What Could an App offer your Small Business?

Hello!

Every business owner is always on the lookout to find ways to grow their company and improve customer engagement, whether that’s from improving website traffic, increasing the number of sales at your physical locations, or adding new means of marketing your products through telephone advertising.

Although it’s an area of increasing importance, you may not have considered the numerous benefits that an app can bring to your business.

By reinforcing your unique brand and keeping customers aware of your business, an app can be one of the most effective methods of improving engagement.

Ensuring Customers Stay Aware of Your Business

It’s well known that in order to succeed as a business, you want to encourage repeat purchases and avoid customers buying once and never again. The best way to do this is by building trust between the business and the client, which can be easily achieved through providing a reliable app.

Think about the number of apps that you have on your phone – you likely visit social media apps like Instagram and marketplaces like Amazon on a near-daily basis, and even if you don’t, seeing their logo on your screen every time you unlock your phone inevitably creates a sense of familiarity and trust. When compared to having to search out a website every time you want to buy a product, you can see how an app keeps your business on the minds of customers more passively.

The success of online retailers can be attributed to their use of apps. Even in a situation where a customer would rather shop elsewhere, the convenience of an app on their phone that they feel they can trust will often lead them to use the app instead. By encouraging a combination of recognition, familiarity, and consistency, an app can hugely boost re-engagement, making sure that customers keep coming back for more.

Also read:

• SaaS Buyer Journey 101: How to Map Content to Different Lifecycle Stages
• IT Consulting and Services
• Benefits of Having a Website for a Small Business

Creating Brand Loyalty

Now that you’ve created a foundation of trust with your customers, it’s time to take that a step further and encourage brand loyalty to craft a lasting relationship.

A simple way to do this is by employing a loyalty scheme through your app that rewards customers for their repeat business.

You’ll likely notice that lots of businesses do this nowadays – coffee shops that give a free drink to customers for every 9 drinks purchased, for instance – and it’s a well-established way of turning one-time customers into regular consumers of your products.

Apps make this far easier to manage than the traditional stamped card method, and the points system on an app can even turn a single purchase into the beginning of a wider interaction by creating the sense that the transaction has only just begun.

Businesses like the globally successful Wish have found great success in encouraging repeat business through offers like discounts and loyalty stamps that provide an incentive to come back. By utilizing a knowledge of customer psychology in conjunction with advertising know-how, they’ve been able to grow their business astronomically.

This psychology is based on the simple idea that a customer wants to be rewarded for coming back to support the same business – because they feel as though they’re making a saving through repeat purchases, even when they didn’t intend to buy anything, they feel as though their loyalty is being acknowledged.

Keeping Your Customers Up to Date

Lots of businesses with apps are finding that the push notification is an invaluable tool for keeping users aware of your brand.

A push notification is the popup that appears on your phone lock screen or the corner of your laptop alerting you to things like messages, updates, and new products that, when clicked on, takes you to the relevant part of the application.

Functioning as a little alarm that alerts users to anything new, they can be used to great effect by businesses who want to advertise new products, promote a sale or clearance, provide delivery information, or more. As well as conveying the same information as a phone call, email, or text, this also keeps the user from having to check their inbox before learning what you want to tell them.

Studies have revealed that this is an impactful way to increase engagement from customers, especially when compared to emails, which tend to result in very few clicks through to your app or website.

However, you’ll want to make sure that you aren’t going overboard with the amount of notifications you send – if a user feels bombarded, they might just switch them off altogether.

But regardless, sending customers notifications that keep them informed of the most important updates and appealing deals is definitely an efficient and modern way to improve engagement, and therefore increase your sales.

Staying Up To Date With The Latest Tech

By providing your customers with an app dedicated to your business, you’re also letting them know that you can move with the times and create options that suit their lifestyle. Even if you’ve already found success with a website, you can view an app as a complementary way to keep users informed about your business. Of course, if you’re serious about providing an app you should do more of your own research to make the most of this technology, and speak to some potential designers who can turn your vision into a reality.

Essentially, you need to remember that an app is a valuable extension of your brand, as well as an important feature of your communications portfolio. If you use it smartly, making the most of new innovations, you could start to see some enormous improvements in your relationship with your customers.

Thank you!
Join us on social media!
See you!