A mobile app is turning into an indispensable tool for businesses to increase their reach and profitability. While many companies are realizing the paramount importance of a mobile app for their target audience, a lot of businesses are still pondering over whether they should have a mobile app or not. What’s more, some business owners even think that they don’t need a mobile app and are not going to profit from it. If you also think about why your business needs mobile app development, let us show you the top reasons why you should go for it.
Before that, let’s take a look at what the latest statistics say about the use and acceptance of mobile apps.
- Nearly 90 percent of mobile internet time is spent on mobile apps. This reveals that companies not only need to optimize their websites for mobile but also create custom and responsive apps.
- More than 100,000 new Android apps and 30,000 new iOS apps are released in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store every month, respectively. Even though the number of Android users is far greater, businesses choose to build their apps for both platforms to maximize their reach.
- In 2019, about 204 billion apps were downloaded worldwide (excluding re-installs and app updates), and the number continues to soar. Not having a mobile app can mean you are missing out on potential customers and sales.
- Gen Z (between the ages of 13 and 24) spends 71 percent of their online time on smartphone apps. If your audience falls in this category, creating a mobile app might be one of the best decisions for your business.
A user-friendly and interesting mobile app can put your business ahead of the curve. However, you still need to know what kinds of benefits your business is going to enjoy through mobile app development. While having a mobile app can bring so many benefits, we are going to walk you through the most important reasons why any business should develop a mobile app.
Reasons Why Your Business Needs Mobile App Development to Outperform Your Competitors
- Enhanced Accessibility
When we talk about accessibility in the context of a mobile app, it can mean two things. First, accessibility can refer to the reach among the audience through different platforms. While consumers can easily download apps through Google Play and Apple App Store, they can find apps through a wide variety of platforms, such as social media install campaigns, in-app banner ads, interstitial ads, websites, other apps, and more. Meaning, with a mobile app, you can woo your customers in innumerable ways.
Second, mobile app accessibility refers to the accessibility among not only normal users but also users with special needs. Did you know 15 percent of the world’s population (over 1 billion people) has some form of disability? In India, over 30 million people are disabled, while the number of disabled people in the United States is 61 million. By embedding accessibility features, such as audio description, captioning, speech, and TalkBack/VoiceOver, you can make sure that everyone (of course in your target audience) can benefit from your products and services despite their disabilities.
While people with mobility issues are least likely to visit your store and less likely to use your website, they will be more willing to buy or interact with your app if it has in-built accessibility features.
This way, you can develop a robust relationship with your customers, increase customer loyalty, and create a genuine customer base.
- Better Target Your Audience
Apps are not just the way to serve your customers better but also provide an easy way to learn about your users and better target your audience based on their specific needs and interests. Whenever a person downloads your app to ask a question, schedule an appointment, or make a purchase, you have an additional channel to collect relevant information about them to improve their buying experience. However, asking for permission to automatically collect data is still recommended to comply with data privacy guidelines.
Besides, mobile apps also allow app administrators to learn about the users’ interest in specific offers and products. Using this information, they can plan better advertisements campaigns for their users, customize them for different audiences, and offer a personalized experience to increase engagement and interaction with the brand.
- Make Business Management More Efficient
A highly functional, easy-to-use, and interactive mobile app allows you to efficiently manage your business operations that involve interaction with existing and potential customers. It can strengthen your customer service, reduce the burden on customer support staff, and help avoid making errors in managing appointments, fulfilling deliveries, catering to return requests, refund process, and more.
Mobile apps allow you to streamline many operations, automate appointments, send updates about their orders and queries automatically, and even answer commonly asked questions.
To understand this better, let us take the example of bank apps. By offering an advanced and interactive app, a bank app can answer the common queries of customers through their chatbot. Plus, through easy-to-use apps, banks encourage their users to carry out simple tasks such as fund transfers, opening a Fixed Deposit/Recurring Deposit, checking their bank statements anytime, anywhere, and a lot more.
By offering a variety of functions through mobile apps, banks are succeeding in increasing the engagement rate of their users, reducing the staff burden, and building a wider audience base. That is quite an enormous achievement in a field where people feel more susceptible, vulnerable, and skeptical.
Another great example of succeeding through mobile app development is Domino’s. The share price of the pizza company hit an all-time low during 2008. To recover from this situation, among other initiatives, the company launched a mobile app in 2011 to allow its customers to order pizza quickly with ease and track their order right from the moment they place orders to the moment they get pizza on their hands.
Around 60 percent of domestic sales were made either online or via a handheld device by 2017. Now, the company has left its competitors like Pizza Hut and Papa John’s behind. And the company is not stopping there as it is also working on allowing its customers to place their orders through their watch, messenger, and smart speakers. Without a mobile app, things might have been quite different for this pizza brand.
- Help Engage with Customers On the Go
These days, most of us are very busy with our work lives, caring for our loved ones, and making ends meet. In the United States, about 13 million people have more than one job. More than 43 million adults provide care to a person with a disability. One of the things common among these two groups of people is their busyness in life. More people find it difficult to have quality time or have free time to go outside for shopping these days. The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in more people going digital and placing orders online. Providing them with an easy way to fulfill their needs everywhere is something that you can do easily with a mobile app.
In the case of websites, people often need to recall the URL address for quick access. If they remember more than one website, the chances to use your website get reduced. However, when a person has an app already downloaded on their mobile phone, they are less likely to think about other apps to place an order. Everyone likes convenience, and the shortcut icon of an app on the mobile gives this convenience to users. Offering an app is like giving them a way to keep your business in their pocket all the time. They can use it while traveling, before sleeping, during lunch hours, or anytime anywhere they want.
- Drive-up Sales and Thrive Business
With a mobile app, businesses can boost their sell-through rates (sales that reach the end consumers). Apps can help businesses segment their audiences, track their consumers’ behavior and cross-sell and up-sell their products based on consumers’ browsing and purchasing history. With a mobile app, your business can engage customers by reaching out to them regardless of where they are, gain their attention through exclusive and special offers, and nudge them to complete the purchase seamlessly.
App push notifications have proven to be more effective in increasing sell-through rates when compared to other methods, especially email marketing. However, to benefit from the feature of push notifications, you need to use it wisely. For instance, send mobile app push notifications at the right time (notifying users of the upcoming sale and then let them know of special offers like discount codes).
Never be too pushy and always give them a way to opt-out; otherwise, users can get frustrated and may even uninstall the app altogether. On the other hand, if you use your notification strategy right, you can entice your customers to re-install your mobile app as all these process are part of digital marketing strategy.
Having said that, you should not create an app just to have an app!
You need to create an app that makes buying your products and using your services easier and enhances their experience with your brand.
Your app should give consumers a reason to download and use your app actively. Although app stores are being loaded with hundreds and thousands of new apps each day, most people are not downloading this many apps these days. Surprisingly, the average number of apps being downloaded in the United States is slowly going down. However, this doesn’t mean you should not have an app. You need it to outsell your competition and boost your ROI. All you need to know the reasons what makes people to uninstall or not use an app.
A lot of people uninstall apps due to a variety of reasons, such as:
- The apps are not in use.
- Users have limited storage.
- Apps are loaded with excessive advertising.
- Apps send too many notifications.
All these reasons boil down to just one thing – poor user experience. Meaning, poor UX is downright the failure of a mobile app.
Thus, when you step up to work with a mobile app development team, make sure that your focus is on developing a mobile app that offers a seamless user experience and amazing interaction in every way rather than just offering a way to shop online.
