Mobile App for Small Business: Mobile applications have become an essential part of growing businesses and maximizing reach. Especially for small businesses that don’t have bottomless marketing budgets, an efficient mobile application can increase scalability in more ways than one. Here are 5 reasons to convince you to create a mobile application for your small business. 

5 Reasons Why You Should Consider a Mobile App for Your Small Business.

It’s time to dive into the details. 

1. Serves as a Marketing Tool

Mobile apps can become highly efficient marketing tools for small businesses. The business owner can abandon traditional marketing techniques of running TV ads and distributing brochures. Instead, they can adopt push notifications that deliver the latest information to the customer directly to their devices. Push notifications can alert the mobile user about new sales, product launches, discount offers, newsfeeds, and many more. 

The small business owner can create a database about the user based on the metrics of push notifications. Open rates will give you insights into the effectiveness of your subject lines. Similarly, click-through rates and conversions rates will offer feedback on the offers and propositions of the push notifications. These data will help you set the preferences for your customers and fine-tune your marketing campaigns. You can also run mobile-only discount offers to make your customers feel like they are part of an exclusive club. Exclusivity might convert some cold prospects into repeat customers—absolutely essential during the initial years of a small business. 

2. Expand Brand Presence

Mobile apps can be more persuasive and impressive as a brand marketing channel. Apart from being a great marketing tool for your business, mobile apps can also expand your brand’s presence. Creating brand awareness for your small business through a mobile app is comparatively easy as most people regularly use their phones. Push notifications and other update notifications sent through the mobile app ensure that your brands stay on top of their minds. 

Scaling your business also becomes more manageable with a mobile app. To begin with, once the app is released in the app store, anybody in the world can download it and interact with it. Next, customer reach becomes inexpensive for the business, thus increasing your overall ROI. Small businesses have a limited number of personnel who often juggle many roles and may not have the time to improve the brand presence. But, with a well-designed mobile app, you can free up your human resource to work on other essential functions that increase the brand’s reputation. 

To maintain brand awareness, you need to ensure that the functions and features in the app make it more convenient for the customer to perform the necessary actions. A thorough onboarding feature can help you get the customers up to speed. Finally, continually update your mobile app. Updates not only remove bugs and errors but lets the user know that your business is responsive and dynamic. 

3. More Value for Your Customers. 

Creating a mobile app for your customers is not enough to convert them into repeat customers. The more value you add to the customer’s life via your app, the more likely they will continue interacting with your small business. All the top brands run a dedicated loyalty program on their apps to provide more value to their customers. You, too, can replicate the same strategy and gain more trust from your customers. These programs let the customers enjoy benefits in proportion to the value their loyalty creates for the business. Like loyalty programs, you can run rewards programs to incentivize the customers to continue shopping from your business and using your app.

However, loyalty and rewards programs are not the only way to add more value to your customer’s life. A well-designed app full of utilities will be more than enough to enhance the customer’s browsing experience. For example, most mobile users use an app to help them shop in physical retail stores. Starbucks is one of the best real-world examples of this feature.

Starbucks has a potent loyalty program along with in-app ordering and payment options. The loyalty program offers users free drinks and exclusive discount offers that incentivize them to visit their nearest retail stores. And in the physical stores, the user can order their coffee and pay for it all through the app. If you can replicate this kind of value proposition, you can reap the benefits of it. 

4. Better customer engagement 

Digital communication is slowly replacing the one-to-one sales communication of retail stores. This provides a unique opportunity for small businesses to take their customer engagement to the next level. Putting your entire service and product line-up on your mobile applications enables the customer to make certain positive decisions before entering your retail store. Furthermore, the customers can skip the nagging of the salesperson in your physical stores. In short, creating a mobile application acknowledges the autonomy of the customer’s decision-making process. 

Better customer engagement is not limited to excellent sales. An excellent mobile application will help you take your customer service up a notch. The mobile app for your small business should have an interface that provides the customer with all the necessary tools and information to make the decision. In addition to that, there should be functionalities for assisting the consumers. Smart nudges, smart highlights, walkthrough videos, and more can help teach the customers about the necessary functions of the application. 

5. Higher Profits

When ordering products and services from apps is becoming the norm, it is counter-intuitive not to create an app for your small business. For example, the profits of Domino’s Pizza jumped by 28% as they released their mobile applications.

This is a testament to what a mobile application can achieve for the business in terms of profit. Moreover, as people start increasing their engagement with the app, the frequency of purchases also increases. Why? Because it is more convenient to order from the app than to visit a retail store. 

Conclusion

These are a few of the many reasons you should consider developing an app for your small business. The initial expense of creating the app can be a hurdle for some companies. Nevertheless, the proven success of mobile applications in the past ensures that you will get your money’s worth and then some more.