Devices like tablets and wearables entering the genre of mobiles has opened up more touchpoints to engage the customers and impacted the way we do business. With the growing influence of IoT, the opportunity to connect to a million more devices is tantalizing. It’s predicted that by the end of 2018, a third of the world’s population- approximately 2.5 billion will be using smart phones. For businesses, it means a mobile app is a requirement not a fad anymore, particularly if you want to be visible to customers at all times, create a direct marketing channel, offer greater value in customer engagements and finally reap higher customer loyalty.
Indian scenario
Indian market is no different and here are some top reasons to ensure you have a robust mobile app strategy to sustain your marketing efforts.
- As of May 2017, India had over 1.1 Billion mobile phone subscribers
- India has the 2nd largest Smart Phone user base with over 350 Mn users
- India’s internet user base is over 450 million
- Pre-paid Smartphone users spend nearly 72% of their time on accessing online content, of which close to 22% of time is spend on apps and balance on online content.
What you need to know about app strategy.
Like most business strategies, it all begins with your customer expectations and company goals. You need to be clear what your mobile app is expected to deliver on both counts.
Your mobile app strategy can start with something as basic as making your website mobile friendly to enable easy reading of your content on various devices or include app as well as web page optimization.
It’s interesting that an average Indian smart phone user has 29 apps installed on their Smart Phone and generally installs 8 new apps and uninstalls 7 app every month. So, unless your mobile app is going to add significant value to the user, having a mobile app may not be the best decision for your company.
How to define your mobile app strategy?
The decision to develop a mobile app is like considering high end Real Estate on the customer device. You need to give it a serious thought because the customer will retain the app only as long as it is relevant and user friendly.
You can start by considering the user experience and then build on the same The idea is to give the customer what he or she wants and be connected at all times. You certainly don’t want your customer to feel “Oh God, that was tough” after using your app. It’s also a great idea to think beyond the freemium to ‘what next’ to encourage the customers to make purchase decisions easily.
We are making it easier for you to develop your strategy- just answer these questions and you know what you need to do.
- How much time you have in your hand?
- What is the budget?
- Are you planning to monetize your mobile application?
- Do you have resource internally to develop and manage the mobile app?
- The mobile application will be developed on a hybrid or a native platform?
- How frequently your expect changes in the application?
- Do you want to leverage upon the functionalities and features of the mobile OS?
- What is the frequency with which the user will use the mobile application?
- Internal stake holders- finance, marketing, product teams may have divergent views on what it should deliver.
rIt is quite possible that your initial end –user concept may change once you roll out the app, but that’s a good problem to have! After all you are developing an app to go where your users go and incorporate customer driven changes! So go right ahead and take the plunge!
