5 Benefits of Having an App for Your Business

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Your business needs an app.

Period, end of discussion. As we’ll see, the benefits of a well-rounded app that allows current and prospective customers to engage with your brand far outweigh the upfront costs of creating it.

Whether you turn to one of the top app developers in your industry to develop a truly best-in-class platform or have your own team throw a minimum viable product together to start, your app will take you places. Let’s review five reasons why it’s past time you began.

  1. Apps Enable Marketing and Service Personalization

If you’re considering developing an app for your businesses, chances are good you’re doing so with these capabilities in mind. Because apps collect significant amounts of data at the individual level — with the user’s permission, critically — they’re natural vectors for personalized marketing and service delivery.

In other words, a well-designed, engaging app makes it much easier for your business to cater to individual customers rather than idealized “personas” representing broad segments of your audience and constructed from aggregated data that may or may not accurately reflect reality.

  1. Apps Help Businesses Develop and Improve Products and Services

Apps’ data collection capabilities have a less direct benefit for business users as well: product development and improvements. By accumulating data about how customers engage or choose not to engage with their brand, use their products and services, and change their usage patterns over time, businesses can assess their strengths and weaknesses in real time. With this information in hand, they can then do what product developers do best: iterate and improve.

  1. Apps Support Loyalty and Discount Programs That Encourage Customers to Buy More

A customer-facing app is a natural home for loyalty programs and other incentives (volume buying and preferred customer discounts, among many others) that encourage customers to buy more. Any app features that reduce friction at the point of sale and subtly nudge customers to engage (and buy) at higher frequencies are app features worth keeping and improving.

  1. Apps Support Seamless Referral Programs

You probably don’t need convincing of the benefits of customer referral programs. They’ve proven their worth time and again. But if you’re relying only on your website, social media properties, and email marketing list to drive your referral program, you’re not converting at your full potential. Indeed, a business app with a seamless referral feature could grow to be your company’s most potent lead funnel.

  1. Apps Collect and Organize Customer Feedback

The customer metadata and behavioral details you’ll collect with your business app will certainly help you improve your offerings and perhaps develop new ones. But your app can also help you collect qualitative and quantitative feedback directly from customers, assuming you ask for it and make it easy for customers to provide it via in-app chat, messaging, and problem reporting.

Your Business Needs an App. So, What Are You Waiting For?

It’s past time for your business to develop an app of its own. Doing so will put a wealth of customer-generated information at your fingertips, supercharging your marketing and product development operations while boosting sales and lead generation. Talk about an investment worth making.