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The irony about this topic is that it feels like writing an article about “No-fat for athletes”. While fat is an essential part of the body, it is not something that athletes should concern themselves with on a day-to-day basis. Instead of talking about “fat,” let me jump straight to carbs and protein and how they can help you win gold medals, you beautiful superhumans, dear marketers.
The pace at which marketers had to adapt and innovate over the last couple of years is unprecedented. Some of us have chosen to use brute force to dig our way through innovation – by doubling down on the efforts and making the most of the extra hours shaved off, not having to commute and leaving yet another pile of laundry or dishes for our partner to deal with (I don’t need to point any fingers. You know who you are). Whilst others decided to stand back and challenge the way they did things before and asked themselves:
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could build this [Interactive experience| Landing page | Customer Portal | Clienteling App| …] in-house to see if this tactic will actually provide desired results before committing to a significant investment? Perhaps I could even have a go at doing this myself?”
It turns out that we could, and this is where no-code solutions came in very handy.
Table of Contents
What is no-code?
7 scenarios for no-code solutions
How to select a no-code solution
What are the benefits of using Bubble.io?
What is no-code?
Forrester defines no-code platforms as “Platforms for application development that employ visual, declarative techniques instead of programming to meet a wide variety of application and process automation use cases.”
You may say that this sounds “dreamy”. So how exactly could this help you improve your operational efficiency and enhance your customer experience?
7 scenarios for no-code solutions:
Clienteling Apps
Applicable where you provide services or products within a physical environment. Do you want to offer your in-store personnel access to a limited subset of customer data and the ability to send personalized messages to individual customers? No-code solutions are a quick way to test your desired objectives before committing to a significant investment.
Clienteling App by RedAnt
Zero-Party Data Collection
Create data collection forms and experiences for customers to share their first- and zero-party data. No-code solutions provide you with above-and-beyond capabilities that you would typically use with your existing landing page and form builder solution. The next time you are trying to build an experience that stretches your current landing page capability, consider using a no-code solution instead.
Zero-Party Data capture by Tide
Custom Microsites
Many great microsite- and competition solutions are available to you, but that’s not enough. What about all those edge cases where you need to add additional interactive elements that are not supported or leverage a custom integration or API that requires custom coding? No-code solutions allow you to build custom microsites and competition pages within minutes or hours rather than days or months.
Internal Dashboards
Want to create an internal dashboard that shows custom KPIs, based on segment counts or retrieve statistics about the most recently launched campaign? No-code solutions can help you here too.
Managing Translations
Is your campaign creation process heavily dependent on input from multiple teams? In that case, an enterprise Marketing Operations platform would be too excessive for your needs. Consider creating a custom interface for your translation teams and agencies to manage content without needing to access a specific platform.
Distributed Marketing
Think about allowing your distributed workforce to create and launch local promotions. Create an interface for your local store managers to manage their offers, which will be included in personalized newsletters, or perhaps even allow them to trigger location-based mobile push messages to customers within close distance to their store.
Apps
If you are still deciding whether an App is right for your business, No-code solutions provide a quick way of prototyping and launching a first App-iteration. Many platforms offer ways of converting your no-code web App into a mobile App. This comes with trade-offs compared to a native App built by professional developers, but if you are constantly de-prioritizing this or are unable to find a budget, testing your ideas with no-code may be the most efficient approach.
Create More Customer Value-Adding Assets
Create additional digital assets that position you as leader or expert in your field. Here are a couple of examples:
A community for re-selling your products and encouraging consumers to re-use and extend the lifetime of your physical goods.
A directory for ancillary services. For instance, if you sell plumbing supplies, you can create a plumber directory where your high-value B2B customers will benefit from a higher listing.
If you are a manufacturer, you can create an interactive portal where you share insights and data about the market with your retail partners.
Selecting a No-code solution
There are several platforms for you to choose from at various degrees of maturity. Here are our top 10 picks:
1. bubble.io
2. ycode.com
4. airtable.com
5. appsheet.com
7. dronahq.com
8. webflow.com
9. quixy.com
10. softr.io
At Mapp, we have chosen Bubble.io for some internal operational efficiency improvement and marketing projects. The reason we picked them is because they provide a perfect balance between flexibility in what the final design looks like, ability to integrate with any platform that supports APIs, and their simple-to-use data schema.
https://improveyour.marketing – developed by Mapp using Bubble.io and Mapp Cloud.
We believe that Bubble also fits the skill set of the typical CRM marketer. Not too complex, yet provides enough flexibility to create great digital customer experiences. Effectively anyone that knows how to use a marketing automation platform should be able to use Bubble.io.
What are the benefits of using Bubble.io?
Accelerate Innovation
Responsive design is standard, not add-on
Rollback capabilities that allow reverting to previous versions
Multi-user access
Instant content update as data gets added – no need to refresh the page
Lazy loading to help improve page load time
Simple to use Drag-and-Drop UI
Pre-built components
Cloudflare CDN is included to help decrease the time to serve content
Built-in SEO capabilities
Login and user management, incl. social logins via Gmail and Facebook
Magic login links
Countless plugins and integrations
Easy to connect to external APIs
Pre-built and straightforward data model
Scalability
Unrestricted performance that allows buying additional capacity when required
Allows measuring the performance and page load times if needed
If you’re ready to start innovating, you can find the test and demo app here. Make sure to also explore the Mapp Cloud plugin for Bubble.
This article was first published by Mapp. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.
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