Top 5 tools every D2C brand needs to ensure growth
It’s no secret that running a manufacturing business is a tough job. You spend hours upon hours working with customers and suppliers, you deal with the unexpected, and you don’t know if any of your staff will be around at the end of the month. Luckily, each day offers new opportunities for improvement. That’s why it is important that the key stakeholders have a complete overview of the business.
A typical sales flow of a D2C brand may look as shown in the diagram below. Teams maintain records in notepads, calendars, memo books, and other outdated systems for tracking sales or customer-related data.
When people are buying your product or service, you want them to feel good and have a positive experience. A customer who feels good and has a positive experience is a customer that will come back again and again and refer other people to your brand. It’s important for d2c brands to have a customer experience which is designed with the needs of the digitally native customer in mind. In the clutter of your own organizational processes, this is often missed.
In this article, we will cover the following points:
Benefits of digital transformation for D2C brands
Enhanced data collection
Previously, manufacturers would have relied on retailers and distributors to create the ‘shop window’ for their products. A D2C approach means this will lie with them. In terms of the product data, there will be a much higher level of control. They can choose the specific details they want their products to be associated with.
This also means manufacturers can provide a deeper, more granular layer of detail. This ultimately means customers have more confidence in their buying decisions. In addition to the product data, manufacturers will also have ownership over any data they collect from customers. Having this data will contribute a large amount towards improving the overall customer experience. You can tailor experiences accordingly by having a deeper insight into trends, behaviours, and product preferences.
Increased transparency
Shrinking budgets, many operational distractions, and debt all make it difficult to spend time looking at the evidence of your company. But an integrated system provides you with a key tool to see what’s important and focus on what matters. This paints a clearer picture of where you need to invest time and resources, or where you should cut back.
Better customer relationships
Having more data and insight is a key element of digital transformation. Equipped with this knowledge, manufacturers can show customers more personalized product information, as well as make adjustments that increase sales. With a digital-first approach, companies can also increase the efficiency at which they track campaigns.
Well-managed email campaigns
Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies. Massive mailouts may still surprise you with performance – you just need to make sure email campaigns are hyper-personalized and reach the recipients’ inboxes at the right time.
A digital system helps you automate the process, sets up automated drip campaigns and sends out the personalized emails of each prospect at the perfect time based on the information and tags that have been collected. It offers email tracking functionality so that you could measure the performance of email campaigns.
Increased transparency
One of the biggest benefits of implementing a digital tool into your business operations is the dramatic improvement in efficiency. The way your employees communicate from department to department, the continuous flow of data across the organization, the seamless transition from phase to phase over the lifetime of the customer – all of these benefits add up to a more efficient business process that can save time, money, and resources.
Top 5 tools for D2C brands to ensure growth
Customer relationship management tool
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers.
Email marketing & automation tool
Email automation is a process where you send targeted email campaigns to your customers through a pre-built and self-operating system.
Abandoned cart recovery tool
Abandoned cart recovery is a problem that has been plaguing eCommerce retailers from the outset. A combination of strategies that work best for your business will allow you to attain the two-fold goal of preventing mass cart abandonment and converting shoppers who abandon carts into loyal customers.
Personalized offers tool
Take your coupon marketing to the next level! Offer personalized coupons to all of your site’s traffic and help them redeem the offer with less friction!
Omni-channel customer service tool
Omnichannel customer service is assistance and advice for customers across a seamless and integrated network of devices and touchpoints. Businesses with robust omnichannel customer service can maintain consistently great experiences for their customers regardless of the communication channel.
Conclusion
In today’s dynamic and constantly shifting business landscape, there are several possible reasons why a company may need to perform a complete overhaul of its products, services, or business model. Business transformation, also known as digital transformation (DX), comprises a wide variety of changes put in place to help a company or organization run more efficiently.
Must Read : What are a purchase requisition system and the importance of a purchase requisition system?
5 best budget-friendly CRMs for small businesses
Are you still managing Excel to track customer records? Use one of these 5 best budget-friendly CRMs for your small business to expand your business.
