What Mobile App Development Can Do for Your Company Bottom Line

Businesses today create mobile apps to be a hub from where they can serve and interact with their customers better. The app acts as a gateway or a bridge between a brand and its customers. While the investment in a mobile app can be significant, the hope is always that the return on investment will be visible through a growth in the company’s bottom line. So how does it work? What opportunities does mobile app development unlock? How meticulous does an app need to be to impact revenue significantly?

Branding Opportunities

Mobile apps are a major branding opportunity for companies. While the app has to have a unique selling proposition in terms of utility, companies must also think about how the app portrays their brand. Therefore, the design team must integrate the brand logo and colors into the app’s design. The UI/UX must also be top-notch because users will subconsciously use that as an assessment of the brand’s quality.

Therefore, a clean and easy-to-use mobile app that’s always available strengthens brand equity. If users are always coming back to the app, the brand will be able to unlock the revenue potential of the app. 

What your current users say about the app through reviews on app stores matters. If the app has impressive ratings, it will have a strong network effect whereby downloads will automatically increase over time. Building a strong brand takes so much time because so many little things need to come together to create something convincing in the audiences’ minds.

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Premium Mobile Apps

A premium app is an application that customers must pay for in order to download to their devices, or at least to be able to start using it. While some businesses use a one-time fee model, others may go for a subscription model.

Creating a premium app to grow revenue requires that the app provides a unique selling proposition that’s not being offered elsewhere for free or at a lower price. In many cases, USPs include exclusive content, such as on Netflix or Spotify, or access to an exclusive community. This requires investment in research on users’ needs, price sensitivity, competitor actions, app maintenance costs, the roadmap for the app and so much more.

In-App Purchases

Most apps on stores are free to download and use. However, some applications monetize through in-app purchases in order to unlock premium features. This is a great way to affect a company’s bottom line if they can create good enough features that people would be willing to pay for. The tough balancing act is to determine an appropriate pricing point for the premium features so that the fees do not seem exaggerated. It might require some A/B testing to determine which price point generates the most revenue.

Improving Customer Experience and Service

As pointed out earlier, an app provides a way for a brand to interact with customers better and build a profile that it can use to improve and personalize service offerings to clients. For an e-commerce store for instance, the company can collect data on the products the customer browses even though they do not buy them. This is obviously not possible in a physical store. Data on products browsed might allow the company to then send a personalized offer to the customer (via email or a pop-up) thus prompting them to proceed with the purchase.

It’s also worth mentioning that personalizing the content on the app is crucial today. Recommendation systems are common on content platforms such as Netflix, YouTube, and Twitter. They significantly increase the time users spend consuming content. It’s no different for an e-commerce mobile app. According to Hyperon, who have their own recommendation engine, recommendation systems for e-commerce can boost revenue by over 30%. Therefore, personalizing what each customer sees on the mobile app based on their profile will no doubt have a positive effect on the bottom line.

Mobile App Localization

Creating a mobile app for customers and localizing it for different countries or regions is important in improving your company’s revenue. Experienced brand managers will opine that building an app is often the easy part but adding content and customizing it for different markets is hard work.

App localization starts with translating the content with the help of professionals. The translation should ideally pay attention to local nuances and slang to achieve the desired impact. It’s also important to take note of the unique technical challenges people in certain regions might have. Sometimes, companies have to create a lighter version of their app (strip certain features) because data might be expensive in certain regions or most devices there may not handle the bulky version of their app.

App localization has many advantages. Accessibility to a larger market increases the overall number of downloads. However, by customizing the copy to suit the local context, the brand comes off as more relatable. This increases customer engagement with the app leading to more sales opportunities for the brand. Most brands like to tap into the local pop and sporting culture in the different markets they serve. This explains why they will have social media accounts for different regions or markets- to speak to audiences in their language.

Push Notifications

With the average person having more than 40 apps on their mobile device, there is competition for user attention amongst the apps. Often though, most of the installed apps go unopened for weeks. Push notifications are a great way to nudge users to navigate back to your app and therefore grow engagement.

Push notifications can seem intrusive but you can use them strategically to boost revenue. One way to do this is to ensure each push notification has a call to action. For instance, you could use push notifications to ask customers to grab a personalized discount that expires in the next hour. You can now also add icons to push notifications. Images add the likelihood of people interacting with notifications because visual information is simpler to process.

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Email List

Building up an email list remains an important way to drive up revenue for businesses today. You can collect emails from customers who download and create an account on your mobile app. Email addresses allow you to share more detailed information with customers through newsletters. You can also use an email list to invite a sample of your customers to test out new products that haven’t been launched yet or invite them for exclusive brand experience events.

Emails are also great for retargeting customers who visit your website. Based on their profile and interaction with various pages, you can send personalized offers to them via email. You could also use offers to prompt customers who haven’t used your app in a while to check back in. Integrating email addresses into your CRM tool empowers your marketing team to do so much more they wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

Strategic Execution

There are numerous other ways through which mobile apps can affect a company’s bottom line. However, what’s most important is perhaps that there is congruence in all the app seeks to achieve. The UI/UX design needs to ease customers’ interaction with the app. The branding should be representative of the image the organization wants to portray. The app needs to be localized for the various markets the brand is present.

The product team needs to collect data on how customers are interacting with the app so they can continually improve upon it. All these things need to come together for the app to be successful.

Getting the right app development partner is crucial for the success of an app. At NS804, we specialize in building mobile apps for businesses. Our team will take your organization through conceptualizing, prototyping, building, and launching your mobile app to help drive revenue. Reach out to us for a free consultation today.