When you have already decided on a mobile app for addressing audiences at large, it is very important to know which features and content you need to include in your new mobile app. Obviously it depends on the nature of your business and your business objectives. Your goal may be increasing potential business leads or rigorous sales promotion or you may want to improve customer relationships with the new app. But whatever the nature of your business and corresponding app objective you need to focus on a few features and business specific content for your app.
#1. Informative contents and news
If you are in the publishing business or have anything to do with news or content publishing it’s needless to say that your app would contain these things. But when publishing content through your app to the users you must update your app by pulling content from social posts, your websites and other relevant sources.
Remember, app users like to stay more updated than the so called websites or news portals and if you cannot do that, for a majority of users, it would be pointless to use the app. You must facilitate channelling content directly from your website, blog posts, social posts, media posts, etc. Remaining updated with latest information and content is the key to get maximum focus and mileage.
#2. Mobile Commerce
For ecommerce websites and online stores offering a mobile app is of the greatest importance. A mobile app would increase the chances of customer transaction and engagement. Especially if you already have an existing client base and a niche identity a mobile app is the irreplaceable step forward. However, when offering a mobile app for facilitating ecommerce transactions you need to follow some conventions. Here we provide a few of them.
- Products should be clearly and conveniently viewable besides accompanying text.
- The app should have some effective and usable features like easy navigation capability through catalogues, products and transaction pages.
- The app should offer an easy and fast search mechanism to facilitate searching any item or product.
#3. Generating leads
Suppose, you are an hotelier and considering offering a new mobile app only to increase bookings and generate more leads. How can you do this lead generation better with your app? There are multiple ways that your mobile app can help your customers to locate your facility, give them appointments and proceed making your products and services more lucrative. Actually following the customer preference and accordingly devising a strategy for effective push notifications and pop up alerts to generate more leads.
- Engaging customers with active feedback and replies is the key to the success of these apps.
- Push notifications should be effective enough to generate interest and consequent business leads.
#4. Customer Loyalty
Do you have a business, the nature of which implies the necessity of more clients? If yes, then this new mobile app can play a vital role in increasing your customer engagement and their fidelity to your brand. In a number of ways you can make your app play an important role in boosting this customer loyalty. You can create a check-in program and further can give incentives for visiting the app and for transaction. You can reward your users for both purchases or simply for visits.
But either way this proves to be hugely effective and it drives a lot of traffic behind your app over time. By introducing a mobile loyalty program you can keep track of your frequent users and other client engagements. Furthermore, you can reward your most frequent users with simple and attractive gifts or other things like free downloads of the Pro version of your app, coupons, license for another app by the same company etc.
- Giving rewards and incentives as per volumes of use is important to drive traffic.
- Offer in app purchases like Pro version, license for another app, upgrading the app can be effective.
#5. Updating events
For businesses that have a lot to do with events, mobile apps can really play a big role. Mobile apps can help users to stay updated on the latest or upcoming events, event schedules, event tickets and other forms, etc. An app featuring latest events of any niche would facilitate easy contact information, map, direction and local information and lastly social media information. Offering background information regarding participants will make people more engaged. This kind of engagement would further help to share social media and other contents.
#6. Building Community
A mobile app can be a great tool for building a purposeful business focused community and for connecting people and ideas on a variety of given topics. If your people need a place to stay connected and chat, a mobile app can be the ideal place. Your app can itself be a platform for discussing relevant and timely topics. Furthermore, by integrating social media sites you can facilitate sharing ideas and feedbacks.
#7. Utility Apps
An array of mobile apps that have garnered huge success belongs to this category. Yes, many of the most popular apps are utility apps. They offer solutions for one or two practical problems for the user. Whether it is a good calculator or a weather widget or a currency converter, all these practical utility apps can fit into the user preferences of people and thus can make the app popular. Through utility widgets if you can offer some unique problem solving apps this can help customers to get used to it quickly. These utility apps would also make them more familiar with the brand.
Finally to draw a conclusion we must say that while all these features of business app serve different purposes, you must focus on any one or two of them according to the nature of your business and your business objective.
Images: ”colorful application icons with Hand holding the phone and tablet pc, isolated on white background/ Shutterstock.com“
__________________________________________________________________________________
Connect with Tweak Your Biz:
Would you like to write for Tweak Your Biz?
Tweak Your Biz is an international, business advice community and online publication. Today it is read by over 140,000 business people each month (unique visitors, Google Analytics, December, 2013). See our review of 2013 for more information.
An outstanding title can increase tweets, Facebook Likes, and visitor traffic by 50% or more. Generate great titles for your articles and blog posts with the Tweak Your Biz Title Generator.
