It’s no news to hear that smartphones have completely changed the way we live and permeate so much of our lives. Most of us look at our phones first thing in the morning, during meals, and before we go to bed every night. What might surprise you however is that mobile traffic has now eclipsed web traffic in every developed country, and in some places, such as China, 98% of internet users are mobile. The amount of time we spend online has surged thanks to the ability to now access information from the palm of our hand.
Clearly there is no more important time than now as a business to have a website that is optimised for mobile traffic and if it makes sense, to offer your customers a feature-rich mobile app that follows leading design principles and is easy to use.
A mobile app allows you to build a stronger brand as it effectively offers you another platform to interact with your customers. The perception of a company is highly attributed to the touch points that its customers have with it, and given that mobile is now the biggest touch point for almost every business, it would be disastrous for a company’s brand to neglect its mobile channels.
The benefits of having a valuable and intuitive mobile app also include higher customer engagement, which often directly translates in sales. A lot companies mistaken think of mobile as an extension of web but it is an entirely different interface, and once of its biggest features is the ability to use push notifications. The proper use of push notifications can completely revolutionise how a company engages with its customers. Push notifications convert much better than emails, with a 50% higher open rate and a 7x higher click through rate. Taking advantage of that is critical for staying competitive in today’s mobile-first world.
Domino’s, for example, launched their mobile app for ordering pizza a few years ago and immediately saw an increase to their bottom line. The online orders in the period following the launch of the app caused a 28% rise in half-year pre-tax profits just in the UK. A year or two later and app-based orders shot up by more than 41%, with 11.5 million people downloading the app and now mobile accounts for the majority of their online orders.
There is also a much more incredible story of a hyper-growth company that can credit a lot of their success to having a well built and beautifully designed mobile app.
Afterpay is a fintech payments company originally from Australia. They operate in the “buy now pay later” space allowing people to buy products and pay them off with four interest-free instalments.
Initially only a web-product, in 2017 Afterpay decided they would need to focus on improving their mobile channel. In Australia at the time most retailers did not have their own mobile app, which probably sounds surprising given some of the research and points made above, but Afterpay clearly saw this as a chance to fill a gap in the needs of Australia’s retail consumers.
Afterpay had already been a public company for a year and during that time their valuation doubled, not a bad feat, but it’s after they organised for Dovetail to come in and build them a mobile app that their company really took off. After the app was launched the company’s valuation went up 9x during the next year and a half and Afterpay ended up becoming the fastest growing public company in Australia history. But their mobile growth doesn’t stop there. Fast forward to today and the company has seen their app downloaded over 15 million times as they’ve expanded globally into four major markets across the globe: Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the USA.
In today’s smartphone dominant world, a good mobile app really can send a company’s sales and growth into the stratosphere.
Hi,
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