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In today’s fast-paced digital world, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are constantly evaluating how best to allocate their marketing budgets. Historically, the first step was to develop a website. However, with smartphones becoming the go-to shopping buddy for consumers worldwide, businesses today are finding more value in mobile apps than traditional websites.
If you’re working with a tight marketing budget but want to adapt your offering to today’s tech-savvy customers, we’ve put together a detailed guide on why investing in a mobile app could be a smarter choice for your business.
It all starts with a Google Search.
Before even considering a website, put yourself in your customer’s shoes.
What’s the first thing they do when looking for a new restaurant, clothing store, or beauty spa? They Google it. Customers today rely heavily on platforms like Google Reviews to find locations, check reviews, explore menus or services, and even look up business hours.
So instead of redirecting users to a website that essentially repeats the same information, why not integrate a link to your app on your Google profile? This way, customers can download it, reserve online, edit purchases, pay upfront, collect rewards, and receive more value from your business.
Just think about it: Google helps people find you, and your app becomes the platform where they stay engaged.
Mobile Apps: A One-Stop Shop for Bookings, Payments, and Promotions
Managing bookings and payments on a website often involves complicated and costly third-party integrations. In contrast, mobile apps offer a much smoother process, combining these functionalities in one place. Whether it's a restaurant allowing customers to book a table or a beauty salon offering instant online payments, apps can streamline these processes far more efficiently.
Moreover, with built-in features like push notifications, an app can serve as a 24/7 communication channel, reaching customers directly on their mobile devices without requiring them to check their emails or open a new browser. This is especially beneficial for promoting discounts, flash sales, or last-minute availability — tasks that would be cumbersome to manage via a website.
Additionally, recent data shows that push notifications have an open rate as high as 90%, compared to the 20-30% typical of traditional email marketing campaigns used to redirect customers to websites.
Boosting Cash Flow: Mobile App Wallets and Preloaded Payments
An underappreciated advantage of mobile apps is their ability to support preloaded payments. Apps can encourage customers to add funds into their accounts, which not only makes their purchases faster and more convenient but also improves your cash flow. You could incentivise users by offering a small bonus for loading a certain amount onto their app wallet, such as giving them €10 for every €100 they preload.
This practice is widely used by companies like Starbucks, where prepaid balances provide them with a steady influx of cash that can be reinvested in operations. The appeal for customers lies in the ease of payment and the bonuses, while businesses like yours would benefit from having immediate capital. Additionally, loyalty incentives tied to these preloaded balances — such as cashback — further encourage customer retention and frequent visits.
Increased Customer Engagement and Retention
Consumers today spend an average of 4-5 hours per day on their phones, with 90% of that time spent within apps. It makes sense, then, that businesses should prioritise their presence where customers are already spending their time. While websites can be made mobile-friendly, they are often inferior in comparison to the fluid user experience of a well-designed mobile app.
Mobile apps are built with smartphone screens in mind, ensuring an optimised user experience. From seamless navigation to quicker load times, apps minimise friction, allowing users to interact with your brand effortlessly. Additionally, apps provide a continuous presence on a user’s mobile device, unlike websites that require active visits.
Even when not in use, your app icon will keep your brand visible on your customer’s screen, serving as a reminder of your business.
Rewarding Loyalty: Seamless Integration of Loyalty Programs
With mobile apps, loyalty programs can be integrated directly into the user experience, offering rewards such as cashback, points, stamps, or store credit. In contrast, traditional websites often make loyalty programs more cumbersome, requiring users to log in, copy-paste discount codes when checking out, or even print out vouchers.
Apps, however, make loyalty rewards an automatic part of every transaction. For instance, after a purchase, customers could instantly see their updated stamps or extra credit at a glance.
This ease of access ensures customers continue to engage with your business and have an added incentive to return. This strategy has been widely successful for companies like Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts, where loyalty programs are central to their customer retention strategy.
Customer Data and Insights
Mobile apps offer small and medium-sized businesses access to insights that were once only available to larger brands. Businesses like yours can track customer preferences, interactions, and purchase patterns, which can help redefine your product offerings, create content on social media based on popular customer choices, or even help you decide factors like pricing, deals, or limited promotions.
3 Ways You Can Use Customer Data to Boost Your Business Growth
Personalised Marketing
An app powered by LoyLap allows merchants to segment users based on their behaviour and preferences, enabling the creation of targeted marketing campaigns. You could send promotions based on a user’s past purchases, visit frequency, or even how much they have spent over the years.
Predict Trends & Act Upon Them
The data gathered can also help you predict customer trends. By understanding which products are most popular and which promotions see the highest engagement, you can adjust inventory, pricing, and offerings accordingly. For instance, if certain products sell faster during specific seasons, you can plan better for peak periods, reducing waste and increasing profitability.
Enhanced Customer Experience
With an app, you can collect feedback directly from users, allowing you to understand how customers perceive your services, menu,or even interactions with your employees. These insights can help you make improvements before a bad experience turns into a very public Google review.
In short, the analytics feature within an app developed by LoyLap helps turn customer data into actionable insights, enabling you to make informed decisions that drive growth, improve customer satisfaction, and increase revenue.
Bonus: Simplify Operations and Save Money
Mobile apps aren’t just about making life easier for your customers - they can also drastically streamline your internal operations, especially if you run a small business with a limited team. An app integrates multiple tools in one place, allowing you to manage bookings, payments, promotions, and loyalty programs seamlessly, without juggling various platforms or third-party services.
By contrast, implementing these same features on a website would require significantly more time, money, and expertise. For instance, adding a booking system, payment gateway, and loyalty program to a website means coordinating between multiple developers and plugins, not to mention dealing with potential technical issues that could disrupt your business, or worst, customer experience.
3 Extra Perks of Working with an App Developed by LoyLap
Lower Development and Maintenance Costs
While developing a website with all the necessary features may require ongoing work with web designers and hosting services, a mobile app is usually a one-time investment with lower maintenance needs. A mobile app developed by LoyLap is specifically designed for small businesses with ease of use in mind, meaning no need for in-house developers to update product inventory, change images, create campaigns, or send push notifications.
Ease of Use and Accessibility
Because our mobile apps are built to optimise the smartphone experience, customers can use them intuitively without a steep learning curve. Same things happens with the merchants managing the behind the scenes. Plus, our apps offer a clean, simple interface that works across all devices, eliminating the need to worry about responsiveness or compatibility issues across different screen sizes.
Increased Efficiency Through Automation
Another major advantage of our mobile apps is automation. Features such as push notifications and automated loyalty rewards can be set up once and continue to function without manual intervention. This frees up time for you and your team, allowing you to focus on delivering excellent customer service and running day-to-day operations.
Wrapping Up!
With the mobile industry thriving and people spending more and more time on their phones, it is worthwhile for every business to invest in mobile app development. If your business is not mobile and not thinking about investing in mobile app development, then you are already behind your competitors. Even if your competitors are not mobile, they soon will be.
By using tools like Google My Business for your basic online presence and investing in a feature-rich mobile app, you can provide your customers with the experience they expect while making the most of your budget. Your mobile app will not only be a place where customers can pay, book, and collect rewards - it will become an extension of your brand that keeps them coming back, boosting your cash flow and building long-term loyalty.
So why wait? Make the smart move today and invest in a mobile app that works for your business - and for your customers.
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