The 21st century looks set to be the era of mobile devices. By now all businesses should have a mobile-friendly website. Many businesses will benefit from having a mobile-native app. Apps are specifically designed for mobile devices. This means that they deliver the best, possible experience to mobile users.
In short, if you don’t yet have a mobile app for your business, you’re likely to lose out to competitors who do. Now is therefore the perfect time to bring your business up-to-date and increase your appeal to modern customers using mobile devices.
Why invest in a mobile app?
These days, pretty much everybody has a smartphone. That includes young children, who’re growing up with technology and “silver surfers” who’ve adapted to it. Many people have a tablet as well. What’s more, phones and tablets have become people’s “go-to” devices whenever they’re away from their desks. In fact, they might even be used at a desk.
The importance of mobile friendliness has long been recognized by the major search engines. It’s one of their major ranking criteria. Realistically, however, companies should now be treating mobile-friendly websites as a baseline rather than a target. In some industries, they may be sufficient. Increasingly, however, companies should be looking at proper mobile apps.
Mobile-native apps are, literally by definition, optimized for mobile devices. For example, they’re created on the assumption that a user is going to have a relatively small screen. They also assume that a user is not going to have a keyboard. In fact, they may not even have two hands-free. This means that any controls are designed to be operated with a single finger.
Up until fairly recently, the main objection to mobile apps was that customers wouldn’t install them. Mobile devices had relatively low specifications and memory was quickly used up. As a result, customers tended to be fairly selective about what apps they installed. Now, even entry-level mobile devices are powerful enough for this no longer to be an issue.
Case study Rayna Tours mobile app
Rayna Tours is one of the world’s leading tour operators and destination management companies. Their success is built on a combination of old-fashioned service and quick adoption of new technologies. Having a mobile app created was a natural and logical step for them. In fact, it was arguably a necessity for them.
As its name suggests, Rayna Tours focuses mainly on leisure travel. Modern leisure travelers tend to organize their trips through the internet. Since they’re traveling for pleasure rather than work, they’re probably going to organize their trip when they’re away from their desk. This means that it’s highly likely they’re going to be using a mobile device.
Rayna Tours already had a mobile-friendly website. They were, however, well aware that even mobile-optimized websites cannot usually deliver the same level of user-friendliness as proper mobile apps. Rayna Tours prides itself on delivering the absolute best to its customers. This meant that they needed to invest in a mobile app.
The mobile app created for them by Exemplary Marketing delivers a much more streamlined customer experience. The app makes it easy and intuitive for customers to do what they want to do. This creates mental breathing space for them to engage more fully with the content. The end result is happier customers – and higher sales.
Why Rayna Tours recommends Exemplary Marketing
The arguments for having a mobile app are clear. You, therefore, need to decide who to develop it for you. In principle, if you have an IT team, you can have it developed in-house. In practice, that’s unlikely to give you the best result.
Your in-house IT team is unlikely to specialize in creating mobile apps. This means that it’s unlikely that they can deliver the sort of results you’ll get from a company that does. You can also expect the project to take longer. This is because your in-house IT team will have to figure out what specialists already know.
For most companies, therefore, it makes sense to outsource the creation of your mobile app to a specialist. Rayna Tours chose Exemplary Marketing as their development partner due to our combination of expertise, creativity, and customer service. Our attractive prices were a useful bonus for them.
Rayna Tours and Exemplary Marketing worked in partnership to create an app that looked great and functioned perfectly. It works equally well on both iOS and Android devices and adapts seamlessly to devices with different specifications. It was tested thoroughly before being launched and has proved a major hit with customers.