4 Reasons Your Brand Needs An App This Year
As an e-commerce seller in 2024, you’ve no doubt considered the need for a mobile app. With 42 percent of brands already reporting either having or plans to launch a mobile app, most are feeling the pressure to conform to industry standards. Beyond this, you’ve likely heard the conversations regarding the channel, including the fact that by 2027, more than half of all e-commerce is expected to come from mobile devices.
While the benefits seem obvious, many retailers are reluctant to join the mobile revolution. For reasons ranging from perceived high costs to a fear of a lackluster channel, some marketers and brand owners are simply not ready to take the leap.
While these concerns can be valid, the benefits of apps as a purchasing channel far outweigh the downfalls. Keep reading to understand the 5 reasons your brand can’t afford to miss out on apps.
1. Maximize Brand Awareness with Mobile Apps
Be where your customers already are. By building an app that can be downloaded, existing in a visual, visceral way on your customers’ home screens, you’re driving a level of brand awareness that’s unprecedented in other channels. Where mobile web and desktop sites have their place in your strategy, there’s no match for the top-of-mind awareness that’s driven by a mobile app whose icon lives on the home screen that users see dozens of times every day.
2. Simplify Checkout Process for Increased Conversions
Cut the payment madness. Cart abandonment is a massive frustration for any online retailer, but especially for mobile commerce brands. With a widely estimated 90%+ of online shoppers abandoning their cart at checkout, offering checkout options such as Paypal, Apple Pay, Amazon Pay or other solutions is vital to ensuring customers complete a transaction. Paying in a way that’s fast, efficient, and takes away barriers to purchase is the most natural way to drive customers from the browse stage to the buy stage. Remember, 70 times more people browse your products than buy them, meaning every person ready to purchase is a vital potential conversion.
3. Utilize Push Notifications for Direct Customer Engagement
Push notifications give you direct contact with interested customers. Customers who are already interested in your brand are the ones who’ve downloaded your app. Beyond this, the ones who’ve opted into receiving push notifications from you are even more valuable. The direct, anytime line of communication this affords you with this most valuable customer segment cannot be overstated. Targeted push notifications, especially, drive 300 percent higher engagement than their broadcast counterparts. Communicating directly with the people who care about your brand, about exactly the products and categories they care about, is a benefit you can’t ignore.
4. Enhance User Experience with Native Apps
A better experience all around. Native apps are built to run on the device they’re served on. Inherently, this creates a significantly superior experience for the user, increasing their chances of completing a purchase. Serving users a customized experience both drives brand affinity and increases the chance for a repeat purchase. With payment and shipping information already saved into an app, the barrier to purchase is lowered, making it more appealing to buy from your brand – and your app – than a competitor.
It all comes down to creating the best possible experience for the user. Becoming the top-of-mind retailer for the item you’re selling, offering streamlined payment options, communicating proactively, and building a better user experience are all vital elements of the value of adding a mobile app to your strategy.
