Getting closer to your customers and increasing revenues
To find out how to get close to your customers, ask yourself the following questions:• Can you create new online strategies without involving your IT department?
• Can you precisely identify and target the needs of your subscribers?
• Can you respond rapidly to changes in the market place?
• Can you integrate online models with back office legacy infrastructure?
• Can you future-proof your digital assets?
If you answered "no" to any of the questions, read on to find out how Ingenta’s Information Commerce Solution (ICS), designed with all of these fundamentals in mind, can benefit you.
Publishing markets are constantly changing and growing. Publishers need an agile and responsive approach to their online business, one that allows them to quickly and safely evolve their strategy to meet the needs of the changing market in which they operate. The key to this is the ability to build and deploy flexible business models tailored to meet the specific needs of a publisher's subscriber base, coupled with the requirement to monitor the performance of those business models already in place.
Ingenta's ICS gives you the:
Opportunity to experiment and innovate
Technical advancements in online publishing present you with unlimited possibilities for packaging and distributing content and services in innovative ways. By converting your content into rich, Web-ready formats, it becomes the flexible component base for an unlimited range of potentially innovative business models. What was once constrained within the pages of a print publication can now be repackaged, sold and distributed to different users, in many different ways and at many different price points, allowing you to target specific market sectors with new and attractive online products to significantly drive incremental revenues from your valuable publishing assets.
Ability to create multiple products and channels
The ability to create new products is only a portion of an effective information commerce solution. Equally, if not more important, is the need to protect the terms and prices under which your content is sold and accessed. Once new information products are created, only recognized and authenticated users should be given access — and if granted, this access must be at the appropriate license terms for that customer and circumstance.
Ability to create comprehensive customer hierarchies
Your individual or institutional customers are complex and diverse, and often affiliated with overlapping customer groups. A single user could have multiple user affiliations that will need to be recognized regardless of how they initially identify themselves. The Ingenta solution supports the creation of comprehensive customer hierarchies, which accommodate authentication within, for instance:
• Multiple identities: User is affiliated with an individual university library and two library consortia.
• Changing identities: User has progressed over period of time from undergraduate student, to graduate student and now faculty.
• Accumulated rights: User is an alumna of a particular university, professor within a faculty department of a private institution, and a member of two learned societies.
Different authentication credentials can be used to meet varied subscriber needs – you determine what credentials are supported and can offer any combination of, for instance:
• User names and passwords: User selects user name and password, and that profile is linked to subscription (and rights) information.
• Federated authentication: The publisher issues licensed URLs to select users, which contain individualized authentication information. Anyone coming through that link will get appropriate access.
• IP authentication: User registers IP addresses, which are linked to subscription (and rights) information. Anyone using these IP addresses receives appropriate access.
Flexibility to evolve your Business Model
The information commerce capabilities are at the heart of the system, specifically the ability to support you in packaging, promoting, and selling digital content to a spectrum of different user types using license terms. Ingenta allows you to package and sell an unlimited number of views of your content at whatever level of granularity you wish to support - be it articles, chapters, pages, paragraphs, tables, charts, references, or perhaps even related links or searches.
For instance, you could choose to set up:
• Rolling windows: Allowing an individual or institution to purchase a subscription to the last six month’s content; or a user to purchase access to everything ever published except for the content published in the last three months.
• Pay-per-View Bundles: Allowing an individual or institution to pre-purchase credits which can be spent purchasing articles from a select collection of publications; this could be further enhanced by weighted pricing (e.g. editorial articles would cost 30 credits, while articles from the Global Archive would cost 20 credits).
Ingenta: A publishing services provider with vast experience
In creating the Information Commerce Solution, Ingenta have combined their technical capability and specialist knowledge into a comprehensive system that can be delivered either on an Application Service Provider (ASP) basis, or as a licensed software product. So, whether you are looking to provide access control and flexible e-commerce capabilities to a new website, replace an existing access control system, or implement a single source of authentication and commerce behind a series of unconnected websites, Ingenta has a solution to meet your needs.
If you would like to learn more about Ingenta’s Information Commerce Solution or have any queries, please email sales@ingenta.com and a member of the team will contact you.