making your own mobile apps for customer engagement · mobilesmith making your own mobile apps for...

• Why mobile app development is the Marketer’s business• The step-by-step guide to building native apps without programmers• Top 4 tricks to make your apps “stick” with your customers

Making Your Own Mobile Apps for Customer EngagementA Marketer’s Handbook

Your Quickest Path from Idea to App

Mobile Apps are Marketing Tools

MobileSmith Making Your Own Mobile Apps for Customer Engagement

Your Quickest Path from Idea to App 2

As a marketer, your goal is to maximize return on investment on every stage of your marketing funnel: Positioning, Awareness, Conversion, Engagement, and Customer Loyalty. On every step, engaging

mobile apps can help you improve your bottom line.

Satisfied app user = valuable customer!

• Intelligently-designed mobile apps can enable a multitude of compelling and

efficient customer engagement strategies

• Once downloaded, your app becomes valuable real estate on your user’s mobile device – use it to drive customer loyalty

• Mobile apps can help you emotionally

engage consumers

POSITIONINGA portfolio of mobile apps creates a competitive advantage

AWARENESSReach out to your growing mobile audience

CONVERSIONMobile apps are efficient sales tools

ENGAGEMENTUnleash your imagination!

LOYALTYYour app is an Anchor

• An attractive portfolio of mobile apps can position your brand as a leader in

your industry

• With easy-to-use apps available for multiple mobile platforms, you can

reach a wider audience

• App download = 1st conversion!

Mobile apps are proven to be efficient

marketing and sales tools



Customers are Going Mobile...

and so is Customer Engagement!

• 56% of American adults own a smartphone, and 34% own a tablet.

• Tablet ownership is highest among people in their late 30s and older.

• There are 224 million monthly active mobile app users in the U.S.

• Lifestyle and shopping app usage has grown 77% in 2013.

• 96% of consumers have researched a product or service on their phone.

• 72% have a more positive view of a company if it provides a mobile app.

• 85% prefer a native mobile app to a mobile website.

• After receiving good customer service via a company’s mobile app, 81% will share their positive experience via social media and word of mouth.

• A whopping 53% of marketing executives are designing and deploying mobile apps as part of their marketing strategies.

• 45% of mobile marketing campaigns involve app downloads.

• 78% of companies with customer-facing apps reported increases in their mobile app audiences over the past year.

Your customers are ready for mobile apps! Are you?



I understand the value of mobile apps, BUT…

I don’t know where to start! As a marketer, you know better than anyone what your prospective and existing customers need from a mobile app. However, mobile use case development requires a particular set of skills that might not be part of your team – to say nothing of user interface wireframing, development, testing, etc.

Mobile app projects are time-consuming.The key challenge for a marketer is to implement a mobile idea and get it to market quickly. Yet, custom app development can take anywhere from 4 to 12 months, depending on the complexity of your mobile app. And what if you want to launch it to multiple platforms?

Mobile development can be costly.Let’s face it: good iOS and Android mobile developers are expensive and hard to find. Moreover, most companies are not prepared to function as internal mobile app development shops. Building, testing, launching, and upgrading even a single app is a full-scale software project that requires both development and software project management skills.

We have no bandwidth!With your IT department busy with internal and customer projects, your mobile ideas can get

shelved for a long time. Even if you hire an outsourced development team, they still need to use your IT team’s bandwidth to fine-tune the app and securely connect it to your systems.

Is there a shortcut for a marketer?

When it comes to mobile app development,

marketers face an uphill battle…



Start with the Use Case

1. Do Your ResearchIdentify the functions your target demographic is likely to enthusiastically embrace in a native mobile app, as opposed to a mobile website. Think of the contexts where your customers would most likely use it. Check if there are similar apps out there – what are their user ratings? What’s missing?

2. Start with a Long List!Think of your initial wish list of features as a “dump” – put down everything you would ever want in your app! Go nuts; brainstorm with your entire team. Great mobile app ideas pop up every day among creative, dynamic teams of marketing professionals.

3. Trim it DownAs soon as your creative power hits the wall, it’s time to whittle your list down to a reasonable size. This is the most important part! Diluted apps are not user-friendly and may confuse your customer. Go through your wish list and identify the 3 most important functions. Follow this up with 3-4 secondary functions, and shelve the rest for potential future use.

Trimming your use case is important, but so is optimizing it for long term!

Successful mobile apps start with compelling use cases. Designing a great mobile experience is not as difficult as you think. Here is our step-by-step guide:



It’s Never too Early to Develop a Long-Term Strategy

4. Think of a Multi-App StrategyChances are, you will find that some of your initial ideas are simply too good to be dumped or postponed. That’s how new app use cases are born! You may want to start developing a multi-app strategy even before you build your first app.

5. Think of Versioning Even Before You Start DrawingSomething you want to consider even before you start drawing your wireframes is your app versioning strategy. Mobile real estate is valuable; once your app is downloaded on your customers’ devices, you want it to have a staying power and drive continuous engagement. As time goes on, your app should be ready to adjust to new requirements and accommodate the evolving needs of your customers. When your resources are limited, a solid app versioning strategy, put in place from the start, can become a life-saver. MobileSmith experts can help with that!

