5 Reasons a Small Business Needs a Mobile App

Since the App Store and the Android Market (now Google Play) launched back in 2008, the market for mobile app development has seen an exponential surge. As of 2022, there are about 5 million apps available for download on these two platforms alone (buildfire). This demand for quality app development has been especially high in the eCommerce industry, so much so that it saw the emergence of a brand new subset  - mobile commerce, commonly called mCommerce.

The truth is that mobile applications open up multiple avenues for retailers to reach and connect with their clients, and reach an even wider set of audiences. Today, small businesses regularly hire the services of mobile app development companies in order to boost their growth, and it has been proven to work.  Here are 5 reasons why every small business should consider a mobile app.

Brand Recognition

According to a survey, Indians spent about 4.7 hours everyday on their smartphones (Economic Times). In the US, that number is over 5 hours (Statista). This is time that brands can use to build a stronger connection to customers through mobile apps. For example, integrating popular social media platforms in your app will let people easily share links to your products, and discuss their favorite products and services. This is a powerful tool in building a reputation for your brand, since most users willingly share links to their favorite sites, describe their own experiences, and request feedback in social network circles. It serves as a way to easily advertise your service, and garner the attention of potential customers.

Additionally, you can also use a mobile app to send push notifications to customers, regularly talking about special sales, discounts, offerings, and giveaways.  Such offers will naturally cause a customer to shift towards your shop, seeing as they might be able to save money.

Convenience

Although mobile apps generally provide the same utility as a website, it is highly optimized for mobile devices, well-designed, and brings significant improvements to customer experiences. Convenient apps not only help in retaining these customers, but simultaneously also bringing in new ones.

• Mobility - Customers will get more freedom to be using your app from any place and at any time. Using the full power of modern smart devices, your app can also provide basic offline functionalities, such as the ability to check and compare prices and features of products.
• Loading Time - Since apps are well optimized for smartphones, their pages will load faster. In the retail business, even seconds make a difference in whether a customer will choose you over your competitors. A fast loading app providing a quick and streamlined shopping experience means many more possible customers get reeled in.
• Personalization - Customers generally expect companies to remember recent transactions and orders, and make personalized marketing efforts based on their individual preferences. Mobile apps are the ideal platform for this. Not only do they efficiently store customer shopping data, but they can also easily gather more critical customer data from the smartphone's own data collection that the customers have to approve of.

Better Customer Experience and Service

Mobile apps promote a two-way interaction between small business and customers. As mentioned earlier, the apps can get permission from the users to push notifications directly into their devices, informing them about sales events, promos, or new products. Interactive chat options, similarly, can help your customers connect with you anytime, from anywhere.

Loyalty programs such as reward points or discounts meted out through the app can truly boost the image as well as the sales of your brand. It will keep customers coming back, and it will also encourage them to speak positively about your business to friends and family, which means further growth in your customer base.

Individual mobile phones can now also be used as a replacement for cash and credit/debit cards, and can be used as a means of contactless payment. Payment apps are easy to use, fast, and secure. They can be integrated easily into any eCommerce business app.

Boost Revenues

An increase in customer satisfaction typically means an increase in sales as well. In fact, upto 70% of customers’ buying experiences will primarily be influenced by how they feel they are being treated (SalesForce). The more interested people are in your business and the way you manage it, the greater the consumer demand you will see. And if you manage to offer a product that most customers cannot wait to purchase, then the returns are going to be truly something to behold. And this is where an app can prove most handy.

Black Friday of 2020 saw eCommerce app installations in the US rise by about 43%, while consumer spending rose by 143% (as compared to the previous 3 Fridays) (AppsFlyer). When Domino’s Pizza released a mobile app back in 2012, they saw a surge of 28% in half-yearly pre-tax profits in the United Kingdom alone (Financial Times). All of this points to a trend that makes it evidently clear that mobile apps that make it easy and exciting for customers to click on the “Buy” button will provide a huge boost in revenue, even if your business already owns a mobile-optimized website.

