Apps are the New Internet: Online Revenue Goes Mobile
Embrace the APP-lification of Internet commerce or consider your website dead in the water. The bottom line is you can have the best-designed and well-run website the Alexa Score has ever seen, but if it’s not optimized for the next generation of smartphones you will still be leaving mountains of money on the table and even worse, frustrating the biggest growing customer base online: phone shoppers.
What many have considered inevitable has finally happened, and Google confirms it. Online shoppers are officially spending more money with their phones than with their tablets, laptops and even desktop computers. Here’s how to optimize your current content to generate even more revenue with this progressive development in e-commerce.
Optimize, Optimize, Optimize
If your website isn’t easy to view, navigate and shop with, it could sour a potential customer from ever even looking at your website on another device, and much more hesitant to punch a credit card number into the keyboard. Popups for shopping carts, recently viewed products and “follow us on Facebook” or “sign in for special deals” are notorious for being impossible to read let alone complete on mobile devices. Leave no stone unturned. Navigate every avenue of your site, on every major device you can get your hands on, and enlist others to do it too. With innovations like Samsung’s new curved-edge display demonstrates, you just don’t know what your content will look like until you see it and use it on each unique device.
Buy Into the App Craze?
Tread lightly here. App is a buzzword that can end up costing you a fortune in upfront production costs and end up getting lost in a flooded market. Making it free is a great start, and making it both crazy useful and simple to use is paramount.
There are millions of hotel finding apps, but HotelTonight stands out because it’s as specific as it is useful let alone direct and to the point. Mallzee is the Tinder of shopping as Harper’s Bazaar has dubbed this useful high-end designer shopping app, where women routinely plunk down a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars for a handbag or boots with a simple swipe. There is certainly something to be learned from the insane success of certain well-known apps; the ease of the Instagram double tap, the smooth sexiness of the Tinder swipe. Focus on the wants and desires of the everyday social media user, not your own message, when designing an app that other people will actually want to use on a regular basis.
Connect with Existing App Success Stories
You can also align your brand with existing apps that are already popular. Bar owners can reach out to cocktail-making apps like On The Bar and Mixology and cross promote specialty drinks and happy hour specials. Home cleaning service could partner with cleaning hacks apps like Unfilth Your Habitat to promote their services and provide useful information to potential and existing customers. No matter what industry you’re working with, the good news is they make an app for that. And you don’t have to create your own necessarily. Partnering with complementary businesses can get you in on the app game with next to no upfront investment.
