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It’s important to know that when launching an app for a business, you have dominion over a small and effective space on a consumers phone. This opens you up to plenty of opportunities that the advertisers of the 50’s would have considered a magical art. So, in order to respect our newfound abilities, we must conduct ourselves in the correct way.
There are many manners of doing this. Some of them are effective, and some of them are less so. The app you develop for your business should not be considered an accessory. It should be the centralized goal and hub of your firm. It should be the de facto place you desire your customers to interact with your firm, as its potential of reach is massive. Here are a few tips for doing that, and how to curate this digital island on the smartphone of every client you keep:
Respond
It’s important to respond to reported bugs, app reviews, and release regular updates. This shows that you’re always in the process of fixing new issues and ensuring people can use your app. Any downtime, issues or other problems can lead to a negative perception of your firm. This means being completely transparent about what your app has to offer. It also means ensuring your app description is laid out crystal clear on the app store. If there are certain models of phone that have a hard time with your app and you’re not sure of an immediate cure, be sure to list that. Respond to bad reviews, asking if you’re able to resolve the issue in any way.
When you conduct your affairs like this, it’s likely you’ll be up for gaining the ‘editors choice’ or ‘new and noteworthy’ tag for your app, helping you become localized on lists seen with priority the world over. If companies pay millions of dollars simply hosting their name at the side of a sporting venue stadium, you can be sure that this translates into thousands of dollars of free exposure.
Free
If your app is simply a method of interacting with your firm, it should be completely free. If it’s a more curated experience, you can charge a little without issue. For example, if your firm offers an even better way of listening to audiobooks than Audible, and hosts a more varied library, charging a dollar or two for the app might be justified. However, it’s incredibly important to stay hyper-aware of your cost and reward scenario for implementing this fee. Most of the time, it’s not worth it at all.
Light/Bloat
It’s important for your app to be extremely lightweight. If acting as a storefront, this is very simple. The best app developers will help you achieve this first and foremost. It’s important that no intrusive ads are present, and that the app is quick and easy to use. This might mean allowing for touch swipe integration like the famous pull down to refresh ability found on most social media apps. Your app should also come with little to no bloat. This means no advanced operations past the express purpose. That could mean that your storefront needn’t ask permission for a consumer phone to save files to their storage, for example. Attempts like this can seem suspicious to even the most novice smartphone user, so it’s best to avoid them.
Integration
It’s important to allow your app to keep full integration in all that you offer. This means syncing your app with Paypal support, voice to text searching options, connecting to social media apps (or logging in) as an unrequired option and also allowing your customer the ability to pay using one of the most popular saving apps. Integration with other popular apps is almost a must these days. After all, there are a majority of people who would much rather log in using Facebook than creating their own account and verifying their email address. The least amount of time you have to spend ensuring that a client can engage with your app the better, and integration helps you do that first and foremost.
User Accounts
User accounts are very important to consider. Allowing customers to create these on your app will afford them the choice of saving items to their basket, contacting support when needs be, and generally seeing their order history. This will also help them save their details, which could make future purchases much easier and therefore attractive.
With these things in mind, you’ll be sure to develop an app that truly speaks to the quality of your firm, and supports you in all that it offers.
