Gone are the days when mobile apps were only reserved for large corporations or entities. Building a professional app for your business is easier and less expensive than ever before.
Apps are a great way to build stronger relationships with existing customers and potential customers alike. If you’re considering building an app for your business, but aren’t sure if it’s the right option for your company, worry not.
We’ve outlined the main benefits of building a mobile app for your business. All it takes is a clear goal for what you want your app to do, and you can begin the development process.
1. Build brand awareness
A primary benefit of mobile apps for businesses is their capacity to build brand awareness in tandem with your other marketing initiatives. Having a mobile app can even be more effective in this regard.
While traditional awareness advertising campaigns often struggle to keep your brand top-of-mind with customers, a mobile app puts your business’s brand front and center on the screens of their mobile devices.
Once the user installs your app on their device, you can be certain that they’ll encounter your brand multiple times a day, especially if you create built-in features that enable you to engage with your users consistently.
According to RescueTime, the average person spends about 3 hours and 15 minutes a day on their smartphone.
These are exciting numbers, but only if your business invests the time needed to create an app.
2. Provide added value to customers
Digital accessibility is perhaps the most important trend of our time in the business world, and mobile applications fit perfectly into that mix.
Customers don’t want to have to call your store to order a product. They prefer to make an order with the tap of their finger from the comfort of their couch.
They don’t want to have to send you an email to address a customer support issue. They want to be able to immediately speak to your customer success team via your application’s chat feature.
Keep in mind that convenience goes both ways.
In the past, the easiest way to contact a customer was to email them or call them. Nowadays, you can send a notification that appears on their lock screen, a method that’s simultaneously more direct than an email and less disruptive than a call.
When you add all that together, what you get is increased customer loyalty that helps transform your business into their favorite brand.
Speaking of loyalty, if your company has a loyalty program, you can integrate it into the app. Traditional loyalty programs aren’t convenient as they usually require the customer to come into the store with a punch card.
What happens if they visit your store without the punch card? At best, they leave a bit disappointed. At worst, they leave unhappy and upset.
Creating a mobile application removes that unfortunate scenario from the equation because, while a customer might forget to bring a punch card to your store, they seldom forget to bring their smartphone anywhere.
Mobile apps also give your customers 24/7 access to your business and its various programs.
3. Increase customer engagement
There’s already a slew of ways to increase customer engagement with your business. Email marketing is a tried and true method, as is social media, but neither of those mediums is as personal or direct as push notifications.
Whenever your business has a special mobile app offer that you know your customers will love, you can schedule a push notification that pings their device to bring it to their attention.
You can also set up an automation that asks for reviews or ratings whenever a customer makes in-app purchases of your products and services.
Having an app for your business also grants you the opportunity to deliver a more controlled and complete brand experience to users.
A business website technically already brings your brand to your user’s screens, but it’s too easy for them to get distracted by the countless other tabs they have open. Mobile apps, on the other hand, enable you to facilitate distraction-free browsing, as users are limited to viewing one app at a time.
And what if a customer has a complaint regarding your products, services, or even the app itself? Having a mobile application streamlines customer service initiatives, which brings us to the next section…
4. Better customer service
A report from Dimensional Research stated that “52% of consumers say they have made an additional purchase from a company after a positive customer service experience.”
We all know that customer service is critical to business success, and one of the most important aspects of customer service is respecting the customer’s time by responding to their inquiries quickly.
With the right mobile app development, your business should be able to provide all kinds of useful customer service features such as in-app messaging, call and call-back buttons, easy directions to your stores, RSVP capabilities, and of course, customer feedback options.
Mobile applications also give your business another place to provide an FAQ both for current and potential customers who are thinking of buying your products or participating in your promotions.
5. Enhance your product or service
One thing that was so revolutionary about the rise of online stores was that anyone from enterprise businesses to mom-and-pop shops could suddenly utilize website analytic data about their customers.
In that same way, large and small businesses alike have the opportunity to acquire even more data about their users with mobile applications. For instance, with mobile apps, you can access a user’s location if they enable location sharing with your app, which is something you can’t do with a mere website.
On top of the feedback users typically leave for you on the application (complaints, comments, reviews), you can analyze behavioral data, such as what users search for most often, which FAQs they consume the most, and how long they stay on different pages within the app.
All of this information, if analyzed properly, can lead to insights that you can leverage to level up the user experience (UX), strategize ad campaigns, and create better products.
6. Increase revenues
Remember when we mentioned that users can enable location sharing with your mobile application? This functionality is more than just another way to gain geographic data about your customers.
You can set up push notifications that notify users of local promotions going on that only activate when they get within walking distance of your store. Targeted promotions like this lead to more foot traffic, which, in turn, translates into more sales.
Unlike websites, apps provide greater flexibility for your business to create more immersive and seamless shopping experiences—everything from finding products to secure, easy payments.
The fewer barriers there are to entry, the more people are willing to shop.
The future is mobile
There are reasons big and small brands alike used to do whatever they could to get their stores into shopping malls and other high-traffic spots: money flows wherever the customer goes.
However, the golden age of malls is and has been fading for a while; online stores saw to that. But now, the cycle is repeating, and mobile apps are disrupting e-commerce sites.
A report from eMarketer indicated that, in 2019, 90% of the time people spent on the internet went towards apps, not websites.
This point alone makes it worth considering the potential benefits a mobile app could bring to your company, but if that’s not enough, keep in mind that many of your competitors are already putting time and money into the development of their mobile applications.
By investing in mobile apps, you pave the way for better brand experiences and, in turn, happier customers.
