website and team.
- Enhance your user experience – Create a seamless, delightful journey for your visitors
- Tailor a more and more effective customer journey.
- Focus always 100% on what’s most important right now.
- Become and stay top of innovation.
- Unify your team – Get everyone on the same page (pun intended!).
- Streamline your processes – Efficiently plan and execute updates.
- Last, but definitely not least: By working on your website, online-shop or app, you reflect on, work on and optimize all your organization.
I’ve written even more on those advantages in my other article towards this topic: Why is a “continuous relaunch” better than a classic website relaunch?
How can I get this going? -> With my proven 5 Steps
This blog post outlines my proven and comprehensive process, how to transform your website, app or online-shop into a well-oiled machine that drives real results.
These steps have proven to be very successful out of my more than 20 years experience. Thus, they will provide a solid foundation for the continuous improvement of your website, shop or app also.
Now, let’s dive into it. I recommend to follow the following 5 steps:
Now, let’s dive in to discover how to implement continuous improvement into your organization effectively.
1. Strategize – Build your Data-fueled Strategy
The first important step of establishing a continuous improvement process for your website, app or online-shop is to lay the fundamentals: It begins by understanding your users’ primary and problems. When you have a clear picture of these, define your ideal customers profile. Align your customers objectives with your own business goals. Map all needed customers touchpoints to reach these goals into a customer journey mapping. While doing all this, gather all new ideas that can improve your righ now communication and processes.
2. Experiment – Identify your innovations that really make the difference
After having defined your strategical basic pillars, now it’s time to head over to finding out, which new ideas, communication elements or functionalities can bring you further to reaching your goals better. Of course, this contains not only building up new ideas themselves, but also laying the foundation to properly measure your success, while you’re going.
Thus, I suggest to start it all with a Technical Basis Tracking Tool Check and add still missing measurements of those important touchpoints you don’t know enough about today. When having a solid measurement basis, I suggest to do an initial data analysis so you understand where the main potencials and problems are. Then, when you have an overview of your potencials, problems and having collected ideas worthy testing, it’s time to start into experimentation: Test which new ideas have the biggest influence on helping your users reaching their and remedying their biggest pains.
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3. Build – Implement your proven and best innovations
So now you have identified your most innovative ideas. Surely, the next step is to now weave them into the core of your website, app or online-shop.
Thus, now it’s time to PLAN your next projects with heart, mind and – again – support this WITH DATA ASSISTANCE. Data can support also your project planning! Estimate the ideas impact on your main goals as well as the effort needed for development itself. But also don’t forget the effort needed for data privacy or internal political discussions and decisions. Choose those ideas that need first of all the smallest effort. And THEN also have the relatively highest impact. This way, you prioritize and achieve more accurate and more efficient plannings!
After planning, you finally DEVELOP those innovation winners into your websites, apps or online-shops core. Also in this step, it is crucial to feel pulse (aka DATA) of all those new features as early as possible. I can help with that.
Don’t forget to MONITOR your success. Now (not earlier) you need an overview of your key performances indicators. Thus, it’s a good idea to now add DASHBOARDS. These contain all your most important goals and your users touchpoints. With this, you can monitor, how your latest added innovations affect your overall directions. Hopefully they help to increase :).
4. Cultivate – datadriven habits & internal knowhow
Let’s do a short interim summary: So in the steps until now, you’ve already succesfully identified your strategy, customers, goals and very promising ideas, you’ve tested the best ideas to be successful and have implemented them into your website, app or online-shop. Great! Aren’t we finished now? No, there’s one more important thing to do.
With your successful new continuous improvement toolkit, scale further into your organization. It’s important to share the new knowledge you won with your colleagues. My recommendation is to establish regular meetings – I often call them “facts and data talks” – so you all together can have a look into the latest achievings and challenges. Researching and bringing relevant FACTS onto the table and into discussion: For discussing latest achievements and challenges. For reaching your goals, helping your customers, improving your experiences, identifying and testing relevant innovations. On a regular basis.
Besides that, share your knowhow within individual coachings to inaugurate more colleagues into the successful methods you’re applying. You can find an overview of all my coachings here.
And finally: Improve your newly added continuous improvement process itself. Of course, all points and aspects being described here, are only best practices. But the practice with my client shows: This one perfect way does not exist. It’s always even better to find individual ways and recipes for your organization. By really adapting and individualizing the methods and tricks being mentioned in this article into your organization – you all start to really “breathe” these principles. This will bring the most useful and succeeding effects to life.
How to Keep up good habits – even Under everyday pressure
One typical challenge for a truly data inspired organisation – at least from time to time – is: How can we keep up the datadriven culture and habits even under pressure? When there are huge amounts of other projects, tasks and additional requirements coming to you?
The answer is, data and facts based habits help you to keep calm in times of trouble. They can guide you through tough times.
For such higher resilience, your organisation needs to develop new habits. Then you can keep up data inspired meeting formats, the regular look into main KPI and regular reflexion. This needs to be trained.
My suggestion is this one: In times of trouble, I accompany you. We walk side by side. Let me support you to strengthen your organizations resilience.
Also, sometimes, additional external resources can make a decisive difference. In not few cases, I was the one in your company to make this decisive analysis and deliver new insights that helped – in times of trouble – with new helpful insights.
In case that sounds interesting, book your free sparring call. And we’ll have a together look on your situation and your individual challenges.
5. Repeat
A continuous improvement process is crucial for success in data-driven marketing. By regularly repeating the entire above mentioned continuous improvement cycle – from the initial strategy definition over analysis and experimentation to implementation and data-driven culture rollout– strategies and measures remain up-to-date and effective.
Continue to experiment with new ideas. Always build the best of those innovation potentials. From time to time -> strategize again – zoom out back again to update your strategical pillars to new market environments and brand developments. Last but not least –> cultivate – increase the knowhow inside your company further and further. And repeat it again and again.
Summary
The continuous improvement approach for your website, app or online-shop fosters a culture of constant innovation, development and adaptation, keeping companies flexible and head of competition. Even more than that, it engages transformation of all your organzation into a better version of yourself. In little – the longer you keep doing it – the more impressive increasing steps. All the time. This way long-term success and sustainable growth are ensured.
Continuous improvement is like a circle, that gets bigger, more innovative and more influential with every loop.
Do you want to break free from chaos and achieve website- (app-, online-shop-) greatness? I can help you with my more than 20 years of experience in all this. I’m here for sparring and support. Let’s connect. Book an appointment now.
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