How much does it cost to make a real-time messaging app like WhatsApp?
Mobile messaging apps have become one of the most popular communication channels, especially among young people. The most common of them is WhatsApp. Therefore, it is not surprising that banks all over the world strive to work with popular messengers to reach their audience. Furthermore, WhatsApp is the most popular app around the world.
According to recent studies, WhatsApp has now crossed the mark of 2 billion in the terms of monthly active users (MAU) and is one of the most successful instant messaging apps ever.
But, what is the cost of development for such a successful messaging app like WhatsApp? The cost of developing an instant messenger app depends on many different factors. Let’s have a look at the various factors that affect the cost of a real-time messaging app like WhatsApp but first, let’s check the basic features required for a real-time messenger app.
Basic features required for a real-time messenger app
- Registration, using the mobile phone number
- Audio & video calling
- Real-time messaging
- Multimedia sharing
- Notifications
First, we shall take a closer look at these basic functionalities which you will need to create a WhatsApp like real-time messenger app clone.
Registration
For registration on WhatsApp or similar messenger apps, they usually use a phone number to authenticate the user. To implement the registration via the phone number, the backend server will need to send SMS messages to the numbers of the users who are registered.
In the Android version of the app, WhatsApp reads and submits the verification code automatically. Once the registration is done and the user has accepted the explicit permission to access contacts, the app syncs all the phone book contacts automatically to display the ones available on WhatsApp messaging platform.
Audio & Video Calling
WhatsApp’s free calling features are added to attract more users to it. It uses internet traffic to call rather than your data plan. Audio and video calls, perhaps are the most complicated task when creating a real-time messaging app like WhatsApp. As for voice quality, device responsiveness depends on many reasons.
There are a few approaches to availing this feature, few of those are:
- Self-hosting a TURN server (coturn)
- Relying on a managed TURN server (Twilio)
- Implementing a SaaS product (Agora)
All the approaches have their advantages and disadvantages, but a SaaS solution like Agora will be the easiest and less-expensive approach.
Real-time Messaging – One-on-one, group chat and broadcast messages
Since you are willing to build a real-time messaging app like WhatsApp, messaging is the critical feature of all. For that purpose, we integrate WebSocket that keeps the clients active and transfers messages in real-time.
Also, WhatsApp chat enables Emojis, Stickers and GIF files. Based on your use-cases, we can add more custom objects – ex. Appointment cards, product cards and more.
Multimedia sharing
Apart from sharing messages and calling on WhatsApp, we can also share images, videos, and audio notes. To add a file to the chat of your application, it needs to implement both client & server-side logic, which will host the files and securely share them with the other user.
Notifications
Notifications are used to notify both the users of new messages and the app to perform activities in the background. The user can choose to enable the option to show the notifications received on the notification tray when the phone is locked. This feature can be incorporated through Firebase Cloud Messaging and Apple Push Notifications.
Steps to develop an app like WhatsApp
Now that we know what all the features a basic messenger app requires, let’s talk about the development process. We will primarily talk about 3 key phases:
- App Design & prototyping
- Server-side development
- App Development
App Design & Prototyping
Design/visual understanding creation is of utmost importance, as they define the visual language of the brand. We believe that stunning and intelligent design is what separates a successful product from an average one.
Server-side Development
A messaging app like WhatsApp needs to be dynamic and perform multiple business logic, for which we need a backend server. The backend server manages all the business logic on the server-side and performs complex logic.
First, WhatsApp used the XMPP-server Ejabberd but then switched to the in-house solution. Erlang was used as the main language. Service stores the data using the SQLite database.
Based on your requirement and use cases, we can recommend a tech stack which is secure, flexible and scalable.
App Development
Once, we have the design, prototyping and backend APIs, it’s time to write the client-side logic and integrate the backend APIs into the application. App development and maintenance processes can differ based on the tech stack you select. There are primarily two ways – native App development and hybrid app development.
Now, let’s look into the development cost.
How much does it cost to develop a messaging app like WhatsApp?
