Why Your Business Needs a Mobile Application

Today, any business that strives to remain successful in the market considers the possibility to build a custom mobile app that is entirely adapted to their needs. That’s because mobile apps are seen as an effective tool that helps reach more customers and enhance their marketing efforts.

There are many ways how businesses could improve their operation, positioning, and interaction with customers. On the other hand, building a mobile app is never cheap. That’s why, before starting the creation of a custom mobile app, business owners have to carefully consider which goals they want to pursue with the developed solution.

In this article, we’ll look into the types of mobile apps companies can develop and their advantages for any business.

Types of Apps for Business

The mobile app development industry is booming today. According to Statista, the number of mobile app downloads has risen by 37.55 billion worldwide in just 4 years, rising from 192.45 billion in 2018 to 230 in 2021.

Meanwhile, the diversity of the proposed apps is also growing quickly. Although, there is no fixed set of mobile app types, let’s have a look at the most frequently developed.

• Lifestyle mobile apps – this type of app defines the lifestyles of different users and can include apps related to fitness, food, music, dating, travel, and more.
• Communication apps – at the time of their inception, social media platforms were mostly web-based. Today, they actively move into users’ smartphones, providing them with the opportunity to spend more time there. Apart from social media platforms, messengers also play a significant role for mobile users, being used for personal as well as business communication.
• Utility mobile apps – these apps offer various functions and often aren’t perceived by users as standalone apps because they are built natively for iOS or Android. They usually include such functions as reminders, calculators, flashlights, and weather. Although, these can be more specific solutions like data search and analysis, data protection, data processing, memo pad apps, and more.
• Entertainment mobile apps – mobile games is a massively developing niche in the mobile app development sphere. These apps work great for monetization. They retain large numbers of users in the game for a long time, nudge users to buy in-game items as well as watch ads for their game progress.
• Office productivity apps – these apps contribute to employees’ performance, allowing them to work with various files more effectively. For example, these can be collaborative tools where employees work in various spreadsheets and documents, edit videos, create music, etc. Some apps are dedicated to schedules and business process execution and tracking. They can be tax calculators, project management tools, schedulers, document readers, and more.
• Enterprise-level mobile apps – these are the mobile apps that were designed for specific business needs. They can include expense tracking apps, accounting mobile applications, ERP systems with integrated mobile apps, salesforce automation apps, customer support apps, and more.
• Mobile payment apps – mobile payment apps are a convenient tool used by many users today. The apps allow paying with a smartphone at stores, making purchases online, performing P2P transactions, and much more. Often, banking and financial organizations include a mobile payment feature in their more complex solutions.

Benefits of Mobile Apps for Business

While there is a great diversity of apps that companies can develop, they should clearly understand how the requested solution can enhance their business performance and development. Here are some examples of how companies can benefit from building their own mobile apps.

New Sales Opportunities

People always have a smartphone at their hands which is a perfect opportunity for businesses to offer their products and services. Very often people do online shopping spontaneously: while waiting for a friend, staying in a traffic jam, or having lunch at work. Such moments are the right time to encourage them to shop or arouse interest in them and later stimulate them to make a purchase.

For example, you can use push notifications about new deals to re-engage with buyers. When they see a notification like that, they may want to open your web store to learn more about the deal. By giving your customers the possibility to shop whenever and wherever they want you can significantly increase sales.

Higher Retention Rates

Deep customer engagement in marketing activities and spending more time in-app results in increased customer loyalty and, therefore, better retention rates. It’s much easier to achieve higher customer engagement via a mobile app than via a website today. The reason is simple – mobile apps are easy to reach and follow. Businesses can send offering and brand updates to their customers at any time and make sure that they will be quickly checked, virtually staying in touch with their followers 24/7.

Moreover, running smart marketing campaigns for mobile apps, helps businesses make their customers stay in-app longer than usual and participate in engaging activities. BusinessOfApps states that 90% of users who visit a mobile app at least once a week are more likely to convert into long-term users.

Rich Data for Analysis

Mobile apps are increasingly being used for product search and browsing, sending notifications for new products, or making purchases and payments. By collecting and analyzing customer behavior, you can uncover unique buying patterns that can help you create more effective marketing campaigns.

Mobile functionality allows you to monitor user interaction and gives you valuable insights about your customers, such as audience composition, session length, responsiveness to specific features and content,  feedback, etc. This can help make beneficial changes and updates, provide a personalized experience, and create an advanced marketing plan and successful promotional campaigns.

