How can mobile apps help optimise Your business

Mobile phones have become a significant part of our lives and we couldn’t imagine ourselves without them. On average people spend at least two hours a day using their phones, but in some cases more and it’s predicted there will be over 65 million monthly internet users in the UK by 2026.

Almost every business has an app now. Starting from small businesses, shops and cafes to the bigger tech giants and companies. Mobile apps don’t just help a business to grow, they also help to control the business in different ways.

Branding

We all want our business to be recognisable. You do this by creating an easy to remember name, logo and style. So the same applies to the app you use. By creating a specific app, we can spread our brand around.

Let’s say you want to go somewhere for a coffee, and you see that this café has an app. Of course, you are intrigued  to download it, have a look at what’s interesting and you may even get a discount for downloading it.

Next time when you look at your phone, you’ll see that app and remember the cosy café which you’ll probably visit again if it was a positive experience. If the app’s design has similarities with the cafe’s interior such as the colours, logo and fonts, it will trigger positive feelings of being there and enjoying your coffee.

And that’s only one example of how a well-designed app can help users to recognise your business.

Direct Marketing

By using mobile apps, you can directly notify users about everything that’s going on in the business. You can use as many tools as possible such as push notifications, banners, ads, widgets and more. Your marketing team can be creative, get closer to customers and spread your business further.

Loyalty

If we continue with our small and cosy café as an example, let’s imagine that the app provides different discounts and loyalty programmes for app users. It can send different notifications, suggest new types of coffee and low prices for it. How likely is it that users will go back to the café in these cases? Well, we think they would be 100% happy to grab a cup of coffee that comes with a tasty discount.

Engagement and customer interaction

During the pandemic our attitude to interaction has changed a lot. We tried to not to meet people in person but use alternative ways to see each other. In a Tech Nation survey, social networking apps where the most relied on during the pandemic in particular, WhatsApp.

Interaction with customers has also altered over the past 18 months and mobile apps work perfectly to help businesses interact with users remotely. There are more cases now where a user can read a menu, order the product and pay all within the app. It’s possible to interact using QR codes for getting different information and help the user navigate through the app.

Mobile apps also help businesses to improve. We can collect feedback from customers, give customer support (e.g., chatbot) and provide different kinds of surveys. By collecting this information, you can look at ways to grow, improve and make customers happy.

Analytics can help with looking at what’s interesting to our customers so we can choose the way to the improve and change to allow the business to grow. Lastly, an app provides incredibly fast interaction. Customer can make payments, search, vote, chat and much more just with one tap of the finger!

Security

Whilst using the web, it’s very important to keep customer’s data safe and create trustful relationships with the customers. So, the higher security the app provides, the more trust we can achieve and users can be sure that their data is safe.

Especially with bank data and payments, customers must be sure that their data won’t be shared with third party companies and people. By using mobile we can achieve a better security level. Apps provide us with the possibility to use Apple Pay and Google Pay for payments which assures that all the transactions are secure.

Scalability

When a business grows, so do the app’s capability. We’re able to add new features to show our customers how the business improves. For restaurants and cafes, it could be a new menu and the app can promote it using notifications. There are a lot of useful UX approaches to present something new for your customers.

Conclusion

Nowadays most communication and interaction with customers goes into their pockets, directly to their phones. So, if you think about improving and expanding your business, don’t think twice and invest in an app. It will help you choose the vector of growing, give you control over the security, marketing and scalability; and of course, will increase the loyalty of your customers.

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