How Can Feature Flags Benefit My Business?
As a business owner, understanding the ins and outs of the digital marketing world can seem like an exercise in futility. Between managing pay stubs, meetings, and interdepartmental relations, you don’t have time to take a lunch break, let alone manage the code updates on your website.
That’s where feature flags come in. Also known as feature toggles, this handy tool serves as a switch to deploy certain features on your website. Here are the primary benefits of feature flags and how this increasingly necessary tool can help your business thrive.
What are feature flags?
Feature flags are the best way to hide, disable, or enable certain features on your website. This flag is added directly to the code in your website in order to toggle certain functions (or “features”) on or off at the necessary time. This allows you to control any and all releases on your website, but it also allows you to deploy this technique to specific audiences.
This latter option can help your business track user percentages in the wake of an experiment, such as a new marketing campaign. Many businesses have relied on multiple source code branches to perform this task, but feature flags hope to make this a thing of the past.
What do feature flags do?
As mentioned earlier, feature flags allow you to track audience variables throughout your website. By making some features only available to certain audience members, you can track variables like consumer engagement, changes in revenue, and more.
However, feature flags are also beneficial in that they shorten the time between production deployments. This streamlines your business process, improving communication between various departments within your company. When you deliver new features and website updates at frequent intervals, your website looks more reliable to both your customers and the search engines on which you advertise.
You can use feature flags to release market promotions, post blogs, and more. This feature allows you to put all your ducks in a row before implementing them on your website. This helps you as a busy entrepreneur who wants to streamline your business as much as possible. It also gives you a little wiggle room should anything go wrong.
Feature flags can also help you cater to an individual’s experience. As mentioned above, feature flags enable you to predetermine which audience members see which features through user segmentation. It allows you to track the responses among your audience members to see which products perform well, inspire engagement, or anything else you want to test for your business online. Feature flags allow you to filter through a variety of audience members, including new users, old users, users based on location, or any other method you can think of.
What are the benefits of feature flags?
The primary benefit of feature flags is time control. The switches enable the programmer to release a specific feature at a specific time. When the date finally rolls around, the programmer doesn’t need to do a thing.
This helps you better manage your time and gives you more accurate data analysis regarding which audience members see what content. This can help mitigate risks associated with new products or promotions, since you can see customer responses in real time. Simply take down the feature at the first whiff of a bad launch to form a new strategy.
Many businesses love feature flags since it enables them to implement a timed strategy regarding their rollout of new items. You can choose to release your experiment at frequent intervals in small increments, or you can do a big release set at a future date. With feature flags, you can perform a variety of experiments to better connect with your consumer.
