If you’re an owner of a restaurant or food truck, or an entrepreneur, and you’re interested in creating an app, here is an interesting article for you!
5 Reasons to Build a Custom Business App
As you scale your business, it might make sense to invest in alternative platforms to reach new customers. The debate between creating an app or software solution mostly comes down to how well it serves your internal staff, as well as end-users. According to Clutch, 42% of small businesses currently offer their own custom app and that number is expected to rise, especially among millennial business owners. With 89% of mobile consumption occuring in apps, investing in a custom business app provides immense value for your customers. Mobile application development continues to grow as an industry and going mobile is no longer a trend businesses can ignore. Here’s five reasons to build a custom business app.
Opens Up Additional Channels to Market
Marketers understand the value of creating an omnichannel marketing experience. You probably already leverage email to keep in contact with customers and digital marketing to reach new ones, why not invest in an app that pulls all of these channels together? Apps are especially valuable for customer because they offer native firmware features that mobile websites can’t engage with, such as a device’s camera and contacts. Beyond this, mobile apps are faster and smoother to navigate than responsive web sites. Most marketers agree that apps are the best way to generate brand loyalty. By always being in your user’s pocket and offering them solutions they need online and offline, mobile apps deliver continuous value.
Direct Marketing Opportunity
This also opens up the opportunity to market to customers directly. No longer will they have to bookmark your website, discover it over a search, or type in your domain name. Nope, you’ll be right there in their pocket. If your customers don’t use your app for a while you can deliver them push notifications, alerting them to time sensitive offers and new features to download. This direct marketing opportunity also offers a more sincere experience by offering customers the solutions they need without having to jump through hoops. More often than not, businesses invest in custom apps to offer their customers a service that was lacking on their mobile website.
Increased Brand Recognition
Furthermore, businesses can design their unique solution with fully branded colors, logos, and themes. This has the effect of keeping your brand top-of-mind. Customers will glance over your your app’s logo everytime they scroll through their phone or maybe even open it. No matter your application, whether it’s an energy management system or mobile banking solution, you can fully brand your apps to always keep your brand top-of-mind.
Increase Customer Engagement and Create Loyalty
This all translates to fostering greater loyalty among your customers. With tap-to-call features and a help-desk feature in your app, you provide a platform where customers can contact you directly and immediately. Beyond this, by pulling in all of the features of your website with the additional features of your app, you provide a one-stop-shop, all-in-one solution for customers to engage with your business. You can even offer customers the ability to navigate to your app when they visit your site to receive content that is properly rendered to their screen’s size and pixelation.
It’s a Wiser Investment than Software
Finally, I would recommend building a custom app over a software solution if your primary focus in serving end-users. While a software solution offers greater latitude in terms of features and infrastructure, it’s also so much more costly. Between maintaining the infrastructure and delivering new updates to market, the costs can multiply over time.
Conclusion
Building a custom app can provide immense value for customers and help connect online marketing to offline efforts. Now, it’s time to figure out who’s going to build it.