To develop a real-time messaging app like WhatsApp, the cost would be in the range of $20,000 – $50,000. The breakdown is as follows:
- App Design & prototyping – from $3000
- Server-side development – from $7000
- App Development (iOS & Android) – from $10000
The cost is completely dependent on the tech stack to be used, the resources to be deployed and the time duration.
If you need a simpler version, we can help you with that too. The basic MVP version of a real-time messaging app starts as low as $2500.
How much does it cost to make a photo-sharing app like Instagram?
In today’s digital era, social networking applications have become an integral part of our lives. Apps like Amazon, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram have become pre-requisite and have witnessed tremendous success in their respective sections.
It is quite surprising to note that Instagram received a tremendous response from worldwide audiences since its launch in October 2010. Instagram has seen a meteoric rise to over 1 billion active users, making it one of the top 4 social networks worldwide.
Such a stunning success and ever-growing demand for secured, personalized & engaging social media products have made many entrepreneurs think of how to make an Instagram app of their own. If you are one of them, let’s look into the factors that affect the cost of an app like Instagram.
Digital products evolve over time, the same goes for Instagram. Instagram today has tons of advanced features that the Instagram team has developed and improved over time. So, in this article, we will try to determine the cost to build an app like Instagram based on the various basic features of the application.
Basic features of a photo-sharing app like Instagram
Authorization
This is a common option for almost every B2C application. Instagram also gives at least two ways of authorization:
- Create a new account using a phone number or email
- Sign in with your existing social media account (Facebook)
In addition to these, there is always an option for the users to reset their lost password through phone, mail, or social account.
Profile editing
The feasibility of editing a profile should be the next must-have feature of your photo-sharing app. Users must have the option of adding, customizing and changing their profile information including but not limited to username, profile picture, bio, etc.
Real-time Messaging – One-on-one and group chat messages
It is important that a photo-sharing app like Instagram must facilitate the users with a real-time messaging option along with notifications. Push notifications are critical for a social networking app like Instagram as they notify about all incoming messages.
To prevent the server from getting overloaded with notifications generated because of to and fro messages, required server-side strategies must be implemented to reduce the load.
The notification facility is implemented by using Firebase cloud messaging(FCM) and Apple Push Notification service (APNs) services.
Uploading photos & videos
For a photo-sharing app like Instagram, it is the most important part. Enable users to easily share their photos and videos to the feed and other places. Users can either take photos from within the app or upload the existing ones.
When it comes to uploading photos & videos, managing the backend with relevant strategies to optimize, store and serve images to the client-side is critical.
Photo editing capabilities
Photo editing capability is another essential feature of a photo-sharing app. For an app like Instagram or any other photo-sharing app, it is a must to provide users with the option to edit photos.
Geolocation
Using this feature, users will be able to share and tag a location on their post. This further allows the users to show where the photo or video was taken, further allowing them to promote a location.
The technology stack used for Instagram
iOS application
- Language — Swift
- Networking — Alamofire
Android application
- Language — Kotlin
- Networking — OkHttp 3, Retrofit 2
Back-end development
- Language — Node.js (JavaScript)
- Framework — Express
- Database — MySQL
- Messaging — Socket.io
- API documentation — Swagger
Third-party services
- Push notifications — FCM
- Geolocation — Google Maps
- Storage — Amazon S3
- Emails — Elastic Email
Steps to develop an app like Instagram
Now that we know what all the features a basic photo-sharing app requires & the technology stack used, let’s look into the development process.
- App Design & prototyping
- Server-side development
- App Development
How much does it cost to make an app like Instagram?
To develop a photo-sharing app like Instagram, the cost would be in the range of $20,000 – $50,000. The breakdown is as follows:
- App Design & prototyping – from $3000
- Server-side development – from $7000
- App Development (iOS & Android) – from $10000
The cost is completely dependent on the tech stack to be used, the resources to be deployed and the time duration.
If you need a simpler version, we can help you with that too. The basic MVP version of a photo-sharing app starts as low as $2500.
