Yes, it seems like a very technical subject best left in the hands of your IT department.
But just as the web and mobile jumped quickly from sideshow to center stage in sales and marketing, how good your APIs are will ultimately have a significant impact on your bottom line – and potentially, the future of your business.
Here’s what you need to know about them.
It’s been called the best business model in the world. And subscriptions aren’t just for media businesses.
Gartner forecasts that by 2015, 35% of Global 2000 companies with non-media digital products will generate up to 10% of their revenue from recurring models. Are you ready?
Ongoing monetization is a key part of disruptive digital selling. Consumers flock to these businesses because they offer a superior product experience, enable costs to be amortized, and provide a guarantee that vendors will always work hard to ensure their satisfaction.
In return, enterprises maximize customer loyalty, secure predictable revenue, and often gain a significant competitive advantage.
Unless you’re Google, Netflix, or Twitter, you may have found it difficult to build or articulate compelling business cases for your API projects.
While conversations around this subject have long been dominated by how the big public APIs have forged new business models by opening up products and services to the world at large, the harsh reality for most companies is that copying this strategy is not necessarily the right thing to do.
For years, e-commerce practitioners have obsessed over the idea of a slippery funnel, built to maximize retail metrics like conversion rate and average order value.
Today’s disruptive digital products and services are quickly making this way of monetizing things obsolete.
Every connected device or service that hits the market, from tablets and televisions to ad platforms and social networks, brings with it new opportunities for marketing and selling your company’s goods and services. But in many cases, blindly pursuing the traditional retail path of pushing customers through a “shopping experience” will only alienate them.