Our love affair with smartphones is coming up on its 15 year anniversary (Crystal for those of you looking to get a gift), and our passion for all things handheld shows no signs of slowing down.
With 90% of adults in the UK owning a smartphone – and 95% of those smartphones being used daily – investing in application development is an attractive and cost effective marketing strategy for boosting customer engagement and long-term business growth.
With reports showing Android and iOS app revenue reached $133 billion in 2021, a 19% year-on-year increase, most businesses now recognise that they will have to develop custom mobile applications in order to remain competitive in an increasingly digital future. Here are some of the benefits that helped them decide if App Development was their best next step.
If the last couple of years have taught us anything, it is that our businesses have unexpected traditional limits that we need to adapt around, and the one reliable investment has proven to be any effort to digitise your business and meet your users where they are. Software solutions play an essential role in this, whether it is implementing a chatbot, or digitising the management of client operations to increase the capacity of teams to take on new business.
Customers today expect businesses to help them with any issues regarding products and services right away, and the companies that meet this expectation are the ones they will come back to time and again. An app can act as your business representative, available day or night, to answer questions and fulfil the demands of users, saving you from paying for 24/7 staffing.
People spend almost five hours on their phones every single day. That means your target customers are spending a third of their waking hours in the day looking at their phones, and businesses like yours have an unbelievable opportunity to engage with your target market. Apps are shown to increase the overall time that a consumer spends with a brand, which in turn increases the odds of a sale.
Researchers have also found that when a customer accesses a mobile application, they increase the number of both online and offline purchases. And they are also far less inclined to shop around for options from other competitors. So it really comes as no surprise that mobile e-commerce accounts for almost 40% of total digital revenue.
With customers spending increasing amounts of time on their apps in the day, those businesses are able to collect much better data and gain incredible insights to inform their decision making. This is one of the least expensive forms of data collections (as much as 70% less expensive according to some studies) with huge strategic value as these analytics allow businesses to improve their user experience and marketing efficacy, optimise pricing, reduce churn, and increase sales.
Using the user data collected, you can easily conclude what your users want, provide services accordingly, and earn their trust. Taking this data and putting it into action provides a way to not only improve your overall product, but also an avenue to cater to each user’s individual need through personalised services that will encourage users to use the app again and again.
Push notifications are fast becoming one of the most effective ways to reach a customer. Coupled with the vast amounts of user data a business can collect from an app, and you have an incredibly powerful medium for engaging customers with personalised alerts that are of value to them. Acting almost as an assistant to them, looking out for their interests in your products. For example, if they haven’t logged in for a while, you can bring them back to your app with a well designed message, like an alert that the item they viewed but didn’t purchase is now on sale. These alerts can be relevant to what they have done in the app or any other data that you have collected, either way it will increase engagement and relevance of said engagement.
The development of mobile applications has redefined the way customers and businesses interact, providing a far more convenient and exciting touchpoint for the provision of services. A brilliantly designed app, offering a tailored on demand experience of the best of a business – is an incredible combination that helps a business learn more than ever about its market, reach new heights in sales and retention, and even expand its operational capacity over current limits.
Beginning your mobile app journey is one of the most important steps you can take as a business, and outsourcing is the most cost-efficient way to develop high-quality applications. The combination of specialised talent, reduced time to market, and pan-industry expertise that agencies provide is an integral element of success.
Talk to our team today about how an app could help you build connections with your customers.