Detailed Analytics

It is relatively easy to gather and track information from an app. Mobile analytics will allow you to monitor every user’s interaction levels, and provide valuable feedback about them such as average session length, individual responsiveness to specific content, etc. This information will be valuable in creating updates and improvements, and also in creating personalized content, advanced marketing strategies, and well-made promotional campaigns.

Conclusion

Worldwide mobile commerce sales registered around $3.56 trillion in 2021 - a growth of over 22.3% from the $2.91 trillion it saw in 2021. These sales account for nearly 73% of all global eCommerce (Oberlo). These numbers are not only staggering, but a true eye-opener as to the profits an app can bring for a business.

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What is App User Lifetime Value and How to Increase It?

Developing a mobile app is only the first (indeed crucial) step to boosting your business. But have you strategized what happens after people install your app? Increasing customer lifetime value (LTV) is equally, or perhaps more, important than driving installations. You sure don’t want people to uninstall the app after using it once? Then it’s time to focus on boosting user lifetime value.

Not sure what LTV is? No worry. Today, we will discuss the concept of user lifetime value and explore how to maximize it.

What is User Lifetime Value in a Mobile App?

App user lifetime value denotes the total value of a user for a business. From paid subscription to referring to other users - everything is included in it. LTV offers a holistic view comprising monetization, shareability, and retention rate. Let us take a quick look at these:

•  Sharability - It takes the shareability or virality of the app into account. You can identify how many users are brought by each user over a specific period of time.

•  Retention Rate - It denotes the percentage of people who continue to use your app over a specific period of time. It also considers how much time users spend on your app or user engagement.

•  Monetization - It refers to the amount of money the users spend on an app over their lifetime or Average Revenue per User (ARPU). For an eCommerce app, it takes order values into account. Other monetization methods include PPC campaigns (where the business owner earns money from the ad owner as the users click on it), paid subscriptions, in-app purchases, etc.

How to Calculate User Lifetime Value

Here, you have to multiply the average amount of revenue brought by each user by the time they use your app. Then add the extra value brought in from referrals. Here is a quick formula:

Average LTV = ARPU x 1/Churn rate + Referral rate

(Churn = 1 - retention rate)

Your aim should be to increase user lifetime value. Below, you will find some handpicked tips recommended by a renowned app development agency to boost user lifetime value.

How to Increase User Lifetime Value in a Mobile App

Here, we will elaborate on three components of lifetime value.

1. Sharability

Today, with numerous apps around, people prefer to listen to their peers’ recommendations. Here’re a few ways you can drive more shares.

• Incentivizing the users to share your app is a great trick. They will do something to get something in return. For instance, you may offer in-app bonuses or credits when a user refers a friend through social media.

• Offering something unique on the app will automatically compel people to share your app. Therefore, pay attention to that.

• You can also create an illusion of celebrating the users’ activities on your app. For instance, you may encourage them to share your gaming app when they cross a hurdle or win a puzzle.

• It’s also important to optimize your brand presence on social media. You can engage digital marketing services to spread brand awareness, manage brand reputation on different forums, and so on. All these will lead to evoking a positive impression in people’s minds and drive more installs. And the more installations your app gets the chances of virality through the existing user base increase. 

Before jumping to the next pointer, let’s quickly mention that you must enable people to directly share the app from inside the app. For that, it’s important to integrate popular social media APIs into your app.

2. Retention

The first step to increase retention is to analyze why people delete an app. Precisely for two reasons:

1. They got a better app to meet their purpose
2. They find the app to be confusing or boring

Focus on these two issues and you can significantly reduce the chunk rate. So, how to do that? We will explore below.

• Improve app onboarding experience. Introduce people to the features of your app and encourage them to perform some activities to get started. These may include dragging a feature, swiping through something, and so on.

• Make sure your app is intuitive enough so that people can easily understand which button or feature functions in which manner. The sign-up process should not be long or tedious. Encourage one-tap login with email/social media account or phone number.

