8 Tips for Building Your Business Mobile App – Pt 2
This post continues from our previous post where we delved into how successful Business Mobile Apps must provide access to your services, giving users real world value to solve their daily problems. Tips five through eight follow:
5) Coupons and Mobile Rewards vs Upselling
Nothing says ‘Thank You’ to your customers like rewards and discounts. Today, it’s perfectly reasonable to offer special discounts based on what avenue the customer is coming through and which events they want to participate in. This has become normalised in reward codes entered at checkout for everything from online software to ordering pizza.
Find ways to reward your customers and make them feel like they earned it. Loyalty points are an excellent way to go with it, along with randomised ‘roulette’ daily rewards as well. You might associate certain discounts with your charity works, national or cultural events, or even special company holidays you decide to make real by celebrating them with your mobile users.
While this tip isn’t exactly specific to the mobile audience, don’t forget to include special offers directly triggered by or associated with your mobile features and opportunities.
6) Cool the Notifications
Even with custom apps, it has been the trend for several years to get notification permissions for your mobile app and then bombard users with constant ‘helpful’ updates on what the app, your business, and their orders are doing. However, in reality, it’s important to realise that their mobile device is going to make a sound and possibly vibrate every time one of those notifications goes through.
Rather than demanding your customer’s attention with every shred of new information, make your notifications count. Cool it on the ‘filler’ messages and only alert your customers when they might want to respond or make a decision. Letting them know that packages have arrived at their door is useful, but not every time the package changes carriers along the way. Choose which notifications are important and make them the default, then give customers the option to turn on or off individual notifications based on their preferences.
7) Allow for Multiple Accounts
While it’s true that almost everyone in our current society uses a smartphone or tablet on a regular basis, not everyone actually has their own device. Parents phones become family devices for children to play on and partners to borrow and young siblings are often required to share the responsibility of a phone. On top of this, there are many households where everyone may have their own phone but share a number of tablets and hybrid tab-tops.
This all comes together to mean that you shouldn’t assume that one device is limited to only one user account. By allowing quick switching between a collection of ‘household’ accounts, you can rapidly adapt to the new demands for mobile device convenience features by providing for family devices and even classroom devices multiple accounts. One way to offer smooth but password-protected account switching without the usual security hazards of saved passwords is a quick picture quiz. Have each person select and memorise a few images that they then pick from an array to switch accounts.
8) Smart Home Skills
Finally, let’s talk about smart homes. These clever AI-directed device hubs can bring together dozens of home appliances, gadgets, and lights but they can also interact smoothly with the online and mobile world through the application of “Skills”. A smart home skill is essentially an API that allows the smart home to access certain features of your mobile app based on pre-determined verbal commands. By preparing a smart home skill that can use most of your handy mobile features, you enter the cutting-edge of modern consumer technology by making it easy for every compatible smart-home user to access your services from home without even picking up a device. Consider commands like “Check my account balance.”, “When will my delivery get here?” and “Does my local store carry this product?”. Don’t forget to integrate some of your more innovative mobile features as well.
When it comes to mobile marketing, nothing is more powerful than a well-designed custom application that provides real-world value to the customers. For more information on how to fine-tune your app to become an integral part of your mobile users’ lives, contact us today!
