5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Mobile App to Succeed in the New Reality
If 2020 showed us anything is that having a mobile presence was often the difference between surviving the crisis caused by the global pandemic or not. Unfortunately for many companies, doing business the old fashioned way was no longer cutting it in light of the recent economically disastrous events and many of them saw the real value of digital solutions.
In our new reality, having a mobile app is no longer a luxury, it’s a way of extending your business into the digital realm at a time when the customer’s direct physical interaction with your product or service is literally restricted. Confined by lockdowns and quarantine, consumers are now spending an unprecedented number of hours on their mobile devices, 1.6 trillion hours in the first half of 2020 alone, to be exact. In April 2020, Among Android users alone, the average user spent about 27% of their waking hours on their mobile, that’s a 20% increase from 2019.
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Needless to say, if your business isn’t mobile or if the mobile experience you’re providing to your customers is subpar, you’re missing out. In case this intro alone wasn’t sufficient enough to convince you, let’s take a look at a slew of other reasons why you need an app for your business.
1. Improve Customer Retention and Engagement
Since the pandemic has interrupted buyer behavior, customers are now turning to digital solutions to continue to get the products and services that they need. And by digital, we mean mobile. Desktop usage continues to decrease, as more and more people prefer to interact with their favorite businesses through the palm of their hand. This is largely because a mobile app is more convenient than a web interaction and makes the interaction with your brand that much more seamless.
If your website isn’t optimized for mobile or uses tools that have an awkward UI on mobile screens, a custom mobile app is the solution for you. An app that is frill-free and has an intuitive UX will delight your users and keep them coming back for more.
2. Access to In-Depth Customer Behavior Insights
Understanding your customers is the key to business success, and mobile apps give you the opportunity to collect invaluable insights about your users and their interactions with your brand. You can find out their geographic and demographic information, how much time they spend in your app, which features they use most and which features are least popular, etc., which you can use to further improve your offering and provide an even better experience.
3. Take Your Marketing and Customer Experience to the Next Level
Today’s sophisticated customer expects personalized experiences from his favorite brands, and a mobile app allows you to provide exactly that. By leveraging the customers’ profile information, businesses can interact with them individually in real-time via personalized marketing, push notifications and loyalty programs. This improved user experience, in turn, helps customers to develop a deeper relationship with the business and contributes to greater customer retention.
An app also allows you to improve direct communication with your customers. Today’s customer service is no longer about cheery associates greeting customers in brick and mortar locations or over the phone. In fact, many businesses view their apps as one of the means to improve their customer service. A solid mobile app with an intuitive UX and an engaging interface is a way to present your business in the best possible light. To take this one step further, many companies also choose to add a help desk or a chat feature to their app, allowing customers to voice additional inquiries or to perform basic booking, ordering, and scheduling actions directly through the app.
4. Increase Sales
One of the most obvious benefits of mobile applications is that they boost sales. They increase customer engagement by extending the overall time consumers spend with your brand, which, in turn, contributes to your sales efforts. This is why m-commerce is expected to generate about 73% of all retail e-commerce this year.
Having your app already installed on their phones means that customers don’t have to go to their browsers and look for your URL. They get to interact with your brand without all the distracting noise and clutter, which further streamlines the sales process. Apps also allow you to send special promotional offers via push notifications directly to your client’s phones and create various loyalty programs, which helps you maintain customer interest in your products and continuously incentivizes them to buy from you.
5. Improve Your Employee Experience
So what are employee experience apps? They are tools that in one way or another allow your workforce to quickly find the resources they need and access them on the go and easily collaborate with each other in order to be even more efficient throughout their day. These apps are becoming increasingly popular, taking into account the fact that employee engagement or a lack thereof continues to cost companies considerable amounts of revenue and remains a pressing issue in many organizations. In fact, a study by Gallup found that “only 15% of employees worldwide and 35% in the US fall in the ‘engaged’ category.”
This is why many companies utilize the benefits of mobile apps not just for their clients and customers, but also for their employees, which has proven to be especially relevant in this age of COVID-induced remote work. These types of apps have become essential with an evolving global economy, new employee expectations, and a redefined workplace.
Is your company leveraging all the benefits of a mobile app at this time of uncertainty? If you’re a mobile product manager contemplating an app to manage the disruption caused by COVID-19, we’d love to hear from you and discuss your needs and challenges.
