The ever-rising number of mobile development frameworks has contributed towards reducing the development turnaround time and costs. A few years ago, building an app could have been a time-consuming and costly affair. As a result, many businesses resulted in exploiting alternative ways of increasing sales and revenue such as marketing and advertising. Fast-forward to today, the business environment has gone under massive transformation apps taking over the e-commerce business in terms of sales and advertising.
This transformation is fueled by a number of factors. Firstly, there are readily available platforms like Apple’s Store and Google Play Store where companies can deploy their apps. Secondly, improvements in the programming languages coupled by remote employees that specialize in building business apps to positively impact multiple aspects of a business.
In this article, we are going to shed light on how an app can increase your sales and possibly help you find an iOS developer for hire.
Mobile App Development Industry Overview
According to a recent report by Statista, the mobile app development revenues have come a long way. In 2015, the total revenue generated from the entire mobile application development industry was a mere 69.7 billion. However, with the continued growth, its projected that by 2020, the total revenues will surpass the $188.9 billion which is almost unheard of.
The growth isn’t only being experienced in terms of revenue only but salaries too. For instance, iOS developer jobs have emerged as some of the best-paid professionals globally. Since the inception of Apple’s App Store a decade ago, iOS developers that have managed to create both native and cross-platform mobile apps earning over $86 billion. And with the ever-growing tech talent pool and the constant upgrades on the iOS programming language, the entire iOS mobile development ecosystem is set to even get better.
If you have been wondering how to make a mobile app, you should first know the platform where you will deploy your app between Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store. Although both of them have their merits, they do equally have a fair share of criticism. For this reason, you should be guided by your business and customer’s need to choose the one that suits you.
Here are 6 ways in which business apps can help increase sales and revenues:
Through Targeted Advertising
There are many merits of user’s digital identity over cookies in terms of tracking customers behavior. However, the most significant of them all is the location data inclusion. It allows you as the business owner to know where your customers go, how frequently, and even their spending habits.
Armed with such important data, your marketing department can tap into the insights to create specific ads that target them. For instance, if a certain mum goes for kid’s shopping on Wednesday, you can offer her coupons or other deals at the exact moment she’s within the vicinity of your business. Multiply this a million times and the possibilities are endless.
Supplementary Engagement Opportunity
Another biggest opportunity that a business can leverage on within the mobile apps ecosystem is shopping and engagement opportunities. With the improvements being experienced in different circles like iOS mobile app development, business-customer interactions have moved from being organic to become geo-agnostic.
Right from the morning commute to jogging in the gym, you can deploy your mobile app marketing strategy to compel get shoppers to interact with your brand as they hunt for better shopping deals. Moreover, you can reach out to them using interactive notifications reminding them of an abandoned shopping cart, prompting them to continue shopping. To make the experience seamless, a stored login and payment information for easy transactions would be great.
Streamlining Your Customer Support
As businesses, having your ears on the ground helps you gather what the customer wants, how they want it, and the issues they are facing trying to do so. That’s why having an in-app customer support has become so popular with many businesses.
Combined with Live Chat, an in-app gives your customer confidence in knowing that they are connected to your business and that someone is always available to help them out. The concept is very simple – whenever a customer needs assistance – mechanisms to offer assistance by either showing them what to do or redirecting them to the appropriate person should be available.
When hiring a mobile app developer or a UI/UX designer to either build or design your iOS business app, you want to ensure that the entire iOS application lifecycle is customer oriented. After all, you wouldn’t want to risk losing a customer simply because they feel like you are too hard to reach or your app is super-complicated.
Reduced Costs
Running a brick and mortar business can be expensive. For instance, if you are running an IT company, you need to hire an IT project manager, developers, and other support staff. Moreover, you need to part with other operational costs such as bills and utilities.
With a mobile app, you reap the benefits of staying open 24/7 throughout the year without incurring any operational costs. If you are lucky enough to have an intuitive mobile app design, your customers can access mobile wallets which gives them a super-easy way to authorize purchases.
The end result?? Reduced expenses which contribute to the bottom line of your business.
Pushing Through the Funnel
Every business has had to deal with occasional bounces where customers casually walk into their shop and leave without purchasing anything. With mobile commerce, these instances are even greater considering no one wants to stay on a website that is not user-friendly. For instance, a customer in a specific location may find it tedious to type all the address info even if they are into making a purchase.
Fortunately, working with a developer experienced in iOS app programming can help you overcome this problem by helping you to build an intuitive app that has automatic details fill-in capability. Using the phone’s GPS, an app can detect the user’s location and help them to automatically fill the address data.
Eliminates Geographical Barriers
Most brick-and-mortar businesses face the problem of showrooming, whereby shoppers will physically visit the store to just view the products and ultimately purchase online where prices are cheaper. This is counterproductive for the retailer as they end up losing on such a business configuration.
On the other hand, the online retailers end up reaping big thanks to the incorporation of price comparison tools in mobile app development that helps customers get better deals at the comfort of their homes.
Final Thoughts
Mobile apps have come a long way from just being communication tools to helping businesses increase sales and revenues by injecting efficiency in their processes. Instead of thinly spreading resources by advertising on a broad spectrum of platforms, businesses can narrow down to targeted customers and entice them to buy where they are within the range of their premises. From the customer’s perspective, they now have the freedom to shop irrespective of their location and even win discounts in the course of their shopping. These small and calculated efficiencies may seem inconsequential but can result in more revenue and sales for a business while, by far and large, improve the user experience.