How Can Mobile Apps Boost the Growth of Local and Small Businesses?

Smartphones have emerged as a disruptive technology that has revolutionized human lives and the way of doing business completely. With smartphones, mobile apps have also evolved drastically over time. Today mobile apps have become a significant business tool.

Every business these days is investing in a mobile app to boost its business visibility and make its services more accessible to the public. Mobile apps can help businesses improve customer experience and boost customer retention. Investing in mobile apps holds a lot of benefits for businesses, both big and small.

Small and local businesses can benefit significantly from investing in mobile app development. Today building a mobile app is much easier and cheaper than ever before. You can easily get an app built based on your budget with the help of some of the best mobile app development companies. 

This post will discuss how a mobile app can help small and local businesses grow by serving customers more effectively and efficiently. 

Top Ways Mobile Apps Benefit Small Businesses

#1 Helps Improve Customer Accessibility 

Small businesses in today's era of globalization face both opportunities as well as some serious challenges when it comes to competing with global businesses. We've witnessed many small businesses wind up in this competition, while some have become big names today. 

With the right strategy, small businesses can earn more profits and scale to new heights. 

Small and local businesses can improve the accessibility of their services significantly by making their services available through mobile apps. Let's understand this with an example, suppose you are running a grocery and vegetable store chain in various parts of a city. 

Launching a mobile app that allows customers to create their baskets and place orders to get their chosen items delivered at home can prove very beneficial for the customers and the business itself. These are types of services that are widely popular with MNCs like Amazon Fresh, Walmart+, etc.

Customers tend to trust local businesses and stores more, and this benefit can be reaped efficiently with a mobile app. Local businesses can benefit greatly by providing online services like this to customers through a mobile app. 

#2 Boost Customer Loyalty 

Customer loyalty is one of the critical factors that highly contribute to the growth of small and local businesses. By investing in mobile apps, these businesses can add up to the convenience of their loyal customers by allowing them to access their services from any place. 

It is imminent that local businesses possess more credibility in shoppers' eyes when compared to global platforms that run on a vast scale. With mobile apps, they can access your services at any time hassle-free, and in case of any query or inconvenience, such as order and refunds related issues can visit the nearest outlet. 

This makes things way more convenient for your customers as they do not have to wait long for their queries to be solved. They possess an ulterior option, which is the advantage of physically visiting the stores, a type of convenience big businesses cannot provide.

#3 Improve Customer Experience 

In today's era, every chore can be performed from the comfort zone without even moving a bit. In such times small businesses suffer badly when they fail to stand with the heavily digitalized world. Almost every business today has invested in mobile app development to improve customer experience by providing convenient online services. 

It is a viable option for small businesses to invest in mobile apps to provide online services to their customers and improve their online visibility and presence. If customers get the same services they are getting from big chains from their trusted local stores, it is imminent that they'll choose to go with them.

Suggested Reading: Top Design Tips To Perfect User Experience in Apps

#4 Personalize Shopping Experience 

Small businesses can ensure that their loyal customers are served best by boosting personalization using shop-dedicated mobile apps. Using mobile apps as a medium, they can send personalized offers to your most loyal and old customers and make them feel valued. 

Through mobile apps, small businesses can learn more about the shopping history of their customers and hence can curate personalized offers to help customers buy the things they need at discounts. Meanwhile, businesses can increase sales. 

Personalization is an excellent tool for businesses to boost sales and customer trust. According to SmarterHQ, approximately 80% of frequent shoppers choose to go with those brands that offer them a personalized shopping experience. Hence it's essential and recommended for businesses, especially those looking to scale, to boost personalization, and mobile apps are the best medium to do it.

#5 Boost Sales 

We already discussed how personalization could help small and local businesses boost sales and serve their customers better. There are several other ways mobile apps can help them boost sales. 

Although everybody these days is shopping online via popular global platforms, the trust that local shops and businesses possess is on another level. This is why the wave of globalization has not engulfed local businesses, and many of them still function successfully today. 

Local and small businesses can use this customer trust to boost their sales by providing them with the convenience that big chains like Amazon provide. This can be done via mobile apps that help your local customers shop from their comfort zones and get their stuff delivered to their doorstep. This convenience can play a huge role in scaling the company to new heights. 

How Much Does It Cost to Develop a Mobile App?

The benefits of owning a mobile app are many for every type of business, small or large irrespective of the industry in which they operate. But with the growing demand for mobile app development, some rumors surround the budget the businesses must have. 

Among newcomers, the belief that mobile app development is a very costly investment for businesses is very prevalent. But this belief is not valid; instead, it is just a misconception. Mobile app development can be done under every budget that fits a business's pocket. 

It is true that the higher the number of features and complexity of an app more will be the cost of its development. Today, so many app development provisions are available in the market that can get you the apps of your dream in the budget that matches your pocket.

There are three types of mobile apps; native, hybrid, and web. Each of these app types has its perks and cons. Small and local businesses can invest in any of these apps based on their budget. Please take a look at the infographic below to learn more about them. 

From the infographic, it's much clearer that native apps require more budget when compared to hybrid and web apps. Though native apps are best for performance, hybrid apps are the best choice for small businesses because of their faster development and cross-platform compatibility.

When it comes to affordability, cross-platform mobile app development is the best for small businesses. Small businesses can outsource this task to their choice of app developers based on the frameworks they use. Businesses can choose from Goodtal’s list of top Ionic developers, React-Native developers, and Flutter developers to outsource the cross-platform mobile app development task. 

Key Practices for Affordable Mobile App Development For Small Businesses

#1 Keep It Simple

As I already mentioned before, the higher the number of features in an app more will be the overall mobile app development cost. Moreover, adding unnecessary features increases the app's overall complexity, which might end up degrading the overall customer experience. 

Especially for small businesses running on a limited budget, it's advisable to add only those features necessary for the functioning of your app and to produce the customers' desired results. This practice will help small businesses get a great app built on a minimal budget.

#2 Make Your App Easy to Navigate

If your customers cannot get what they want from your app easily and find it hard to navigate their way through it, then investing in it would be no benefit for your business. It's essential to keep the user interface seamless and easy to glide through to enhance the customer experience. 

For this, firstly, it is a must for your app to have a tutorial tab that'll help the customers know every nook and cranny of the app. Also, a navigation bar that carries a shortcut to every service and facility your business provides. This will help your customers navigate through your app easily, thus significantly enhancing the customer experience.

#3 Invest in Cross-Platform Mobile App Development 

To have a more significant audience outreach, it is vital to have a mobile app for as many platforms as possible. Usually, large businesses, to build an app with superior performance, invest in building separate apps for every platform. Thus they invest in Android and iOS app development separately, which requires a larger budget and higher build time. This becomes entirely unviable for small businesses with limited budgets. 

In such scenarios, it is highly advisable for them to invest in cross-platform app development. Cross-platform mobile app development allows developers to deploy the same app that will be compatible with running on different platforms. These apps are faster to develop and deploy and much cheaper than hybrid app development. 

Businesses wanting to build robust iOS and Android apps can outsource these tasks to some of the best iOS and android app development companies. 

Wrapping Up

Mobile apps have become an essential tool these days on which humans are very much dependent. Businesses across the globe have invested and continue to do a lot in mobile app development, providing an online platform to customers in order to ease access to their services. 

In this post, we discussed how small and local businesses could benefit from investing in mobile app development. Mobile apps can increase revenue and boost sales by bringing in more customers, increasing audience outreach, and strengthening customer loyalty. 

Hence it is recommendable that small and local businesses invest in mobile apps for their brand to boost sales and earn higher profits.