One of the biggest opportunities for c-store growth is providing customers with a convenient and valuable digital experience through channels such as apps, websites or in-store kiosks.

Doing so not only drives customer retention and loyalty, but can also fuel significant growth for the business.

Oftentimes, however, it can seem like an impossible feat for brands to bring these digital touchpoints to the market, and for good reason: Doing “digital” can be an intimidating endeavor. Without guidance and experience, it’s hard to know where to start.

To ensure that your app, website or other digital property launches smoothly, delivers value to your customers, and helps your business thrive and grow, here are four key ingredients needed to ensure success.

1. Define Success and Have a Strategy.

It’s critical to make sure that the goals of advancing digital within your business are measurable and achievable.

The goal might be the acquisition of new customers, increasing purchase frequency for existing customers, better insights into your customer base and their behaviors, or simply to “make a splash” with innovation within the industry to increase visibility.

Defining goals upfront is critical, because numerous digital strategies can be employed to achieve each of them.

Growth can be achieved with data-driven customer relationship management (CRM) campaigns or by pairing an app or website with a compelling loyalty program aimed at acquisition, while acquisition can be driven by meaningful campaigns through digital and social channels.

Once the business aligns on its goals — and the strategies that will be employed to achieve them — it’s time to take the first steps toward using digital to reach those goals.

2. Find Your Foundational Technology Platforms.

Behind every digital strategy is a symphony of platforms that must play in harmony to deliver value to both guests and brands.

These platforms can be off-the-shelf third-party platforms or custom-built systems that provide services, such as loyalty program management, online ordering capabilities or a customer data platform and CRM pairing.

While some larger brands go the custom route to ensure they have ultimate control over every aspect of their digital program, the more common approach is to buy customizable “white label” software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms that provide these key services.

It can be intimidating to select the right third-party product or platform that will satisfy your business’ needs, which is why having a digital growth partner that has worked with these third-party platforms — and has built some of their own — can help optimize and maximize potential for brand growth.

Once these platforms are in place, they are incredible tools to help drive growth, incrementality, customer loyalty and ultimately make your business even more successful than it already is.

3. Have a Reliable, Adaptable Orchestration Layer.

While off-the-shelf SaaS platforms typically include connectors that enable some data to flow between each other, the unfortunate reality is that these connectors often don’t enable the platforms to deliver their full potential.

At the other end of the spectrum, companies that choose to build all the components of a technology stack from scratch can ensure integrations are seamless — but the total cost of ownership increases significantly, which lowers return on investment.

While there are off-the-shelf integration-platform-as-a-service platforms that can be used and that can get you the best of both worlds, they can also be cost prohibitive at large scale and/or not customizable enough to fully optimize how the platforms work with each other.

One solution is to leverage a growth partner with platform integration experience, preferably one who has a battle-tested middleware product with a deep library of existing integrations from which to pull. This can help ensure systems are fully integrated and all the information technology and marketing systems being invested in return as much of their potential value back to the business as possible.

4. Ensure You’ve Got Experts in Digital Program Management.

Launching new digital properties can be an incredibly difficult endeavor. Coordinating readiness across platforms, vendor partners and internal teams takes a lot of time and focus to make sure everything launches smoothly and that your customers get the best possible first impression when engaging with what’s being brought to the market.

SaaS vendors that provide loyalty, ordering and payment platforms do an excellent job of making sure their product is properly configured and ready to launch, but without program management, integrations and cross-platform functionality can easily fall through the cracks.

After launch, brands must also invest in solid monitoring and incident response capabilities to make sure that if a component fails, it can be addressed and restored quickly. With more revenue, growth and brand engagement being driven by these digital channels, an outage for any amount of time can have a significant negative impact on your business.

When bringing digital products to the market, having a growth partner you can trust can be a secret weapon. From strategy and implementation to post-launch monitoring and support, a good growth partner can help your business bring digital products to market faster, achieve goals and key performance indicators, and catapult growth and engagement.

Mike Maxwell is Bounteous’ senior vice president of technology for the restaurant and convenience industries. He guides the team responsible for architecting, building, testing, deploying and monitoring digital properties for 35-plus top restaurant and c-store brands, including Dash In, Dutch Bros and Wingstop.