The mobile app in the business system is as important as human resources.
Unless your business has developed a user-friendly and appealing app, your business growth is bound to grow at a slow pace. This insightful article is going to explain why.
Mobile technology has greatly evolved over the last two decades. Being just a handy calling device at the start of the twenty-first century, today a smartphone’s role in the life of people is immeasurable.
Besides providing multiple communication options, a mobile phone is a central tool for harnessing the potential of internet resources.
It gives access to social media communities, allows doing banking anytime and anyplace, offers incredible trip planning opportunities, and serves as an effective personal planner and organizer.
This multivariate nature of mobile technology led to its solid integration into business processes, especially those involved with consumer service.
To date, the total number of smartphone users stands at 2.7 billion. This magnitude of mobile technology allows businesses from any industry to reach out to thousands of people on condition that they have handy and good-looking mobile apps.
Statistical data show that mobile e-commerce has risen sharply since 2016, reaching $2.32 trillion in 2019. This figure is almost double the growth rate of mobile commerce in 2016.
Although a substantial segment of consumers still uses desktops to shop online, they tend to spend four times less compared to mobile shoppers.
For that reason, the need for a mobile app seems evident for every business that strives to get a larger market share.
Unless you have already designed an easy-to-use mobile app for your consumers, here are seven sound reasons why you should consider its development.
Effective engagement with customers
The first advantage of a mobile app for business is the direct connection with the target audience.
If a company strives to create a seamless customer experience, it is necessary to stay in touch around-the-clock and assist customers with their needs quickly.
The mobile app provides effective customer support and lays a fertile ground for fruitful trade.
Besides traditional customer service calls, the mobile app enables convenient messaging that appears to be more popular with today’s consumers.
It lets a vendor interact with the consumers in many ways, through content, notifications, or even design.
For example, many experienced marketers recommend using push messages with valuable information that might keep the customer interested.
At the same time, the mobile app makes customers feel independent because they are able to learn more about their preferred products or services without communicating with shop assistants directly.
This freedom and lack of pressure attract the audience because they have enough time and an indefinite number of options to think over.
As a result, the customer is prone to make their buying decision faster. What is interesting is that the customer’s call reluctance does not impact their willingness to respond to messages on mobiles.
If a retailer strives to get consumer feedback, one short survey will be sufficient to engage the majority of customers and find out their genuine opinion about their brand.
Overall, the mobile app improves the connection on both sides. While the business owner has a chance to monitor customer satisfaction, the customer is able to communicate their needs quickly and get immediate support.
Superior customer experience
The concept of customer centricity lies at the core of superior customer service. The use of mobile apps, in turn, enhances the quality of customer service as it allows for the customization of shopping experience.
For example, the buyer can create a “wish list” with all the products they would like to purchase in the near future.
This opportunity is a huge benefit for both the vendor and the prospect. While the prospect has all their wishes organized, the vendor can use the buyer’s ‘wish’ choices to offer relevant recommendations and thereby boost the sales.
When it comes to payment, the mobile app outdoes the PC and the tablet.
It makes shopping ultra-convenient because the user has an interrupted and smooth buying process.
There is no need to pull out a credit card and input financial data manually because the checkout process happens automatically.
Many mobile apps feature chatbots that help consumers improve their payment capabilities through regular notifications and financial assistance upon the consumer’s request.
However, there is a flip side of employing a mobile app as a primary tool for affecting the customer journey.
The company needs to make sure that their mobile app is easy to use as well as responsive because any bugs or glitches will substantially impair the user experience.
Long-term app maintenance requires extra spending. But as long as you aim to increase revenue in your business, make sure you can provide regular updates for your consumers.
Otherwise, you risk losing a part of your loyal customers and being gobbled up by stronger market competitors.
Loyal clientele
The mobile app is convenient to launch loyalty programs that normally allow businesses to attract new customers and reward regular ones.
There are several ways of showing your gratitude to loyal customers. First off, you can offer a number of discount coupons that they will be able to apply to their next order.
This small bonus can potentially urge the loyal audience to make unplanned purchases that will encourage sales in the long run.
As an alternative, you can offer a free item within a fixed price limit. This gift will give regular customers more motivation to choose your brand over similar stores or suppliers.
Some brands prefer point systems that allow a customer to earn points for every purchase and later use them to cut off the price for any product they like.
This type of loyalty program seems more flexible and beneficial as it involves all customers and in some way encourages every consumer to buy more so as to collect more points.
The role of mobile apps here is to help every user subscribe to the loyalty program they like and check their balance.
At last, a company can give “exclusives” to the most loyal clients.
For instance, this can be an invitation to an exclusive event where the brand presents its special products that are not presented on the market.
Or they can give away some trips and other perks that may be pleasant to the clients.
Brand recognition
The mobile app has also a positive impact on brand awareness.
Alongside the unique logo and catchy message, mobile app design can also be a memorable element of the brand identity.
An appealing and user-friendly mobile app always increases user retention and engagement.
There are two main elements defining the app’s ability to hold customers. The first one is the quality of design.
Unless the mobile app is responsive, easy-to-use, and fast, your customer won’t feel comfortable with navigating it.
There are some more features that affect the user experience as well, such as image resolution, page loading speed, and security.
To comply with all these requirements, many businesses opt for hiring an in-house development team that will maintain the app’s performance.
If your business is a startup, the best option, in this case, is to turn to a qualified IT provider that will help you with the mobile app development or its specific improvement.