Better Connectivity with Customers

A well-established communication with customers is one of the ways to improve customer satisfaction. The information should be quick and simple to access, therefore, having solid customer support and providing timely customer updates is essential.

Many companies include customer support and push notification features in the requested apps thereby improving their customer communication effectiveness many times. Let’s compare the engagement rates of push notifications with traditional email marketing.

According to a study made by Xtify, 30% to 60% of users open a push notification, compared to just 20% of emails, and 40% of users click or have an interaction with a push notification compared to just 5.4% of emails. To reach prospective buyers via social media or email, you need to rely on them seeing your advertisement, clicking a link just to get to your website, and then converting from there. With push notifications, messages appear directly on users’ home screens and they just need to open the message and get redirected straight to the app to buy the product.

Customer Loyalty

Loyalty is a key factor in customer retention. Today, customers expect to have everything at their fingertips and it’s impossible to keep pace with their expectations without offering products and services online . One of the easiest ways to attract customers is to put these offerings into their pockets. Moreover, many mobile app users  say that if they find the mobile experience uninterrupted, it will make them come back for more.  Achieving this loyalty when it comes to desktop websites is no easy task.

Psychologically, loyalty programs encourage users to increase their average order value and return for services and products more frequently. Many companies already have loyalty programs on their websites but running the same promotion through a mobile app will be even more effective.

Increased Conversion Rates

The enhanced UX, usability, and easy navigation can help to increase conversion rates. The ease to access encourages users to stay for long on the app and thus, increases conversion rates.

According to Criteo, customers view 4 times more items during one session in a mobile app, than on an adaptive website. Moreover, 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.

However, if you want great conversion rates, you’ll have to work on your app’s engagement factors. Around 25 percent of iOS users and 20 percent of Android users open the app once a day after downloading it. But the number decreases to 3.2 and 3.3 percent respectively a month after the installation.

Increased Average Order Value

As mentioned above, more products are viewed per session on mobile apps. Mobile apps have a higher average order value than both mobile browsers and desktop apps.

The high order value is strongly influenced by push notifications and how they are used. You should carefully plan the frequency of push notifications not to frustrate users by sending too many of them  over a short period of time, or not to lose buyers by not sending any over a long period.

Reduced Cart Abandonment Rates

Shopping cart abandonment is one of the main and most frustrating problems e-commerce businesses face. The reason why it’s so frustrating is that the buyer is usually just one click away from making the purchase.

About 70 percent of customers leave their shopping carts even before buying anything. The main reasons why users don’t finalize purchasing include high shipping/extra costs, account creation, slow processes, and fewer payment options – they are usually termed as a poor shopping experience. Great mobile app design can eliminate them all. Simply optimizing checkout forms can help you reduce the cart abandonment rate by up to 20 percent.

Another benefit is that once a customer buys something, all of their preferences and personal data are saved in the app. So when they get back to buy something again, they won’t have to enter their personal and billing information again. The entire purchase process can be completed in just a few clicks.

Managed Brand and Business Development

With custom-developed mobile apps, companies gain entire control of how they run and develop their brand and business. They don’t depend on any web-platform and its rules while remaining present online.

What do businesses get when they develop a custom mobile solution? Here are the opportunities they can seize:

• Branding – you can build your own brand identity, using unique app design, colors, logo, effects, and animations.
• Security – mobile app developers use the latest protection technologies in their solutions such as two-factor authentication, data encryption, compliance and integrity with international security requirements, and many others. This way, companies can effectively protect their customer personal data, avoiding sharing it with third-party platforms.
• Scalability – modern mobile apps are always built with their scalability in mind. This way, companies can simply add more power to their apps as their business grows.
• Enhanced customer engagement and interaction – personalized updates and push notifications on products and services, time-efficient customer support, 24/7 chatbots, simple ordering and payment, and much more – all these factors improve customer satisfaction and result in higher customer retention, compared to other means of online interaction with them.

Bottom Line

As mobile apps become more and more popular, buyers expect them to become a part of any brand’s customer experience. It’s only a matter of time before mobile apps become a compulsory channel for any business, so if you want to stay ahead of the competition, you can’t ignore the trend.

Now that you understand why mobile apps are so important for running a successful business, it’s time to take action. This may sound a little intimidating if you’ve never created an app before. However, building an app isn’t that difficult, even if you don’t have any technical background. If you need help with upgrading the existing solution or want us to create a mobile app from scratch, just contact us. We’ll be happy to provide you with the assistance you need.