Having a mobile app for business becomes a necessity for many businesses to compete in this highly digitalized world. You may not like it, but that’s the truth.
The number of smartphone users worldwide is higher than 6 billion. On average, a smartphone user spends just over 3 hours on their device. And guess what? Over 90% of that time is spent on apps. This shows that the mobile app industry is growing rapidly.
In the year 2024, the mobile app industry is expected to generate more than $900 billion in revenue. This highlights the growing demand for mobile apps.
Now, let’s understand why businesses need a mobile app?
Why Should Your Business Have A Mobile APP?
There are businesses whose entire business models revolve around mobile apps. Ever heard of Airbnb, Uber, Lyft? Then, there are businesses that use mobile apps to support their operations. Here’s a list of some of them.
- Amazon
- Target
- Starbucks
- IKEA
- Walmart
- Domino’s
- McDonald’s
- Nike
- Home Depot
- Hilton
- Zara
- Marriot
- Chick-fil-A
All of these are well known and established businesses with multiple stores around the US and around the world. Ever wondered why do they need a mobile app? That’s because that’s what the modern digitalized world demands.
Users no longer want to take time out of their busy routines to go shopping. They can just sit and relax at their home and shop from their smartphones. Apart from this, having a mobile app for your business comes with its own set of benefits.
Let’s have a look at them.
Benefits Of Having A Mobile App For Your Business
Having a mobile app for your business offers multiple benefits. From increased visibility to attracting new customers and new revenue streams. You can’t go wrong with a mobile app.
1- Gets More Eyes On Your Business
According to Apple, over 600 million people visit the App store per week on average. And considering most smartphone users around the world are android users, when you put in Google Play, this number can easily cross a billion visits per week. This presents businesses of all sizes with a unique opportunity to get in front of new potential customers.
Let’s face it, every business owner thinks their business is unique and the best in the market, and rightly so. However, it won’t help if you don’t take active measures to increase your brand awareness. Investing in a mobile app is a good way to do so.
2- Increases Engagement
All businesses strive for high engagement rates. This is because the higher the engagement rates, the higher conversion rates.
In a highly digitalized world where the average attention span of humans has become less than that of a goldfish, having high engagement rates is a blessing for any business. This means that they have successfully captured their audience’s attention, and their audience is actively thinking or talking about their business.
This means that businesses can use mobile apps as a part of their marketing strategy and increase their overall engagement rates. At the end of the day, as a business owner, all that matters for you is higher conversion rates.
It doesn’t have to be through social media ads or banner ads. You can place ads on your mobile app. This is a great strategy because users interact 60% more with native mobile app ads than banner ads. Providing you with an opportunity to drive even more revenue.
3- Higher Customer Satisfaction
As a business owner you must always strive for your customers to be highly satisfied. To ensure that this happens, you need to provide exceptional customer service. By investing in a mobile app, you provide your customers with an additional touchpoint to interact with your brand.
This gives you an opportunity to provide exceptional service to your customers. All you have to do to ensure that is maintain a meaningful, straightforward, and efficient line of communication with your customers. By doing this, you’ll be able to help the customers get what they need more effectively.
Other than providing exceptional customer service, consumers themselves prefer to have mobile communications. As talked about earlier, the consumers no longer want to take out time to go out and shop. They want to be able to buy what they want from the comfort of their home or on the go.
This is largely because of the time when we were all locked in our houses and couldn’t go out. Those few months spoiled us a lot. Since, more than 60% of consumers aged between 18 and 44 use mobile apps to seek a service, more than once per month.
4- Promotes Customer Loyalty
Having a mobile app for your business can also lead to fostering loyalty among your customers. As we have already established, your customers want to interact with your business through their smartphones. You can implement a strategy to use your mobile app to cater to this need of your customers.
As for how and what the strategy should be? You can use the mobile app as a direct channel of communication with your customers. Establishing a direct channel of communication is a huge advantage that many businesses strive for.
This provides you the opportunity to segment your audience and then target each segment of your audience through personalized messages and unique offers. This will give your business a unique ability to strengthen and nurture positive connections with your customers. And as we all know, positive connections are the key to long-term retention rates.
You can add a reward system or some gamification elements in your app. You can use these to offer unique perks and benefits to loyal customers. These benefits can be in the form of unique offers or cashback rewards. Doing this strategically will help you retain your customers for a long time.
5- Helps Gain Insights
Gaining valuable insights into your customers is one of the most notable benefits of investing in a mobile app. These insights can help you as a business owner in understanding your users’ preferences and needs at a more granular level.
When users create their accounts or log into the app, data is produced. This data can then be analyzed by the businesses to understand the needs of different segments of their audience/users. You can then use this information to provide personalized experiences to your users.
You can even use in-app surveys or rate the app tactics to identify any areas of improvement or the areas your audience wants you to improve within the app. Doing this will make your users feel more valued, this provides them a sense of belonging, that fosters better customer relations leading to higher retention rates.
6- Cost Effectiveness
With mobile apps you already have direct access to your customers. You can bank on it and use it as a marketing tool. However, you must be strategic about it and not over the top pushy. This means that you must not just keep sending push notifications to your customers.
If you do, chances are they’ll get annoyed and all the effort you made to build positive connections will go down the drain. By being strategic, I mean that you can use strategies like sending a discount code to a customer that hasn’t been active in a while.
This will encourage them to make a purchase and give more business to you. Not only that, you can also use push notifications to promote and build hype around any upcoming sale or promotion. Using these strategies can prove to be fruitful for your business.
And guess what it’ll cost you to do that? Probably less than running a social media ad campaign. Making mobile apps a highly cost-effective tool for marketing.
7- Differentiates Your Brand
Standing out in a crowded market isn’t that easy. However, it also doesn’t have to be hard. You can bank on the fact that most businesses don’t bat an eye when it comes to mobile apps.
It means that most business owners undervalue what a mobile app can do for their business or completely ignore it. This gives you an opportunity to offer a unique channel to your customers to interact with your business. Unique in the sense that most of your competitors do not have a mobile app for your business.
By having a mobile app for your business, you are able to stand out in a crowded market. You are able to effectively use a channel that is not as saturated as social media or even search engines.
8- Generate More Revenue
It is a simple formula that the better customer experience you provide the higher your profits will be. Since a mobile app allows you to offer more personalized experiences to the users, it leads to more revenue generation for your business.
We have already established that strategically using the mobile app can lead to higher brand visibility, customer satisfaction, and enhanced customer loyalty. All of these factors directly affect your business’s revenue streams. So, having a mobile app for your business ultimately benefits you in the long run.
Looking For A Mobile App?
Now that you understand why your business needs a mobile app, if you are looking to get one, New York Software Developers are at your service. You can reach out to us anytime, and our expert developers will make sure to create an app for your business that attracts visitors, converts them into paying customers, and helps generate more revenue for your business.
