Just a few years ago, only the e-commerce giants such as Amazon were giving the option of mobile apps to make a purchase. But with the emerging technologies, the situation has changed dramatically in the last few years. The cost of developing a mobile app has come down, and businesses are now understanding the importance of m-commerce. The market is now filled with all types of mobile services including business apps, retail apps, and e-commerce apps.
Using a mobile device for shopping has become a consumer norm now, which is only going to expand in the future. This is the reason why mobile commerce or m-commerce is considered the future of e-commerce. Here are a few statistics showing the importance of m-commerce in online business:
- Mobile retail e-commerce sales are projected to exceed $430 billion in 2022 and $710 billion in 2025.
- Almost half the mobile shoppers use smartphones to compare the pricing of products or services.
- By 2024, there will most likely be over 187 million active mobile shoppers in the US alone.
- Time spent on retail apps reached over 100 billion hours globally.
- Dedicated mobile commerce apps are the preferred way to do mobile online shopping, taking 54% of complete mobile commerce payments.
In this article, we will go through the various advantages that business owners can leverage by developing a mobile app for their business.
9 Advantages of Developing a Mobile App for your Business
Let’s go through the most important and business-oriented benefits of m-commerce for companies.
1. Faster Customer Journey:
There are still many businesses who believe that by developing a responsive website, they can provide their buyers with a mobile app-like experience. But this is far from the truth.
On a general basis, a mobile app is nearly 1.5 times faster than a website while loading data and search results. Thus, customers prefer mobile apps to browse products and purchase products faster.
This faster experience is a critical advantage for companies who want to provide their customers with a seamless shopping experience.
2. High Accessibility and Wide Reach:
Mobile apps let companies take a step into new horizons in which they have never entered before. As per a report by Deloitte, a developing country like India is expected to have 1 billion smartphone users by 2026. This represents nearly one-eighth of the world’s population present in a single country.
Every person with a mobile device is a potential online buyer. Such a huge base of customers offers a vast target audience to capture and leverage all the opportunities for sales and revenue. Accessing your offerings will be easier for these buyers as they just need to download an app on their phones.
If we compare this with the traditional shopping experience in which a customer walks into a brick-and-mortar store, browse items in the store, and stands in a line to pay, m-commerce is a lot more convenient. Customers can make a purchase while sitting in their homes or even on the go.
3. Reaches Customers at Perfect Timing:
Another major advantage of mobile commerce for businesses of varied industries are that it facilitates targeted timing. With mobile apps, you can target your customers with the right message at the right time.
By mobile applications you can send push notifications to app users if they left a product in the cart if the product they were checking is now available in stock, latest promotional offers, and much more.
You can also leverage features such as geo-tracking and programmatic advertising, by which you can connect with them in real time and during specific moments in their day. Doing these will definitely increase the chances of purchase by the customers.
4. Open New Doors of Marketing:
Now let’s understand the marketing advantages of m-commerce over traditional e-commerce. The mobile technologies of an m-commerce app let you better analyze the incoming traffic on your app, and thus you can boost your marketing efforts if consumer interest spikes. If the consumers are less likely to buy your products then you can downscale your marketing activities accordingly.
A few of the other marketing benefits of m-commerce are:
- The users who have installed your app are your existing targeted audience. Thus, you can have separate marketing campaigns for the users who have installed your app and those who are yet to install it.
- Integrating your mobile app with social media platforms opens a plethora of ways of marketing. You can motivate the buyers to spread the word about your brand on their social media accounts and share your products with their networks.
- If your ad gets highly popular, you can get sponsored product ads on your app from certain brands.
In a nutshell, m-commerce reduces the cost of your marketing campaigns by a huge extent and makes the efforts more effective by using detailed customer data.
5. Leveraging Customer Data:
A declining return on ad spending has caused many business owners to rethink their customer retention strategies. It is highly important to hold your customers as it is less costly than acquiring a new customer. Building long-lasting relationships mean getting to know your customers and providing them with a personalized experience. More than 77% of the customers say they will choose, recommend and even pay more for a brand that is ready to deliver a personalized experience to them.