• The sign-up process should not be long or tedious. Encourage one-tap login with email/social media account or phone number. 

• Keep data fields to the minimum. Make sure that the users need not fill a lengthy form. If yours is an eCommerce app, ensure that the checkout process is fast. Also, let the users save their card/connect with their UPI app as their preferred payment model for future shopping. It will save time and effort.

• Equip your app with all the essential features required to execute an activity in your specific niche. If required, check your competitors’ apps.

• It’s better to provide some more features in your app than your competitors. That way, it will stand out among the rest. For instance, if yours is a chatting app, consider why people will use it instead of WhatsApp or Telegram? What extra features can you provide?

• A/B testing is a great way to find out which elements are preferred to the users. Optimize your app accordingly.

• Engage maintenance services in a consistent manner so as to keep your app glitch-free and high-functioning at all times.

3. Monetization

Some of the proven ways to monetize your app include:

• Leverage push notification to encourage people to interact with your app and convert. For that, you need to send personalized push notifications to the users. You can track geo-locations of the users, their browsing/purchase history, and wishlist to customize the notification message.

• No matter how alluring it seems, always feature native ads on your mobile app. For instance, if yours is a food delivery app, featuring an ad of a bakery is a smart step. Native ads will not irritate people and these may even encourage them to click. That way, you can earn from the ad owner.

• Instead of encouraging people to purchase the app while installing it from the app store, it’s better to rely on in-app purchases. With so many apps available in the market, people may not be interested to purchase an app. On the contrary, as they get addicted to the app, they may want to unlock other features (say, earning virtual coins or lives, or unlocking some tracks) via in-app purchase. This is closely connected with purchasing the premium version of the app that offers more features.

By adopting these strategies you can significantly increase user lifetime value in your mobile app. Try these and share your thoughts with us.

5 Vital Steps to Designing a Great Small Business Website

A well-designed website is important for small businesses, entrepreneurs, or anybody wanting to sell goods or services online. The key to attracting new customers is allowing your prospects to easily find you through a quick search on any of the popular search engines. 

To put it simply, when you are selling products/services online, the website is an extension of your business card. It provides your potential customers all the important details regarding your business, the location of your store (if any) and also lets them know about your latest marketing campaign. However, creating a business website is easier said than done. But, the entire process can seem less challenging if you have availed of professional website design services. 

Now, there are a few steps that are crucial to building an attention-grabbing small business website. Understanding these steps will make it easier for you to work with a professional website design company. Keep reading to know those steps. 

1. Decide the purpose of your business website 

The first and foremost step is to decide what you want the website to do for you. It might be a static website that you are creating for giving potential customers information about your products/services and credentials. Or, you might want a dynamic website where you would be adding new content periodically and want visitors to subscribe for such information. You might want to encourage visitors to buy your products or avail of your services. 

Knowing what you want is important because this will guide website designers to develop your business website and decide on the functionalities, CTAs, content types, user journey, and so on. 

2. Select a content management system (CMS)

A CMS or content management system refers to a web application that helps you with the creation, as well as, editing and management of content on your website. Some of the popular CMS’ are Joomla, Magento, Drupal, Tumblr, WordPress, and Wix. You can talk to a website design company to find out about the features of each of these CMS’ so that you can make an informed decision. 

3. Get the perfect domain and choose stable hosting 

The next step is to decide on a unique domain name (web address). The domain name should be easy to remember, catchy and good for SEO (search engine optimization). It should be relevant to your business. 

Once you’ve decided on the domain name, you need to choose a web host. A web host is a remote location where your business website and all the related software will be held and also made available to your target audience. Your choice of a web host would depend on the number of visitors that you are expecting to receive and the speed of the website. 

4. The design phase 

If you want to drive visitors, you need a website that is engaging and interesting. You would want the design of your website to be relevant and memorable so that visitors keep coming back. Before the actual design starts, a business website design company will provide you with wireframes of your website. These are skeletal pages that will be focusing on offering an intuitive user journey. Once you’ve agreed on the wireframes, they will be passed to the graphic designer who will begin designing your website. 