The other element is the content. Every customer using your mobile app expects to receive helpful information about the products or services you offer.
At the same time, content is one of the popular marketing strategies used for SEO optimization.
As a result, the difficulty of creating content for the mobile app is connected to the necessity to dilute an informative and simple text with SEO elements that tend to complicate it.
One way or another, the text plays a crucial role in whether the potential buyer will continue navigating your app as soon as they find your app design pleasant.
Thus, the design and the text work collectively and can be viewed as two contributing factors to brand awareness.
To put it simply, the better the mobile app interacts with the user, the faster your business’s customer base grows and your brand catches on.
Increased sales
The main value of the mobile app in terms of business development is that it allows for better business efficiency that entails an increase in sales.
Here, it is not only digital companies that need a mobile app. Brick-and-mortar retailers will benefit from this digital solution too.
Mobile shopping is a lot more convenient in comparison with buying via desktop or real life. Besides time efficiency, mobile commerce has other considerable advantages that a business can use to boost their sales.
Based on recent research, the profits from mobile e-commerce grow by 30-40% year by year.
The reason why more and more customers prefer browsing mobile apps in search of the desired product is that they offer higher functionality because of the smartphone-based features, such as voice recognition or QR code scanning.
Moreover, over 83% of smartphone users usually carry their mobile devices around wherever they go.
This behavioral pattern lets businesses harness the potential of consumer desire for new products by using push notifications that inform consumers of various sales and offers.
As a result, the sales rate goes up each time a retailer makes a promotion, especially when the target audience has free time to immediately use this benefit.
Finally, the mobile app can be of great use in the contrary situation, ie when the consumer is on-the-go but needs to make an urgent order.
In this case, mobile technology provides businesses with the opportunity to stay accessible to any client and satisfy their needs quickly.
Since the majority of consumers do not have permanent access to the desktop, the use of mobile apps enables companies to serve a wider audience, which is the key to an increased sales volume.
Effective marketing tool
Statistics say that 77% of all online shopping decisions are guided by an impulse. For that reason, it is important to design a mobile app in a way that assists the user in making quick decisions that are beneficial to your business.
Few buyers can clearly explain why they like this or that product, so you can persuade them to purchase what you find appropriate.
There are numerous ways of affecting the consumer’s shopping intentions covertly. For example, you can display the most popular items to show your customers trendy things.
If they click on them, they will be redirected to the page with corresponding reviews on these items.
Since public opinion always has a particular impact on the buyer’s mind, there is a chance of them thinking about purchasing one of the trendy things as well.
As an alternative, you can choose the path of reaching your clients via social media.
In this way, you encourage your customers to use their Facebook account for registration, so it will be easier for you to learn the habits of your clients and understand their needs and preferences.
The process can be handled more effectively if you opt for Facebook Ads or similar tools to create effective advertising campaigns for your mobile app or the products you sell.
These apps are meant to customize your advertisements and help businesses offer their clients what they are really looking for.
Additionally, connecting your app with Facebook can give you the necessary awareness about your target customers and help you create an ideal customer profile.
However, mobile app owners should remember about their responsibility towards customers in terms of protecting their confidentiality and securing their data.
Business optimization
The mobile app is also an excellent opportunity to learn your customer base better as well as explore the market.
Most mobile apps allow recording essential information about your customers, such as age, sex, location, shopping history, etc.
This knowledge can be further used to develop a subtle marketing strategy for business optimization.
Similarly, this information can be a good basis for providing tailored recommendations that normally speed up the buyer’s decision-making.
These marketing insights are also effective in learning your target audience’s behavior model.
In particular, you will find out what time your customers prefer shopping, how many items an average consumer typically orders, and so on.
By monitoring the consumers’ browsing behavior, you can discover their general preferences and adjust your supply chain so as to fit their needs perfectly.
Mobile app marketing equally allows detecting your business’s strengths and weaknesses.
For instance, if some product categories are not popular with your consumers, mobile app analytics will highlight it so that you could either remove or replace those types of products.
The right idea of what your audience expects to see in your store will let you increase your business competitive edge.
The better you can live up to your clientele’s expectations, the higher your profits. By knowing your customer base well, you can greatly enlarge your market share and get ahead of your market rivals in a short time.
Why are mobile apps better than websites?
To date, more and more companies put an emphasis on their mobile apps because it is becoming the most effective tool for communicating with the customers and shaping their buying choices.
There are a few reasons why a mobile app is superior to a mobile-friendly website. First off, most consumers do not have 24/7 access to their PCs, especially those that do not work in the office.
As a result, any business employing only a website to interact with their customers loses a great part of prospective buyers, whereas the mobile app can work offline even when the user has no connection.
Second, the mobile app’s performance is better in comparison with websites because it stores the clientele’s data locally, while websites may need to use third-party cloud services to manage bigger data blocks.
Third, the mobile app is also attractive in terms of customization as it offers a wider number of customization options that will improve the user experience.
At last, the mobile app excels at connection channels because you can keep in touch with the customers in two ways, namely by sending in-app or mobile notifications.
In sum, a mobile app opens up plenty of opportunities for both beginning and long-standing businesses.
If you aim to win customer loyalty and promote your brand globally, make sure your customers have a user-friendly and appealing mobile app to order your products and services quickly.
About the Author:
Betty Lockwood is a journalist, web developer, fintech expert and caring mother of two kids. She loves to write about new technologies, business news, traveling, and music events. Betty is also editor-in-chief of Computools website. Follow Betty on Twitter.
