Welcome to the “mobile-first” age.
While earlier generations might have labeled themselves as “TV-first” or “laptop-first,” there can be no doubt that the most important screen in most people’s lives right now is the one on their mobile phones. In just a few short years, and thanks to the devastating disruption of the pandemic, we’ve moved from doing digital to being digital. Today, there doesn’t seem to be any going back.
What does that mean? It shows the importance of good mobile app development. To deliver exceptional value and connects with consumers in 2022, your business must have a mobile app. Here are seven solid reasons why you should take mobile app development seriously.
Strengthen Your Brand Image
There’s enormous value in having your brand on the home screen of a user’s personal device. With a bright, bold logo, your app (and therefore your brand) sits comfortably alongside global icons such as Uber, Google, Spotify or whatever else a user has on their phone.
Those are very powerful associations to maintain, and they will serve to keep your brand top of mind with consumers, provided they’re using your app.
But the branding opportunities that come from designing good mobile applications can start even earlier. In Google Play or the App Store, you need to make sure you’re doing a good PR job — presenting your logo and a few key facts about what you do and how much users value it.
Those first impressions, including downloading and setting up the app, are also very important considerations for mobile app development. Spend a lot of time ensuring that your app downloads quickly and smoothly — and make a compelling case for why this app belongs on their most valuable digital devices.
Create a Direct Marketing Channel
One of the most powerful tools your app offers is the direct marketing channel it opens between brands and consumers. With a foot in the door via the app, you no longer have to send out general advertising messages that may or may not land with the consumer.
Now, you have real and direct marketing communication — one on one with a user. Great mobile app design opens the chain of communication between two parties. You will be able to use the data users are generating in the app to create and craft more effective marketing messages. Those messages can be informed by users’ history and interactions with you.
Direct marketing using informed data is a powerful tool that creates a valuable bond with your users.
Retain Loyal Customers
One of the phrases that marketers dread is “customer churn.” That refers to the percentage of consumers who stop using your products and services or delete their accounts during a certain time frame.
Retaining loyal customers is key to business growth, and your mobile app development can play a big role in that. Building a strong relationship is key. It can start with little things like sending a voucher on their birthday or offering them early special offers. By rewarding loyalty through what you say and how you act, you show your clientele that you really care about them and value their participation in your community.
The trick is to make everything easy for consumers and to keep your messaging fresh. Design of mobile applications has to be foundational. If they’re going to keep engaging with you, they need relevant content and incentives that keep them interested.
One of the most common mistakes businesses make is focusing too much of their attention on new customers and not enough on pleasing the customers they already have. Deploy your app to keep your customers happy, and never forget that it is cheaper to retain customers than it is to acquire them.
Offer More Value to Your Customers
Unless you’re specifically a media brand, your app has to find ways to deliver tangible value. What is your call to action? People don’t only want to read about something. They’re coming to your app to solve problems and meet needs in their lives.
Solving your users’ real-world problems using digital tools is the one thing your app can do better than any of your other tools. Consider, for example, apps that show you the nearest public toilet using geo-location, ones that notify you when there’s a blackout in your area, order your food, plan your routes home, involve your friends, and more. Those are the kinds of actions that apps perform better than anything else and add real value for your customers.
When you’re in a position to add value to people’s lives, they recognize and appreciate it — and they’re willing to pay for it. So the value begins to flow both ways. People don’t have to go anywhere or use anything else to turn that feeling into cash flow. Your app can solve a problem and monetize the solution all in one place.
Create Better Customer Connections
Connecting with your customers and making them feel part of a community is another reason you need excellent mobile app development. Customers build up stories and connections with you that lead to deeper, more profitable and more fulfilling relationships.
Mobile app design that works helps deliver ways for customers to tell your stories and be your brand ambassador through their own social channels. That happens with your app when you entertain people, educate them or make life just a little bit easier and better. People appreciate that, and they will share it with their audience.
Boost Your Profits
Mobile apps are an increasingly significant source of revenue. In 2020, the total ad revenue for apps was $581.9 billion. Plus, the mobile app revenue market is expected to reach $935 billion by 2023, according to TechJury.
Statistics like these show how profitable this market is with the right mobile app development framework.
Here are a few ways that you should consider boosting the profits from your app.
Use the Power of Push
Push notifications are unique to apps and provide a critical way of boosting your profits, provided your mobile app developers know how to use them strategically and in ways that don’t irritate the user.
In an interview with Forbes, Frederic Lalonde, the founder and CEO of Hopper made a revealing statement about push notifications, saying,
“We’ll send you a push notification when things change. And, today, for scale, we send over a billion push notifications. Ninety percent of our revenue comes directly from these push notifications. … So, it is a very, very successful value proposition to say, ‘Don’t do any work and save money.’ It’s what consumers want.’
Deliver In-App Advertising
In-app ads are a great way to boost profits. They may be a slight annoyance but many users are willing to sacrifice a small amount of convenience in exchange for a more affordable experience.
When it comes to mobile app development, in-app ads are usually scaled to fit the screen and are more visually appealing than banner ads for mobile, which often seem compressed and clunky.
Offer In-App Purchases
Find creative ways to offer purchases that unlock more value or rewards for heavy users. Users respond well to getting access to gated features, and buying certain prestigious in-app items can increase their loyalty and drive revenue, which is what you want from great mobile app design.
Shoot for Subscriptions
Subscriptions are a great way to generate steady profits. Try to offer different tiers of access to users and vary your offerings based on how much they spend monthly, then look for ways to upsell your subscriptions, too.
Make Payments Easy
Payments are the lifeblood of any organization. All the great work of mobile app development you have done — and all the aforementioned steps about building relationships and offering value — will mean very little if they don’t culminate in sales.
Payments are tricky and need to be handled properly. Too often, you see great apps with a great user experience that are not able to close the deal with a simple payments interface.
Most app developers opt to start with iOS or Android and get that right before moving on to the other. Great mobile app developers use all the tools at their disposal to make payments simple and fast, then test repeatedly to find problems. Your app should already be deeply embedded in a customer’s digital profile, so adding a payment gateway they trust and use makes purchases that much easier.
Getting users to the checkout page as quickly as possible — and finding ways to get them back there if they abandon their cart — is a crucial part of making transactions easy.
Orpheus Can Help You Go Mobile
Apps, if made useful and not too intrusive, are powerful tools for building consumer relationships that last. Good mobile app development aims to create many favorable brand encounters that will, over time, combine to create a long-term brand affinity for consumers.
All of this requires skilled partners who understand mobile deeply. Orpheus creates aesthetically appealing and functional mobile applications for all sorts of businesses. We take care of the entire design and development process, from planning and coding your mobile app to publishing it to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Find out more about our mobile app development services or request a quote right now.
