Mobile App
If you have your own business and are thinking about whether to create a mobile application or not, this article is for you. We hope it will be interesting for designers of mobile applications as well.
The situation with the coronavirus and the introduction of the quarantine has seriously affected businesses around the world. It’s becoming increasingly clear how many types of services will be moved to an online format. Mobile applications have a great future, which means a lot of money and a lot of competition. Why?
Today the mobile application has become a universal assistant for receiving goods and services, and this trend is growing rapidly. According to research by Criteo, the users view 4 times more items during one session in a mobile app, than on an adaptive website. The conversion rate of mobile apps is 3 times higher than that of mobile versions of websites and 1.5 times higher than that of desktop versions. A little more quarantine time and restrictions, and these showings will skyrocket.
The human mind perceives the application as its assistant, friend, companion, consultant. No site has yet been able to influence users so actively.
It’s worth for every business to consider using a mobile app to remain in the market and stay on top of the wave of change. A mobile application can take your company to a new level of interaction with users and generate record-breaking profits. However, don’t get filled with enthusiasm too fast!
Mobile apps aren’t suitable for all businesses.
An analysis of the need for an application and a preliminary ROI calculation will allow you to understand whether the application will be an effective tool for your business or will become an expensive useless toy. In some cases, the company only needs a mobile version of the site, and the implementation of the application is pointless.
Let’s see who wins using the app.
Who needs a mobile application?
Apps solve many issues much better than mobile sites but don’t suit everyone. First, check if your business is related to the following areas:
- Food, taxi, goods ordering services
- Clothing, accessories
- Small appliances and household goods
- Car centers and car services
- Children’s goods and services for children
- Online educational services
- Restaurant business
- Travel business
- Collection of information about users, analytics
- Business automation, management, logistics (internal applications for the company)
Supposing, one of these areas of activity is yours. Then try to answer 3 questions:
- Do you have an established target audience?
- Do you have a high repeat business rate?
- Is your resource used by at least 10,000 people a day?
If you answered “yes” to all these questions, you can be sure that you need a mobile application.
Creating an app is an investment in the future of the company, a serious step that requires financial expenditures. You should weigh the pros and cons before taking this step.
When you don’t need a mobile app?
- if the share of online purchases in the structure of the target audience is less than 30%, the mobile application is unprofitable;
- if the offered goods are of long-term use and will be bought once (for example, a car, expensive equipment, furniture, IT products);
- if there’s no financial capacities to create, maintain, and promote the application.
If you are convinced that it makes sense to create a mobile app for your business, great opportunities, unavailable to site owners, are opening to you.
Benefits of a mobile app
A mobile application is a platform that doesn’t depend on the site. This is a program that contains certain functionality. It’s installed on a phone or tablet and, if necessary, can work without the Internet. The application is a communication channel that allows you to be in touch with your target audience 24/7. Its benefits are indisputable. Within this article, we can list only the main application features:
1. Increase of interested target audience
The application will allow you not only to increase your target audience but to engage exclusively interested users and focus your advertising campaigns on them. (The application is downloaded only by people interested in it.) In this case, your budget will be spent purposefully and efficiently.
The application allows you to build an individual approach to each user. Psychologically, the application is a friend and helper for people that constantly reminds of itself. It creates a fundamentally different, almost personal level of communication that a website cannot afford. At the moment, there’s no better feedback method than an application.
2. Increase of sales
Although it’s not common to talk about it, the main function of the application is to capture and retain clients, and, accordingly, increase sales. Loyalty programs, sending push notifications, promotions, and discounts motivate users to buy goods or services from your company. With the help of applications, it’s convenient to share bonuses with the clients, handle sales, and repeat sales.
3. Loyalty of the audience
To get a loyal audience, you need to become useful and helpful for users, and most importantly, to be always at hand. Today, almost everyone is in touch. The application maintains constant interactive contact with customers. Getting used to receiving useful content, users begin to wait for it, their credibility to the company increases. Sometimes applications are created as part of a loyalty program for the sake of loyalty itself. The app is by far the best way to connect with users and the best quality consumer-business experience.