5. Developing website content and using images 

Content and images can make or break your website. If the images used are blurred or irrelevant, your website is not going to impress your visitors. The same goes for poorly crafted website content. The content must be easy to scan and written in an easily comprehensible language. Jargon must be avoided. 

Besides these, your website needs to have a responsive design so that your potential customers can view your website on their desktop, laptop, or smartphone. 

You can get started on creating your small business website by collaborating with a professional website design company. 

How to Build a Website with Strong SEO Foundation

There was a time when a website and SEO were considered to be distinct. Site owners considered that building a site comprised of design and functionalities. Later, some of them used to invest in SEO services to enhance the site rank on the search engines.

The situation, today, is completely different. In the contemporary competitive landscape, a site owner prioritizes a high rank on the search engine right from the time of building the website. Therefore, having a strong SEO foundation on a website is crucial.

How to Create a Solid SEO Foundation for Your Website

Prioritize Mobile

Google has changed their prioritization from mobile-friendly website indexing to mobile-first indexing. With mobile devices generating almost 60% of website traffic (source: Statista), this only makes sense.

What does it mean from the SEO perspective? This implies that mobile versions of websites will be indexed before the desktop versions. Naturally, responsive website development is the best way to go.

Here are a few principles for building a mobile-first website:

• Use a responsive framework
• Design a thumb-friendly website since 75% of people use their thumb to operate mobile devices (source: UX Matters)
• Place the CTA in easily visible and accessible places and make the button large so that the users can tap
• Navigation must be clean and intuitive
• Constantly test the site

Not sure how to execute all these? Consider engaging a professional website design company and get your job done.

Enhance Loading Speed

Google has rolled out speed update as a crucial part of the ranking algorithm. Take care of this while building your website so as to increase its SEO-friendliness.

With so many websites for a specific product/service/information available on the web, the users are not going to wait for a long time for a page to load. They will simply bounce and visit a different site. If you don’t want your site to have an increased bounce rate and a low rank on the search engines, pay attention to increasing website speed.

Here are a few strategies to increase your site loading speed:

• Use a browser cache
• Compress images without affecting the quality 
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to reduce latency 
• Leverage lazy loading 
• Minimize HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript
  

Optimized Content

What’s SEO without content! Write SEO-friendly keyword-optimized content for your webpage. Make sure that the keywords match your users’ intent and search terms.

From meta titles and descriptions to on-page content, the website should follow SEO best practices. Also, your site URL must be properly optimized. Google states that the first 3 to 5 words in your URL are the most crucial. You can place your target keyword there. Also, keep it short and remove excess symbols and letters.

Further, make sure to include a blog section on your website and fill it with useful content optimized with relevant keywords. This is a long-term plan and you need to have a content calendar ready at your disposal.

Linking Structure

Linking structure plays a significant role both for website navigation and SEO.

Internal linking will help the site visitors check out multiple web pages on your site. However, make sure not to exhaust them from one page to another without any purpose. Every page must have dedicated CTAs at proper places so that people can easily convert.

Further, internal linking will help search engine bots to crawl the site and comprehend how each page is connected to each other. Finally, it will help to flow link juice and help to uplift the rank of each web page.

Outbound links are also crucial as they help the search engines to recognize your website’s nature and its authority in the niche.

Set Up Google Analytics

From the day you launch your website, make it a practice to monitor its performance. It will help you to improve the site features/functionality and properly direct your SEO strategy.

We recommend you set up Google Analytics. It will help you get insights into who is viewing your page, from which platforms are they coming, how many of the visitors are converting, at which point on your site most visitors are bouncing, and so on.

You will also get to know who is linking to your website and which content is linked the most. You can easily access keyword information like CTR (Click-Through Rate) and total keyword impression. Backed with all the data, your SEO foundation will be stronger.