6. Play With Your Wireframe!A wireframe is a drawing of what you want your app to look like – tabs, buttons and all. Draw all of your app pages and transitions; describe all the bells and whistles in as much detail as possible. Then tap through your wireframe and make sure your key user goals can be achieved in less than 4 clicks. Show your wireframes to a person on your team least accustomed to mobile apps and ask them to tap through it. You can glean a lot of valuable insights!

Now that you have finessed your use case, it’s time to build the app!

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From Idea to App: the Usual Process

As a rule, after your app use-case is developed and your wireframes are finalized, your mobile app project would proceed to mockup, development, and testing – until your app is ready to be submitted to the app stores. This green part would typically take the bulk of your app

development budget, while prohibiting any changes past the mockup stage. You don’t get to test your app until it’s fully developed.

MobileSmith totally changes the game!

Idea

Use Case

Wireframe Mockup Development

Testing



Marketers can Take Control of Mobile App Development

With MobileSmith, you can quickly implement your use case without any

programming and immediately test your app prototype on your device!

The MobileSmith app development platform empowers marketers and line-of-business

to build fully customized, full-featured, native apps for iPhone, iPad, and

Android smartphones.

With this process, making changes is easy! You get to test your prototype thoroughly on real devices and collect feedback from your

focus group. Once you are 100% satisfied with your app, lock it into production and

build for distribution!

• Design in WYSIWYG

• Build for iOS and Android

• Launch, manage, upgrade

• No coding required!

Design

Build

Deploy!

No programming required at any stage.



4 Tricks to Make your Apps “Stick” with your Customers

1. Keep it simple.One of the biggest drivers of marketing “stickiness” is decision simplicity, found Harvard Business Review. Today’s consumers are bombarded with hundreds of marketing messages via dozens of channels. What keeps customers engaged with your brand is the ease of collecting trustworthy information about your products or services, and an opportunity to calmly and efficiently make a purchasing decision.

How does this translate into app design? Reduce your list of app functions down to the optimal use case. Avoid cluttering your app with cool but unnecessary features – splash screens, needless menu elements, or too many required steps. Keep your UI design as clean and simple as possible.

2. Use your time wisely.It takes a user 10 seconds to decide whether to download your app and 30 seconds – whether to keep it. Mobile real estate is valuable, and you want to make the most of those precious seconds to gain a permanent place on your customer’s mobile device.

When submitting your app to the app store, make sure you provide an accurate, engaging description and the best screenshots. Design an eye-catching app icon. To break through the 30-second barrier, simplify your app

activation – avoid requiring upfront user registration or lengthy load times. Design your home screen to provide instant clarity as to how the user goals will be achieved.

http://hbr.org/2012/05/to-keep-your-customers-keep-it-simple/




3. Test your app to perfection.Users expect a mobile app to be fast and responsive – median expected load time is 2 seconds.

If your app crashes or freezes, or takes too long to load data, its chances of being dumped grow exponentially. It will get poor reviews, low ratings and low adoption numbers.

Test your app thoroughly on multiple devices and OS versions. Once your app is launched, don’t forget to check user reviews on a regular basis and issue updates with fixes and requested features.

With MobileSmith, testing and fine-tuning native apps is a breeze. In the platform, you can build your prototype for testing simultaneously for iOS and Android and send it instantly over-the-air to mobile devices. Test your app and collect feedback from your reviewers. If you need to make changes in the user interface or workflow, you can easily make them in the platform’s app canvas and instantly rebuild the app. Once you are 100% satisfied with the user experience and performance, you can build your app for production and push it to app stores. Updating your app is easy as well – you can build and release new versions of multiple apps without disrupting the user experience or content flow in existing versions. Your users can upgrade to the new version at their convenience.

The best part? You get to do all of this without writing a single line of code.




4. Keep your app buzzing.Once your mobile app occupies that coveted real estate on your consumers’ mobile

devices, don’t let it go to waste! Keep your app buzzing with push notifications, social media sharing, real-time content updates, and interactive galleries. Incorporate gamification and points – users love to share their achievements and make recommendations, especially if they are rewarded for it! Fans can quickly build your mobile community and turn it into an organic marketing army for your business.

Driving regular engagement by effectively using push notifications and social sharing will keep your app at the forefront of your customers’ minds while also attracting new prospects. But don’t overdo it – mind the information overload today’s consumers are facing. MobileSmith facilitates content marketing through your apps by automatically providing a powerful, dedicated CMS for each app you create in the platform.

Every aspect of mobile customer engagement, from downloading an app to receiving useful information and special offers through push messages, must be carefully orchestrated to deliver a smooth and easy experience. Mobile users appreciate the opportunity to engage and respond at their leisure, using their mobile device of choice. If your app delivers these expectations, it will bring you lots of happy customers – both old and new!

Ready to try it out?


Take control of your company’s mobile app development!

With the MobileSmith platform, you can quickly launch an engaging portfolio of native apps for all major platforms – without waiting for your IT, or hiring costly developers.

Ready to Build your First App? Get a Free Trial!

If you are a Creative Agency, talk to us about our Partner Program.

MobileSmith, Inc.5400 Trinity Rd, Suite 208

Raleigh, North Carolina 27607855.516.2413 | [email protected] ©MobileSmith 2014


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