4. Monitoring of business performance
Via the app, you can monitor electronic commerce and get real-time key business data, such as the number of clients, sales, expenses, profits. You can also set the reception of data on the internal company indicators, for example, performance indicators.
5. Marketing tool
The advanced features of the application allow you to better control the interaction with users and quickly receive relevant and detailed analytics. This helps you personalize your content and introduce better techniques to increase conversions. So, the analysis of the browsing history allows you to show users ads that are interesting to them, information about new products, special offers, and promotions.
6. Optimization of business processes
Mobile applications solve many internal business problems in the processes of management, logistics, control, etc. They allow to improve the efficiency of the company and save financial and human resources.
7. Search engine promotion
According to Google statistics, 40% of mobile device users make a purchase with them, 55% are looking for goods or services to purchase them using smartphones. If a business is not mobile-friendly, Google artificially lowers a site’s position in search results, which means a loss of traffic and a decrease in the retention of new users. The mobile application allows you to get to the top of search hits and, accordingly, expand the audience.
8. Fast loading of the content
Apps load content faster than websites. People are annoyed by slow loading. Lack of positive user experience is a common reason for their switching to the competitors.
9. Increasing conversion with push notifications
Push notifications are a powerful tool for the application. They are cheaper and more efficient than emails, are always available to users, and difficult to ignore. Push notifications are twice as likely to bring customers back to the app. Links that lead to landing pages are embedded in them so that the user can quickly see the desired content.
10. Better UI
The application doesn’t need constant access to the Internet for operation. This allows you to implement more features, load high-quality images, and large animations quickly. The design of the application can be much better and more effective, which attracts more users.
Gamification of applications is also a promising trend. It creates a high level of interactivity and user interaction.
11. Better quality of service
A good app makes your client’s life easier and more comfortable. For example, you can quickly book a table or order food, pay for an order, buy a ticket for an event, make an appointment with a specialist. Such functionality contributes to a positive perception of your company, increasing loyalty, and the level of customer confidence.
12. Using built-in smartphone functions
- Social networks, camera
The website doesn’t allow customers to use the built-in camera, for example, to show friends new acquisitions without leaving the site. With the application, this is done in a couple of seconds. The site cannot implement a voice recognition feature that allows users to navigate menus or subscribe to newsletters. Unlike a website, the app quickly shows the location of your nearest offline store or office using GPS. By clicking the “Share” button, the user will instantly spread information about your product or service over the network.
All of this increases user engagement and interaction with your business.
- Geolocation and timeliness
As the saying goes, “Everything is good in its season.” The applications are demanded by users because they can provide what the customers need at that moment. Location tracking helps to realize people’s desires as quickly as possible.
13. Attracting new users
An interesting application with usable functionality spreads like a snowball, increasing in size and weight. Buttons for sharing in social networks provide an opportunity to increase the number of users quickly and manifold.
14. Linking of the site to the application
When a client visits a company’s website, they can easily leave it and stop interacting with the business, but if the website redirects the client to the app, then co-working is just beginning.
Let’s rest and summarize
The application does not need advertising; its advantages are obvious. We just tried to put together its features, and even not all of them. However, development time remains an issue, and of course the cost of that development and maintaining the functionality of the app.
In general, business owners are well aware of the need to create an application, but they have no idea how it should be implemented, how much the development costs, and how long it will take.
We would not recommend independent software development to anyone, and not because we are personally interested in it. Neither we nor other developers and designers will be delighted with remaking unsuccessful software. Amateur applications bring more losses than benefits, and their improvement requires a lot of financial investment, time, and nerves. It’s better to involve specialists and get a high-quality functional product immediately than invest in its improvement and optimization later.
If you got enthusiastic about the idea of creating a mobile app, in the first instance you should determine what user problems it will solve. Try to put yourself in their place. What functions would be interesting and useful for you?
Take a look at your competitors’ mobile apps. What do you like about them and what do you not? Would you like to have something similar or something fundamentally different? What features would you like to improve if this was your application?
Your personal vision, your understanding, and conception will help designers and developers create a unique and useful product.
It’s impossible to describe in a single article everything you need to know to decide on an application. We would only like to spark interest in the relevant topic of mobile applications in our readers and wish everyone the realization of your desires.
Always connected,
The Outcrowd team
