Businesses used to depend solely on websites for their digital presence. Now we have mobile apps that are taking the place of websites for the digital marketing of business brands. They are becoming the most common and widely popular tool for allowing interactions between businesses and their target audience.
Unlike websites, mobile apps are more practical. They are equipped with user-focused tools that allow companies to deliver solutions to specific problems quickly. With close to 200 billion app downloads, the competitive value of mobile apps is way ahead of websites.
Why are mobile apps more popular than websites? Here are the key reasons that explain the popularity of apps over websites.
Delivering Personalized User Experience
One of the biggest reasons that inspire businesses to choose app development over building websites is the vast scope of personalization. Mobile apps, by utilizing native features of the mobile devices, provide more customized, fast-paced, and intuitive user experience (UX) compared to websites.
As Paul Osborne, the CTO of Cerdonis Technologies LLC, a specialist brand in both web and mobile app development, says, “Personalized user experience is organic to apps because of the ease and flexibility of accessing data corresponding to user interests, preferences, habits, location, use patterns, session timings, etc. Apps are more equipped to keep track of user behavior and activities and deliver user experience accordingly.”
The Huge Scope of Monetization
Thanks to this smooth and highly personalized user experience, apps also emerge as better revenue channels than websites. Even the free apps that are extremely popular allow huge monetization scope through in-app ads, app merchandise, and gated features.
Apps, unlike the websites, also offer precise solutions to user problems which also helps better monetization. Apps, with their engaging user experience and loyalty boosting presence, create a larger scope of interactions and resulting revenues.
Continuous Communication through Notifications
For decades email has been the principal mode of digital communication and a crucial channel for marketing and customer communication. Now mobile apps and their way of facilitating communication through notifications has helped shape a new era.
While the push notifications help businesses update customers about recent products, new offerings, discounts, and any value additions from the brand, the in-app notifications help communicate with customers regarding their real-time needs or giving feedback.
These notifications give mobile apps an edge over websites because of the ability to communicate with customers and users more precisely and contextually. Modern websites utilizing third-party add-ons can also send notifications to users to communicate, but such add-ons lack the ease of sending notifications that mobile apps have.
Utilizing Native Device Features
Mobile apps don’t need to use a browser to be accessible to users. They offer a more direct and straightforward channel to access content and use features. Mobile apps can easily use native device features such as accelerometer and other sensors, GPS, camera, contact list, phone calls, compass, etc.
With these local and native device features within the app, there is a far more engaging and interactive user experience. In complete contrast, websites users generally need to put in more effort or rely on third-party tools to use these native device features within the web user interface.
A mobile app can just allow users to sign in easily with locally stored data, authenticate with a fingertip, use a camera and upload photos, track location, and update location information collected by the GPS and functionality of their device.
Offline Access
One of the biggest advantages that put mobile apps ahead of websites is accessing content and features offline. Because websites need to be in constant communication with servers through browsers, they do not work without network connectivity.
Most mobile apps on the other hand, allow offline access to content and certain features. This is possible through an apps’ local and in-device caching technology and their robust client-side architecture.
A Tremendously Effective Marketing Tool
Almost every business has a website. Having a website for your business brand means you have stepped into the digital marketing arena. Until you have an app, you cannot expect the same level of communication with your customers focused on customer engagement and business conversion.
Mobile apps, apart from helping you build your brand and digital presence, also help in creating marketing channels. You can utilize mobile apps for customer service and support as well as marketing products to your target audience through offers and promotions. Thanks to integrated tools and continuous communication through notifications, mobile apps serve as better marketing tools than websites.
Conclusion
There are many reasons for choosing mobile apps over websites. Because of this, the latest web technologies like Progressive Web Apps (PWA) have evolved to fuse the benefits of both apps and websites into one.
