When you’re in business, either as an owner, manager, or an employee on the shop floor, you need to look good to make customers want to make a purchase. You practice your sales technique over and over in the mirror, and you always keep a smile on your face to seem friendly and helpful. And then by the end of the day you still don’t turn out the amount of sales you really want at the end of the day. It gets exhausting, and it isn’t quite a sustainable model for the future of the business you really want to succeed. With that in mind, what is there to do?
Move more and more into the 21st century. More than ever in the modern day, running a business is rarely something you can do successfully without a little help. And that means you’re going to have to turn to technology; a.k.a it’s time to target the customers with their most personal shopping habits: via the mobile phone!
More and more people shop online every day, and there’s over 3 billion people in the world who have a strong internet signal. However, even attracting people to your website gets harder and harder because of this. So it’s time to devise a monopoly on the market you’re selling to, and one of the best ways to do that is to develop an app. Don’t worry, the investment will pay off in the end! Here’s some of the main reasons why an app is what every business out there wants.
Your Visibility Will Skyrocket
When you’re competing in a field that has some long standing and pre established workers that have many more resources on their side to advertise with, it’s incredibly hard to make sure people can see you at all times. However, that’s where an app can step in to make up the difference. People spend a lot more time on any apps that can connect them to the internet than they do using the inbuilt browser on their phone. Just take facebook as a good example here: daily it receives 1.15 billion active users on its mobile version!
Having something that’s permanently at a potential customer’s fingertips, seeing as your app is going to be on their home screen, means simple exposure will keep you on the person’s mind. Often enough it’s as easy as that to stay relevant! But how do you make sure a person will check the app? Use ping notifications. They’ll be intriguing enough to make a user scan through what you have to say or sell at the very least.
However, these can also be a double edged sword. Too many and you’ll be considered invasive and lose a potential customer when they just turn off the notifications in settings. At the same time, make sure you’re not sending out too few.
It’ll Be a Lot Easier to Market Yourself
Marketing is often a hit and miss game. When you do your market research properly, you’ll be able to put together an entire campaign that’s segregated the target population according to your needs and sell to them alone to increase your exposure. However, that takes a lot of time and money, and only has the most effect when you’re just finding out who your niche is.
On the other hand, when you’ve got an app to do your marketing for you, you’re going to retain customers and be able to attract more and more customers to you with one contact point. Advertise about your app alone and the promotions currently on it and you’re certainly going to pique people’s interests. The customer needs to feel like they’ve made the decision themselves, and when it’s their choice to download the app, they’ll be in control.
Roll out all your future campaigns via your app from now on, as this means you’ll be better appreciating the people who stick by you for the long haul. It also means you’ll have more and more ways to revamp your social media adverts: no need to come up with more and more ideas that run thin on the ground when you can simply get promoting the products you have with some digital coupons.
There’s Professionals that Understand Your Needs
When it comes to coding an entire app by yourself, you’re not going to be up for the job. Coding isn’t as easy a lot of people like to think, and even with a beginner’s knowledge of it, it’s going to take a good while for you to get even your first draft out there on the market. Instead of wasting time and money in this way, whilst you’re trying to be efficient, try turning to software development companies to do the work for you. They’re reliable and worth the investment; you know you’re going to get a good product out at the end.
Similarly, when you’ve got a development company on your side, they’re going to understand more than anyone else what you need to take your business higher. They know the market you’re working with, they know how accessible an app needs to be, and they can patch in any upgrades when you need them. Sounds like a great option already, doesn’t it?
Your Customers will Be a Lot More Loyal
Loyalty is something we don’t see much of in the current majority of shoppers nowadays. It used to be that brands could keep customers for years and years, but when the economy takes a downturn like we’re experiencing at the moment, saving money is the most important facet of making a sale.
Simply put, customers go where the sales take them. And ultimately that means they chop and change between brands whenever they need to save some much needed money. That leaves little left for the company they used to be exclusive with, and you’ve lost some good profit that used to make up your baseline. Relying on your customer base is going to be hard in this climate, so make it easier for someone to stick by you by offering them an app.
Still Not Convinced?
When you have an app, you have a secure connection to your customer base. And they have a place to put all their favorite products in order, keep their payment details on file, and feel like they can reach you 24/7. And at the end of the day, it’s a great way to bring more and more profit into your business.
With almost 200 billion dollars in revenue brought through apps each year, you can see there’s a huge gap in your profits you could be monopolising on here. Even when you have a website for customers to peruse at their pleasure, without a mobile link they’re never going to reach you when out and about.
It’s already been forecasted for 2018 alone that people are going to download about 197 billion apps to their phones. With a number like this on the near horizon, can you really afford to miss out?
An app means you’re going to be able to micromanage your business from a single portal that has everything you offer all in one place. It’s a completely personalised place for a customer to fall into, and means your business is going to be recognised easily the more and more people download. Make sure it costs nothing to download and you’ll have plenty of people willing to reach you through their use of mobile data!
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