Mobile apps can be a huge driver of business for many organizations. As a direct link to your business, they can bypass less convenient ways to access your content, like clicking through an email, filling out a form, or using a browser bar to manually type in a web address.
It’s become one of the standard ways that businesses drive their mobile commerce experience and devoted, branded apps have become an expectation by many consumers.
The importance of mobile apps for business
Forbes notes that not only does creating an app help take your marketing to the next level for businesses of all sizes, but it can:
- Grow brand awareness
- Create customer loyalty and referrals
- Increase visibility to customers
- Increase customer access and engagement
- Build recognition and positive brand reputation
Having a mobile app as part of your marketing strategy and commerce approach is a smart investment and optimizing your app so that customers have the best experience can drive engagement, potentially leading to greater revenue and repeat business. Plus, it helps to create a better customer experience for audiences used to engaging with other brands in a similar way.
How to improve and increase engagement in your mobile business app
1. Make the experience easy
Finding and using your mobile app should be easy and intuitive. Working with experienced and innovative designers is a good first step to create the best app from the ground up, but it’s also important to consider creating a tutorial or walkthrough for new users to understand how to proceed or to set an expectation. These can easily be turned off or skipped through for users who aren’t interested.
2. Encourage exclusive benefits with membership
Having a meaningful user relationship often starts with memberships. Exclusive access can increase engagement and that can start with users creating a login to interact with the application. Offering VIP membership for downloading the app and creating a login to become a member can be an incentive that will ultimately help you collect more information about your demographic, including email address, and will also increase engagement with your app – more people are likely to engage with our business app if you’re giving them a reason to try it.
3. Create urgency
Push notifications – the automatic popups that an app can generate on a user’s home screen – can create urgency and drive more action as well as increase engagement. Some companies utilize inventory alerts that let app users know when the stock of a previously searched product is running low, while others will use popups to generate messaging about an abandoned cart or new pricing on an item or service. This kind of urgent and direct messaging can increase engagement, but it’s also important to not abuse this kind of access. Make sure to save any push notifications or urgent driving messaging for when it’s most needed or relevant.
4. Use personalized recommendations
Growing revenue is closely linked to add-ons and upselling. One way to increase these extra sales is to make sure offers and messaging align with the actual interests and behaviors of the customer. Personalization is a much more powerful tool when it comes to marketing than anything generic, no matter how valuable or interesting. The Marketo blog notes, “Cultivate user engagement and retention by sending marketing messages with relevant, valuable content. Personalized recommendations, based on ‘the last brand viewed’ or ‘most recent purchase’, provide value to your users and warm them to your mobile app experience. The key is to target specific segments of users and to incorporate personalization.”
5. Market effectively
One of the most important parts of increasing engagement for a mobile app is to make sure people know about it. You want to share your app’s existence in multiple ways. One effective way is to share with current customers or potential customers by using an email list. Another effective way to market business apps is to make sure they’re listed in the app store and optimized using ASO techniques to make them easier to find. App search optimization is the key to writing effective marketing that can increase engagement. It’s one of the first places that a customer will be introduced to your app and be convinced of its value.
Your app is something that should drive engagement by being easy to use and rewarding for customers to interact with. It’s important, then, for your design and your content to work together and create the best possible experience for your customer. By being strategic and intentional, you can improve your mobile app engagement strategy and increase your revenue through m-commerce and mobile engagement.
Having a mobile app isn’t the only focus of your business, but it can help be part of an overall successful plan of engaging with customers and driving revenue. Prioritizing these techniques is a sure way to build a solid foundation of business app engagement and success.
