The world is turning digital. And at a pace unimaginable! Smartphones have undoubtedly gained an upper hand over the desktops and laptops today. With the ever-increasing demand for smartphones, mobile apps have also become a rage of late. Be it booking a travel ticket, listening to the news, watching your favorite shows, etc. there’s a mobile app for everything.
The stat that the total count of app downloads last year was $204 bn proves the worth of mobile apps. So, if you are an estore owner and don’t have a Magento mobile app, watch out! You may have lagged behind your competitors already.
And still, if that didn’t make our case, then let’s analyze the factors that make a mobile app highly rewarding for both:
(i) Your Business and (ii) Your customers.
Benefits of a Mobile App for Your Business
1. Branding and Design
Unlike in the case of your eCommerce site, a browser doesn’t decide your app design or functions of your app. Therefore, it has an upper hand over a site. Free from browser dependency on browser elements or caching issues, you gain full control of your app.
By including additional swipe features like hold, double-tap, pinch, etc., you can make your app more user-friendly.
By customizing your app color, layout, etc. in subsequent upgrades; you can sync your app with your brand vision.
You can also turn your mobile app into your all-time salesman and brand ambassador.
2. Ever-Lasting Bonding with Customers
Enabling/disabling notifications, newsletters subscription, password saving, and more such features can make a mobile app immersive.
They can help your customers to bond with you on a deeper level.
Moreover, your existing customers may spread the word of mouth about your organization. This ultimately won’t only retain your current consumer base but also broaden it further.
3. Reduction in Cart Abandonment Rate
A long and tiring checkout process of several steps may sometimes put off customers. This eventually may result in their abandoning the checkout process in the middle. This results in a high cart abandonment rate on sites.
With your store app, you can turn the corner. With the ‘single-page checkout’ functionality, you can ease the order placement process for customers.
As a result, your cart abandonment rate will come down, boosting your sales.
4. Higher Conversion Rates
Simplifying the navigation process, including user-friendly features, and designing an engaging interface may be highly acceptable among your users. With a better shopping experience, the conversion rate goes up.
Related: 7 Important Website Features For Increased Ecommerce Conversion Rates
5. The Rise in Your Site SEO Potential
No more does Google rank only your site content. It now ranks your app content as well. A suitable app name, the right set of keywords, and other similar strategies can rank your app high.
Due to higher ranking and visibility, people notice your app more. Hence, your app can indirectly lead to a rise in the number of downloads and indirectly your brand reputation.
Thus, a mobile app helps you raise both your app downloads and site SEO potential.
5. Rise in Productivity at a Reduced Expenditure
A mobile app makes not only your front-end management but also your backend management more efficient. You can offer products, reply to customers, manage feedback, and monitor users’ behavior. With readily available charts and reporting tools, you can track sales as well.
Similarly, a training app can help you reduce the time for training your employees about your product(s) as it does away with the need for lengthier training sessions from a professional. Employees don’t have to take their time out for such sessions out of their busy schedules. And they get more time for the ‘actual’ work.
The icing on the cake is that your expenditure on training your employees also goes down alongside.
Besides, an inventory management app can help you keep track of your inventory items on the go. You can place orders with vendors, view order statuses, add or remove items, and furthermore that too, right from within your mobile app.
These measures can combine to help boost your productivity by even up to 40%.
6. Higher Loading Speed
Generally, an eCommerce site turns out to be slower than a store app. The reason is the difference in the data storage location. While a site stores its data on web servers, an app stores it on mobile devices. This localized data storage makes data retrieval faster.
From a technical perspective too, a website performs most of the functions using JS Code whereas an app uses a framework that can be 5 times faster than the JS code.
People, therefore, tend to prefer apps to sites nowadays and you can tap right into this preference to strike gold.
Related: Website Speed Optimization – What You Need to Know About It?
Benefits of a Mobile App for Your customers
1. App-Specific Offers and Discounts
To acknowledge your valuable customers, you can offer a loyalty program and offer additional perks or discounts. You can also start offering app-specific offers and discounts to your customers.
This way, your current customers will get encouraged to download your store app. They won’t only acknowledge the extra value they get but also may recommend downloading your app to others.
2. Enhancement of Overall Customers’ Experience
By providing features like:
- Voice Search – Lets users use a simple voice command to search for the product(s) they are looking for.
- Clicking and Sharing – You can motivate your customers to take snaps of different products and share them over social media. This initiative will make shopping an engaging experience for them. And your outreach will also go high with greater social media visibility.
- Live Tracking – It lets your customers track their orders on the go right from within the app. With full knowledge of the whereabouts of their orders, customers engage better with your store. They also consider it more reliable and worth purchasing products from.
- GPS – Turning this feature on eradicates the need for spending time manually filling shipping details. As it auto-detects the user’s current location and fills the shipping address fields. It also helps a user locate your physical stores in the vicinity if any.
