Full-Spectrum Customer Engagement Platform Gets You Closer Quicker

It’s no big secret that if you want to properly connect with your customers then you need to offer multiple routes of interaction and participation through multiple means. While in comparable solutions much / most of this is enabled via disparate third party elements / plugins, for the Affino Unified Digital Business Platform, everything you need for comprehensive engagement is baked into the core single platform.

Affino as a solution has always been social-minded, and with ongoing innovations in Sales and Marketing Automation and a greatly increased scope within the Core CRM - it is unlikely that you could experience this amount of engagement and control so easily, efficiently and effectively by any other means.

The critical component for much of this is Affino’s Automated Customer Ladder, which - with its myriad Conversion Events and Conversion Events Funnels allows you to set up and enact Abraham Maslow -style hierarchies of needs with built-in automated incentives, recognition and rewards.

The key component elements are as follows:

Interactive Elements

This is the customers’ first line of inquiry - filling in forms, posting and replying to comments, or engaging in deeper conversations on Forums and within Topic-specific Collaborations:

• Collaboration - Highly structured threaded conversations for sharing common materials and insight within defined topic areas
• Comments & Ratings - The ability to most comments / ratings / likes on most types of content, receive updates and reply to responses or resulting queries
• Forms - Both shorted fixed format forms, and longer more evolved dynamic forms with some degree of conditional routing
• Forums - Threaded conversations - typically used as primary support resource and for communicating on key projects
• Messaging - Typically intra-site messaging via Public Profiles / Registered User Accounts, also part of Social Networking

Follow-Ups

These are more formalised and structured ways to follow-up on published content, usually requiring email sign-up or full registration and demographic details to activated certain automations.

• Content Subscriptions - Sign up to latest releases from any content Section - that way you get Topic-relevant article updates mailed directly to your inbox
• Messaging & Newsletters - These are more formal communications, some can be set up in an automated fashion - e.g. send out 10 most recent news stories per topic / category on a daily / weekly basis
• Outbound Feeds - All article content can be enabled for outbound Atom and RSS feeds - a sort of different kind of subscription service
• Recommendations - These are based on User registered topic preferences - which then allow content pages and mailings to be fully tailored and personalised to those preferences
• Related Content- This usually involves some degree of Taxonomy / Topics for automation, but can of course be accomplished manually too - for maximum collateralisation

Social Utilities

These are various characteristics of the Social components of the Affino solution - all evolving from the very first Affino Social CMS, which has evolved over the years to Affino Social Marketplace and finally the holistic Affino Unified Digital Business Platform:

• Blog - User-Profile-Specific informal articles - can be enable via workflows for social contribution / customer-generated-content
• Invites - An automated prompt system which encourages users to invite their friends and connections from other social networks - Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook
• Members / Profiles / Networking - The core of the Affino Community components - members listing and profile pages which allows discovery, connection and interactive networking with peers
• Social Connectors - The ability to enable login via third party social networks - Twitter and Facebook; LinkedIn have depreciated their functionality in this area
• Social Media Embeds - The ability to be able to easily include references to your other social media promotional activities - twitter and instagram cards, various video and media embeds as URLs
• Social Sharing - All content is enabled for easy sharing to third party social networks - all the usual suspects
• Workflow-enabled Content Contributions - Already mentioned in the context of Blogs, but can be used for any article type - online directories and events for instance

Targeting Elements

The combine taxonomy topics with user registered preferences for fine and wholly relevant targeting of key audience groups with totally relevant and complementary references and resources:

• Campaigns - Affino’s Ad Campaign system allows campaigns to be accurately targeted to customer preferences and alongside totally topic-relevant content
• Conversion Events - The 50+ automated tracking and auto-responder tasks which enable to you to target not just specific activities, but specific sequences of activities for selected target groups
• Personalisation - The ability to assign topics to all content and site area - which is matched with registered user preferences for totally personalised service / content delivery
• Security - A key element used to restrict or funnel access for very specific target audience groups
  Taxonomy / Topics - These are the tools used for much of the targeting, and for matching customer preferences with absolutely relevant content, products, services and activities

Sales & Marketing Automation

Affino encompasses not only Sales & Marketing Automation, but full Process and Service automation too - where you can essentially build your business models into the workflow of your site activities. This part of Affino is known as the Automated Customer Ladder, which operates a smart dynamic methodology of incentivising, up-selling and elevating customers by encouraging certain activities and then automatically following those up, recognising, rewarding and incentivising the next step on the ladder. This system of Conversion Events is easily daisy-chained together into dynamic business processes which operate automatically at the heart of your business.

• Activity Follow-ups - You can trigger messages, notifications and alerts, as well as follow-up activities for both side of the equation - your actual and potential customers and your various sales admin staff
• Autoresponders - A key aspect of Conversion Events - the ability to send a variety of message and prompts on the completion of any of the tasks and activities set up, including such non-active tasks as failure to fully checkout (i.e. abandoned basket)
• Funnels - Set up smart Conversion Event Funnels to track path though to full process completion and identify fall-out at each stage
• Incentives - This is the promise of rewards - which can be bestowed as access to VIP content, areas and functionality, as well as badges, points and actual monetary credits which can be redeemed againsts transactions - for both products and services
• Onboarding - A formalised terminology for customer acquisition, or the early steps on the customer ladder - sign-up, registering interest and interactions leading to first purchase and primary customer status
• Rewards - As mentioned - these can be granted in terms of enhanced access by a variety of means as well as various points and credits - financial and otherwise
• Security - An additional means of reward and personalisation - can be used to grant various additional and enhanced privileges to registered users and customers

Core Connected CRM

The actual business brain of the system - the part which gathers in all the data points and intelligence and allows you to view all these different types of contact and activities, interactions and transactions via smart, consolidated Single Customer View screens.

• Single Customer View - A complete overview and value indicator for each and everyone of your customers - shows every communication, participation, interaction, transaction, every contact and every touch - on a single, tabbed screen
• Analytics / Trends - Having information and data is not enough, you need means to be able to discern patterns of behaviour and trends - which can feed back into and continually improve your business process / automations etc.
• Prospecting and Lead Generation - A key aspect of the CRM is identifying prospects and opportunities, being able to single out common groups of customers and be able to target them effectively and absolutely - with full-spectrum engagement!