Mobile apps can push your company’s website, which is already the center of your universe, into a much bigger galaxy.
Ultimately, this new addition will mean more prospects and brand ambassadors.
Mobile apps are the next-level marketing play most organizations are missing.
From productivity to health, travel, lifestyle and food, almost everything is at the tip of our fingers with a mobile app. Studies have shown that 80% of shoppers use a smartphone to look up store, product and service information online. Apps account for 69% of the total media time a user spends on their smartphones. This is mainly because responsive websites accessed through mobile devices do not provide the same level of functionality as a mobile app.
This means that more and more users prefer using mobile devices for checking weather, making dinner reservations and online shopping to name just a few. While having a digital presence is imperative, building your business around a responsive website is no longer going to cut it. Mobile apps are much more user-friendly, have integrated features and offer far more value in terms of customer loyalty and brand management.
Why Mobile Apps are the Next Step After Websites
There are six compelling reasons why you should convert your website into a mobile app. (I saved the best for last.) Here they are:
- Better personalization – providing enhanced customer engagement: When users can connect with a brand’s personality, it creates a deeper bond and customer loyalty. Mobile apps can offer enhanced personalization specific to the user’s preference. It helps you track in-app user activity and offers filtered recommendations based on that behavior. An app also can require personal sign-ins by users, which can have a great impact on generating leads. With integrated sign-in features, you can even generate user data across the web. This will help you create targeted ads customized to specific preferences or locations. Using an A/B testing tool, you can experiment with different strategies to optimize the customer experience.
- Ease of sending notifications: Apps allow you to send timely messages directly to your customer’s phone via Push Notifications. These notifications are of two types: push and in-app. Both are exciting alternatives for communicating with app users in a far less intrusive manner. The ability to send instant, non-intrusive notifications to users is so desirable that it is one of the key reasons why many businesses want to have a mobile app in the first place. These messages can include coupons, promotions, special product offerings, as well as links to your shopping cart, school alerts or other reminders and messages.
- Leveraging integrated features: When you convert a website into an app, you can immediately start integrating extra features on the device. Your app can let customers use GPS to automatically track location and match it with your service areas. Integration with maps can help your customer locate your physical store. Mobile cameras can help users scan and search for a particular product. They can even upload images of defective products to resolve customer-service issues. Support of face and fingerprint detection can help with quick credential authorization and one-click purchase. Social media integrations within the app allow for easy sharing of viral content. This also pushes your digital marketing activities to a whole new level. It can extend your app’s reach and boost conversions while developing your brand story in exciting ways.
- Ability to work offline: Just like a website, an app is also dependent on the internet to offer full-scale functionality to its users. However, while a website cannot be accessed offline, some features of an app can still be available for offline use. Offline functionalities drain very little battery from the device, while still allowing users to get basic information.
- Increase brand presence: It can be said that on average a user spends almost every day on their device’s installed apps. This daily activity is a branding opportunity for apps. Users spend a substantial amount of their time on mobile devices. Even when users are not actively using a mobile app, they get reminded of the brand associated with the app. The icon of the app acts like a mini-advertisement for the brand. The presence of an app on any device helps subconsciously influence the user’s perception of that brand. Mobile users spend 89% of their time on mobile apps and just 11% of the time on mobile websites.
- Apps can work faster than websites – A well-designed mobile app can perform actions much quicker than a mobile website. Apps usually store their data locally on mobile devices, unlike websites that generally use web servers. For this reason, data retrieval happens swiftly in mobile apps. There is also a technical justification as to why mobile apps can work faster: Mobile websites use JavaScript code to perform most of their functions, and the framework that mobile apps use can run almost five times faster than a JavaScript code! While all this happens in the background, users get to complete actions quicker on the front-end of mobile apps, again contributing to a delightful user experience.
Still Wondering Whether to Go for Mobile App Development?
Developing both a mobile website and mobile app for your business can prove to be a costly affair, and you may have to choose one of the two channels based on your budget and business goals. While both channels have their own pros and cons, mobile apps can help you get higher conversions and retention. Mobile apps offer greater personalization and operational efficiency, along with multiple other exclusive features.