- In-App Notifications – Are visible on a mobile app only when a user is actively using it. They give valuable info about the latest sales and discounts to active users and prolong their sessions.
There are several others, you can add to customers’ convenience greatly.
Push Notifications and Instant Updates
Push notifications are different from in-app notifications. They flash directly on a mobile screen irrespective of whether the app is open or not. They help customers stay up-to-date with the latest offers and discounts.
They also save the time of a customer otherwise would spend in opening the app and checking for the latest offerings.
By sending regular updates to your users via OTA, you can reduce users’ efforts even more. They won’t need to go to your app store to check for app upgrades. With just a click on the link in the OTA message, they can start downloading the upgrade.
Both these features combine to facilitate the app usage for a user greatly.
1. Personalization
Personalization is a new rage today. You can personalize information on the basis of a user’s interest, behavior, and location. This can personalize their shopping experience.
You can even tap into their search results, wish lists and purchase history to offer recommendations and filter product updates accordingly.
Such custom content not only attracts users more but also adds to their shopping convenience. Custom emails and text messages can also add to their engagement.
With all these personalization strategies, your customers keep coming back to your store. Ultimately, your bottom line also increases.
2. Social Media Authorization and Deep Linking
The social media authorization feature lets your user register faster with your app. They don’t need to keep separate login credentials. It also helps a user log in to your app when they have forgotten their password.
Deep Linking is the use of URLs within a mobile app to link to specific pages or locations. You can implement deep linking in various ways:
- From Website to App
- Social Media to App
- Search Result to App
- Email/SMS to App
- Ad to App
This helps customers to view specifically what they want. It also helps you engage and re-engage app users with contextual deep linking.
By now, you must have started thinking of building a mobile app. One thing more to understand at this point, building a productive store app isn’t suffice alone. Just like you have to market your business, you’ll need to market your app as well.
How to Market Your Mobile App?
1. Research Well
Reaching out to the universal audience for your app is not viable. Rather, choose a particular group of customers for whom your product(s) are. Define their personas, demographics, psychographics, lifestyle, etc.
This targeted approach will be more productive for your app.
2. Research Competitors Well
Insights into competitors’ app design, features, and app marketing strategies can be highly beneficial. Using them, you can make your app stand out from theirs. You can analyze the major pain points of your competitors’ customers through app reviews, forum discussions, and social media platforms.
Accordingly, you can design an app that can take care of all these pain points. And help them with their issues.
Customers would definitely welcome such an app that contains a panacea for all their major issues and download your app in greater numbers directly contributing to your business expansion.
3. Increase Your App Visibility
Just like your website, your app also requires optimization. This helps your app rank higher in app store results. A higher ranking leads to higher app visibility.
Here are some factors your app search optimization (ASO) depends on. And ways you can optimize each of them.
- Title – Keep it readable, relevant and recognizable.
- Description – Insert well-researched keywords and design an engaging description for your audience. It should highlight all your app USPs.
- Icon – Focus on building an icon that goes the best with the essence of your app.
- Screenshots – Include the most important functionalities and features of your app.
4. Make Your Landing Page Engaging
Create your mobile app landing page in a way that it keeps users informed and engaged. It should be creative and include all the key elements – app name, features, call-to-action, promo video, etc.
5. Create Viral Videos
YouTube is a great means of spreading the word today. You can market your app on YouTube by starting a channel.
An introductory promo video is an ideal choice to start with. Following that, you can keep posting timely videos to get more subscriptions and encourage viewers to visit your site and app.
6. Start Blogging
Keep updating your audience about the app development. Blogging on a regular basis can increase their curiosity and build interest around your brand. Select the right keywords, create quality content, and get in touch with influencers. This all will help you rank your blog higher and people may start anticipating more from you. The buzz around your brand will boost your app downloads.
7. Use Social Networking
Social media platforms are great for business promotion. They help you know your target audience’s hobbies and interests better.
You can use a combo of:
- Paid Ads
- Influencer marketing
- User-generated content
- Reviews and ratings to market your app.
8. Measure Your App KPIs
Measuring your app key performance indicators (KPIs) is highly recommendable.
You should keep a track of
- App Downloads – The count of app installs.
- Daily App Users (DAU) – The number of users who use the app
daily. - Monthly App Users – The number of users who use the app at least
once a month. - Retention Rate – The percentage of customers who visit your app
again after their first visit, and other such indicators.
This information helps assess your overall app performance. Accordingly, you can plan new strategies and strengthen your current ones.
To Wrap Up
A Magento 2 mobile app is highly helpful for both you and your customers. While it is a cost-effective and productive solution for your business, it is more convenient and faster for your customers.
So, go build your store app right away and rule the market!