However, personalization is not just adding the name of your customer in the subject line of your marketing email. It is delivering a tailored experience that makes your brand remembered in their mind. A mobile can easily solve your customer data dilemma.
The mobile app analytics lets you easily track customer data from the landing on your app to the final purchase. Within this customer journey, you can get valuable knowledge about what triggers a purchase, and learn to know more about the habits, preferences, and roadblocks they face during the shopping journey.
To know more about your customers, you should know their basic demographic information, along with their shopping history and location to forecast future shopping trends.
The mobile app analytics sophistication depends on what you use for developing your app and also on the business strategy.
6. Improved Customer Experience:
Every company strives for the attention span of customers. The increased competition in e-commerce is leading to deliver a unique and personalized customer experience. Thus, one should leave no stone unturned in delivering a top-notch buying experience. A mobile app helps in that in multiple ways, these are:
- M-commerce has an advantage that most of the customers how an app works on a smartphone and other mobile devices. They find it easy to navigate to find their desired products with just a few clicks. Thus, developing smooth navigation within your app is more than enough to get a headstart from your competitors.
- Customers use mobile devices to connect with their kith and kin. Thus, the users can share their opinions, talk about your product or brand, or even ask for advice from the community.
- Features such as personalized discounts and a streamlined payment gateway can alleviate the user experience.
- As per a survey, 69% of the customers prefer to review a product on their mobile instead of with an in-store representative. It is easy to research products on mobile, they can search from the comfort of their couch or even on the go.
7. Direct Communication:
There are a plethora of ways available by which businesses can communicate with their target audiences and patrons e.g. social media, newsletters, and e-mails. But the impact is very less in comparison to that of the push notifications. Customers can easily ignore an email but not push notifications. Push notifications attract users to click on them and thus land the users on a mobile app.
The open rate of push notifications is the highest among all direct connections with users (90%). It is perfect to intimate your users about the new upcoming stocks, promotions, coupons, and discounts. They are instant and also unobtrusive. Also, 70% of the users find Push notifications useful.
8. Personalized Content:
Consumers appreciate personalized content from the brands as they feel that the brand is understanding their preferences and wants them to experience more with their products. This is another advantage of m-commerce.
The mobile app can use the customers’ data and analyze the different behaviour patterns of the users which ultimately lets you deliver a personalized experience to the users. The data can be of location, interests, previous buying history, items viewed, etc.
9. Geolocation:
Mobile apps are better because they leverage the software as well as the hardware capabilities of a mobile device. For e.g., mobile devices are equipped with cameras to scan QR codes, a GPS for location, a microphone for voice search, and many others.
Challenges of Mobiles Commerce:
No technology has only advantages but there are a few challenges which are always associated with it. Here are a few challenges that you must overcome to gain a competitive edge in the market:
a. High Competition:
As mobile commerce is on the rise, almost every industry and company is realizing its potential and started leveraging its advantages. While there are millions of customers using mobile end technology, there are also thousands of competitors as well. To stay ahead, your mobile app must deliver a unique buying experience and offer all the necessary features to drive engagement.
b. Privacy Concerns:
Today’s customers are very well aware of the fact that companies are going to use their track their buying behaviour and collect data. With great advantage also comes great responsibility. Protecting the data of the users should be the top priority while securing your app from cyber hackers. That’s why it is best to hire a company like Ceymox Technologies who are having vast experience in developing e-commerce apps.
Wrapping Up:
Mobile commerce is an ongoing trend with an increasing number of mobile users. More than 3 billion people across the world use a smartphone to go online every day. Leveraging such a huge potential will not just drive revenue but will also increase the brand reputation and loyalty.
At Ceymox Technologies, the best e-commerce development company in India, we are having expertise in developing mobile apps from scratch. We are having a team of developers who can understand your requirements, and provide the best security, advanced features, and whatever you want. Feel free to reach us.
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