With the dawn of mobile technology, everyone is looking at two options - Responsive Website & Mobile Apps. Here is where the fighting bells rings, at one corner we have inexpensive quick to build responsive website and on the other side we have expensive time consuming mobile app development.
Guess we have an easy winner here right? Well, no. The constant fight between responsive websites and mobiles apps is seemingly endless at this moment. We have heard from many of our clients a very common thing…
“Why invest oodles of time and cash into building an app when you can easily tend to the mobile market with a clean responsive website?”
Firstly let us understand a thing about responsive websites. You DO need them either way, as your customers will eventually go online on their phones to check your web page. Imagine their grumpy faces when they will come across your slowly crumbly unresponsive design, not a pretty sight is it? It leaves a terrible impression of your brand.
That being settled, you do need a very basic responsive site in any case. So the real question is “Shall I go a step beyond responsive sites and build my own app?”
And the answer to that is YES! and we use a play on a famous tagline to describe this…
“Because it’s worth it!”
If a company has products to offer an app can only help facilitate business, if nothing more. Even if I consider small companies serving a niche market, an app is a stupendous idea. As it is much easier to win niche market with a good quality offering. With an app you can make sure that they do not buy from anywhere else.
“If you business is a shop, your app will be your shopkeeper, making sure your customers never get lonely.”
Here are a few strong reasons to believe that it is time to move beyond responsive websites:
Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: You believe in customer experience right? Then mobile apps will deliver better! Of course responsive websites can be made sublimely clean but cluttering is unavoidable, it is terrible burden to maintain responsive sites. Mobile apps are hell of alot faster than websites. Don’t believe us? Here is what a few renowned companies say on their mobile home page
Push notifications: Shall I elaborate more? Push notifications and offline accessibility to your website are one of a kind features that ONLY an app can deliver. It is indeed something to make sure that your customers prefer your app over any other. Push Notifications are used as free tools to advertise, promote and/or push a product.
You can track your customers behavior, the items they have browsed, products in their carts and shopping trends. With all this analytics you can stay up close and personal with your client with fashioned notifications.
Performance & Accessibility: As you may hold a catalog of items which require constant browsing performance comes as a key. Web page loading is tedious, you cannot avoid that. Short ticket items such as T shirts etc are purchased more when browsed more. These are just smart seller tactics, an app holds a lot of performance benefits that can leave a lasting impact even if your customers do not purchase anything.
I have left behind the flamboyance of branding and marketing that an app can bring. The pizzaz of holding an app to your name is certainly a feat to boast about.
You never know how technology is going to expand, mobile app is a preemptive before-it's-too-late approach. From simple catalog shopping to using features like GPS, camera, chat, social sharing, and god knows what. Mere survival is possible through responsive websites, but mobile apps can help you explore the horizons.
I hope you enjoyed the article. For more of such posts around startups, mobile app development and other leading edge technologies, sub to the blog and we will keep you posted.