Wrapping Up

These steps will help you to keep one step ahead of your competitors right from the time of developing a website. If your website is SEO-friendly, you need not give it a complete facelift later when you engage in SEO services. We hope you have found the blog useful. Let us know your thoughts.

How to Make a PWA Search Engine Friendly

We know that a Progressive Web App or PWA is an advanced form of a traditional website. From an interactive experience to push notifications - a PWA offers it all. Now, does it help SEO efforts? One thing is obvious - a PWA offers a superb user experience which is a crucial factor in enhancing site rank on the search engine. No wonder that the experts of SEO services readily approve of PWA right from its initiation. Today, we will explore some more aspects regarding how to improve SEO scores for PWA. Without further ado, let’s get started.

How to Improve SERP Ranking of a PWA

Responsive Design 

Mobile-first indexing is already ‘in’ these days. Search engines prioritize responsive web design as it facilitates superb user experiences on multiple devices irrespective of screen size. Therefore, responsive websites have a competitive edge over other sites when it comes to winning a high rank on the SERP. 

Here’s a suggestion by the top web developers in India. A progressive web app should have a responsive design. Elements like margins, fonts, paddings, buttons, etc. should dynamically scale to different viewports and resolutions. 

Now, when images are scaled-up, they look bad and take a long time to load; thus impact the scroll performance. Further, the margins and paddings may not scale properly. Using the ‘scrset’ attribute can immensely help here. 

This attribute fetches different resolution images leveraging screen display capabilities. Make sure to avoid using fixed-size fonts since it may impact the overall usability of the web app. The thumb rule for a progressive web app is that all the elements should be extremely flexible. 


Loading Speed 

Loading speed is a crucial aspect of search engine optimization. SEMRush states that a site should aim at loading within 2 seconds for enhanced SEO results. As you can understand, PWA aims at reaching it. 

One of the major aspects of a progressive web app is its fast loading. It is known as progressive loading or lazy loading. A PWA defers the loading of some elements while prioritizing other elements to load first. 

For instance, the developers may build a PWA in such a way that it loads HTML elements first and CSS elements later. Similarly, they may also enable the web app to load JavaScript by deferring the loading of CSS and HTML elements. 

Further, a progressive web app can load all the crucial information in a single file instead of multiple small files. It helps the web pages to load faster. A PWA can comprehend what the users want first - for instance, the images and the texts displayed above the fold can be delivered first and the video or other elements present on below-the-fold may load later when the users scroll down.

Link Structure 

External and internal linking plays a significant role in SEO. While external links pointing to your website reflects your site’s authority and credibility, internal links help to flow link juice from high authority webpage to low authority one and enable the search engines to better crawl and index all the pages. Therefore, it is important to focus on link structure. 

The linking structure can be deeply impacted if you don’t use href attribute. The search engine bots will analyze anchor tags that have this attribute in place instead of just JavaScript links. 

We know all these sound quite complex and require extensive tech expertise. You may engage professional dynamic web development services to get your site built by the experts. 

JavaScript Rendering

For a PWA to be search engine friendly, the content available on every web page needs to be properly indexed. That’s because the search engines need to render JavaScript so as to view the content present in the PWA.

Now, the problem is that sometimes resources are randomly utilized due to compilation and execution. Therefore, search engines index JavaScript in two stages. The content rendered on the client-side is deferred until while the server-side content is rendered.

Now, many search engines (not Google) and social media networks like Facebook cannot process JS and fall back on HTML for support. Therefore, the servers need to be configured in a way that these can instantly respond to the requests for deep URLs. This principle applies to various core elements like content, meta tags, links, and images, and navigation. 


Today’s advanced technology makes it possible for the JS framework to be configured in a way that allows uninterrupted server-side rendering or isomorphic rendering. With it, the PWA can run on the server and the browser.

Wrap It Up

As we have earlier stated, PWA offers a superb user experience with its dynamic nature. Following the above-stated strategies will help you to make the PWA more search engine friendly and improve ranking on the SERP.

Found the article useful? Share your thoughts with us.