Hooray! You have funding for a mobile app. That’s great news. But, here’s the challenge: funding alone is not enough to make your mobile app successful. For your app to be successful, it’s important that you start the development process with purpose and direction. In fact, during your planning process, you should have an eye on your customer experience and how your organization supports it. Without a structure in place that facilitates ongoing improvement, your mobile app will struggle. Your organization should be set up in a way that facilitates the app’s success.
Why You Should Focus on Mobile
Let’s face it, with over six billion mobile-phone subscribers globally, mobile is not something your brand (or any brand) can afford to mess up. Mobile apps have changed the game. Yet, it’s often an area that brands fail to plan for. All too frequently, brands put together a mobile app without forethought for increasing customer engagement or mobile app monetization.
Average mobile-device users spend more than three hours each day using their mobile devices. That makes mobile the platform you’re most likely to connect with customers on. While they may not make purchases from mobile every time, you’re likely to connect with them there. This is why you need to know exactly what you want your users to do — and then drive them to do it.
3 Tips to Make Your Mobile App Pay You Back Today
1. Walk Through the Experience.
It’s important to not only build a mobile app, but also use it yourself. During the mobile app development phase, your team should be regularly walking through the user experience to discover where potential issues — as well as further opportunities — lie. This is a process that should be done repeatedly and by team members at all levels of the organization. Including people from varying backgrounds allows you to see the app from multiple people’s viewpoints. Not all of your customers will have the same perspective that you do, so including as many users as possible will help you catch all those potential issues and opportunities. It’s important to reevaluate regularly and thoroughly so that your app doesn’t become stale or unfocused over time. This is an inherently iterative process — successful brands are never truly done improving. Key to this process is to actually move to where your experience is.
2. Determine the Key Functionality.
If your mobile app doesn’t provide a core service to your customers, it’s unlikely that they’ll use it regularly. It’s important to determine exactly what your app needs to do to serve your customers’ needs. For instance, a restaurant group determined that their app needed to do more than just allow customers to find the nearest locations. By updating the app to allow customers to also place orders from it, they increased not only functionality, but also engagement. In addition, they added the ability for customers to check wait times for the various restaurants in their group so they can help customers move toward the restaurant that will best meet their needs at that given time. Determining the most-wanted, key functionalities for improving customers’ experiences allowed the restaurant group to increase engagement with their brand, and ultimately, drive traffic to their restaurant locations.
3. Know Your App’s Purpose.
If you don’t know the purpose of your app, your customers likely don’t either. It’s important to know the goal of the mobile app as well as your monetization strategy. Perhaps you plan to offer the ability to make in-app purchases. Alternately, you might plan to use the app to build engagement and push personalized messages. In fact, the purpose of your app will even drive which metrics are most important to its success. For instance, a major lifestyle magazine was trying to determine the purpose of its app — social impact or increasing subscriptions. If the app’s goal was to have social impact, then the metrics that determined success were all engagement-based — number of engaged users, daily users, monthly users, retention of those users, and so on. However, if the purpose of the app was to increase subscriptions, the metrics that mattered were much more transactional — conversion rate, total number of subscriptions, that sort of thing. Whatever it may be, the purpose of your app needs to be determined at the beginning of the mobile app development process. This purpose should drive your entire development plan, functionality, and marketing plan.
Your mobile app can be a key touchpoint that builds customer loyalty and improves customer experience. Through careful mobile app optimization, you can achieve these goals.
Learn more about mobile app engagement and optimization and how important it is to your business.
The post Three Tips to Make Your Mobile App Pay You Back TODAY appeared first on Digital Marketing Blog by Adobe.