75% of consumers expects a personalized experience from brands and a mobile app is the perfect way to personalize communications with your customers. Unfortunately, most small businesses don’t realize how much potential lies in this business model or can say this marketing medium.
If you are a small business or even a local business, and think that having a basic website and being present on social media is enough to attract new users, then you are wrong! Especially with this unprecedented health crisis – COVID-19 pandemic, one should definitely not ignore the potential of business growth with mobile apps. Let us understand this with simple comparisons of two different scenarios.
Scenario 1: Buy & Bye
A customer finds on mobile search, lands on your mobile website, makes a purchase and gone (may be forever).
Scenario 2: Buy & Buy Again
A customer finds you on mobile search, installs your app and makes a purchase. Now with mobile app, business owners can retain customers far easily while it is extremely difficult to retain a customer through a mobile website.
See Also: Customer Retention – Grow Your Business By Selling More To Current Customers
Now, when it comes to mobile app development for a small business, many business owners consider it an expensive & unnecessary investment. But in reality, mobile apps have actually proven to help small businesses in attracting new customers and increasing sales.
We have certain reasons and some eye-opening stats that makes you believe why your small business should invest in mobile application development.
1. Boost Customer Engagement
With so many noises out there, a mobile app for small business is a great strategy to stay connected to your customers all the time, whether for retaining customers or also widen the reach in the market.
This means your business or brand is right there in the pocket of the customers. Now with smart digital marketing, all you need to do is send a gentle reminder from time to time to pull them back to your business. What else could be the most convenient way to interact with your customers directly.
2. Personalized Marketing Channel
As said earlier, 75% of consumers expects a personalized experience from brands and mobile is the perfect way for this. But why personalization?
Personalization not only creates better experiences for customers to interact with your business, but the foster in building deep relationships with your business. Though push notifications, business can send any updates or remind them about your product or services in real time.
3. Building an On-Demand Marketplace
Ever since Uber was introduced, the craze for on-demand business is increasing day by day. The best part is even the customers are excited about such businesses. A mobile app is the best way to create an on-demand marketplace.
It doesn’t mean you need to create a ride sharing business in order to enter the on-demand marketplace business. You can create with your own small business ideas. We have so many examples like Swiggy, Urban Company, GoMechanic, etc.
We have designed and developed a similar on-demand marketplace app for currency exchange. More details here.
On the other hand, this is the best way to expand an existing small business.
4. Encourages Customer Loyalty
Mobile apps are the best way to offer rewards to your customers through various loyalty programs like cashbacks, discount coupons, etc. It helps to make a genuine connection with customers and builds brand loyalty.
With a branding and marketing perspective, loyalty programs are not only helpful in increasing customer loyalty towards the brand or business but they also help in collecting valuable user data.
Mobile is King!
You may be not be convinced yet that how much a mobile app for your business irrespective of big or small, can be helpful. Mobile is where all the action’s at nowadays. Every individual’s life practically revolves around the smartphones. In fact, the average smartphone user has gone from spending just a couple of minutes on his device to spending around hours.
We have certain statistics that shows the trend of mobile apps in business.
It’s no secret that consumers are using their mobile devices to buy online. A glimpse of M-Commerce shopping behavior:
With the COVID-19 pandemic raging and restaurants struggling with footfalls given social distancing fears, these food delivery apps have figured out ways to thrive in a health crisis.
Other industries embracing mobile innovation
There was a huge ramp-up of using Business apps to collaborate during the first wave of COVID-19 in Q2 2020 and usage has remained high through the end of the year. In India, time spent in Business apps approached 3 billion hours on Android phones in Q3 2020 alone.
The bottom line…
While earlier small businesses have been hesitant to get into the mobile app market, today’s highly mobile centric customers, make them consider it as a necessity for businesses of every size. Having a mobile site is definitely a great start, but a mobile app gives you a plethora of opportunities to grow your business and keep your customers engaged.
While small businesses have been somewhat hesitant in the past to jump into the mobile app market, today’s highly mobile consumers make competing in the mobile realm a necessity for businesses of every size. Consumers migrated more of their physical needs onto mobile. Having a mobile website is a great first start, but a mobile app gives you the edge in creating a highly engaged and loyal customer base.
“So having a mobile app even for small business is the only channel with this reach and depth of engagement.“
