You may be wondering whether your brand needs a mobile app. Let’s think about it together. The key is whether the potential benefits of having an app justify the substantial investment. After all, you have a cool website that works well on a phone. Your brand’s social media profiles are well managed, and most of your content is available on mobile devices. Perhaps that’s enough for the moment?
Let’s take a look at what unique benefits the app offers and judge for yourself how important they are for your business.
Big data = big money
A mobile application is a unique source of information about your customers. Thanks to it you can learn in-depth about the shopping behaviour, preferences and even taste of your consumers. You can collect information about their location, mobility, shopping patterns, life activities unrelated to the brand, but important for their categorisation. Such data should determine what message, at what time, and to which category of customer you reach. Consider how important consumer data is to your organisation, how much it costs to acquire it and whether you can use it to increase sales and ROI from your marketing activities. Perhaps the cost of a mobile app is not such a big deal in this context.
Loyalty programme
If you have a loyalty program, you absolutely need to build an app. Plastic cards and stamp boxes not only trump the mouse, but most importantly are ineffective. Besides the fact that your brand will avoid the dinosaur patch, thanks to a loyalty app you will additionally gain:
- more program participants: A CodeBroker report shows that as many as 70% of customers are more likely to choose a loyalty program with a mobile application;
- Easy access to the program gives you instant gratification: You have a constant possibility to communicate with program participants;
- You can encourage participants to share the benefits of the programme on social media, which will attract even more participants.
How do you learn from your competitors?
If your direct competitors have mobile applications, you have no choice but to build one too. Without an app, you are not only losing in terms of image, but above all you are offering a lower, less friendly process for purchase, service and loyalty. It’s too late to take the lead, but you can learn from the market and build the perfect app.
I buy on my phone if I have an app
It doesn’t matter what you sell, but if you sell online, sooner or later you need to build an app. According to Google, 80% of customers start and 60% complete the purchase process on a mobile device. At the same time, 52% say that a poor UX on mobile discourages them from further interaction. The role of a mobile application in e-commerce is a topic for a separate entry, and we promise that it will appear soon.
Invaluable communication tool
A mobile application gives an opportunity to send a personalised message to a customer at any time. The message can be dependent on specific behaviour, location, type of activity and much more. No other channel allows for such precise targeting and such a large diversification of the message. And all this without charging for ad space, clicks or impressions. If your brand is an active advertiser, it is worth reviewing the cost and effectiveness of some of your media activities in this context. It is possible that from this perspective, the cost of building an application will seem ridiculously small.
Apps are certainly a high entry cost, but the return on this investment can pay off very quickly. Provide your users with a unique, new and necessary experience and use the collected data for personalised communication and offer presentation.
