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Increasing Customer Engagement with a Mobile App: How Does It Work?

The sales made through mobile apps in the UK account for a third of all retail spending made via mobile devices. This is just one piece of data showing how important the applications are for doing business in the digital world. Now you can engage consumers even more effectively to increase your sales with the help of your company’s mobile app. Let me take you through the features, tools and methods necessary for this.

Unique Functionalities
The main purpose of having a mobile app for your business is to use secure yet another distribution and/or marketing channel. It should build up on your website. That is why it has to offer an even richer user experience. This can be easily achieved with a native application which is designed to take advantage of the functionalities of smartphones and tablets.
For example, users can get the opportunity to make voice searches to find content, products and services more easily and quickly. If you are in fashion retail or another business for which images sell, you can have the app integrated with the camera of the smart device enabling users to share photos or to see how they look with different garments and accessories. The sky is the limit.

Attractive and Valuable Content
While some app users are ready to convert and become your customers, others simply want to gather information in a pleasant way. Target all of these segments by offering high-quality content via your mobile app. Having written content, images and video will enable you to engage the largest possible number of users.
How do you make content valuable? Use demographics and data on user behaviour and preferences to give customers what they want, be it entertaining content, practical advice related to your products and services or both. As long as your app has integrated analytics, you will receive accurate consumer data in real time and have all the tools necessary for analysing it and optimising your content and overall marketing strategy.

Easy Social Media Sharing
You know that the social media are among the most effective digital marketing channels. Around 33% of businesses in the UK generate significant lead and sales volume via them, according to a recent survey. Then why don’t you integrate your mobile app with the social media? Enabling users to share content with just one click of a button will increase your brand’s exposure without additional investment on your part. This is how you can engage new consumers interested in your products and services and in your application too.

Target Marketing
A well-built mobile up must come with a system for push notifications. These are among the most valuable tools for target marketing which you can use in the digital world, even though they have been around for a fairly short time. These notifications are automatically generated on the mobile device even if the user isn’t engaged with the app at the moment. They are useful not only for making people open your app, but for distributing powerful marketing messages. You can make announcements about new products and send promotional offers. The key to success is to segment the audience and to target them with the right message at the right time. Use your app’s analytics to help you with this.

Count on me and my team to give you a mobile app equipped with everything necessary for consumer engagement.

Planning on getting a mobile app for your business? Contact me to share your vision.

Flat Design Vs. Skeuomorphism: Design Decisions

The Worldwide Developers Conference in 2013 featured a lot of new conversation as the iOS 7 interface went from a 3D style design to a 2D design. Both of these designs are used today and there are advantages and disadvantages of each design type. The one you use will all depend upon the organizational goal you have. Before you begin mobile app development you have to consider which of these concept is the right one the goals of your business and which will reflect the image you want to convey.

Using Skeuomorphism
Realism design is also called Skeuomorphism. This imitates real shadows, objects, shades, shapes, and details from our physical world. If an illustration or drawing or an appears like a life-like photograph, this is Skeuomorphism. This type of design can convey a certain them in your app, but is often looked at as cluttered and functionality can be lost at times. The Green Screen from the Game Center App is often associated with this design concept which didn’t have a lot of functionality. Skeuomorphism can be done the right way and it’s intuitive, but designs are rapidly evolving and large brands like Apple are adopting more modern designs that look to functionality more than form.

Realism design or Skeuomorphism became outdated and cluttered. Mobile app devices use is rising and apps that are fast loading and responsive adds to usability. Loading times needed to be increased so that users had the ability to navigate through the app in an efficient manner. Functionality was a goal because it provided a better user experience. On the other side of the design spectrum, flat design was born.

Flat Design
When you strip out 3D element and have a minimalistic design, this is flat design. It looks like the image is lying on a flat surface. There’s not as many choices in regards to style such as textures, 3D, or gradients, with flat design. You get solid colors and strokes and not many details. There’s very few shades and gradients. Flat design is a good choice for usability and app navigation. Organizations that have less content can use it as well.

There’s also a misunderstanding with flat design as people feel it needs less detail or takes less time to create. It doesn’t matter if the design is flat or skeuomorphic, a good design is going to take a lot of effort and time to create. A good logo or an icon still takes time to get right. They may look quite simple, but the curves, edges, angles, and dimensions of logos take a lot of time to get the image to look the right way.

Why is Skeuomorphism Used?
When we get signals from our eyes, the brain interprets this and we are able to see shapes. The shadows, shades, and the details can make the difference from seeing a ball and circle, or a carton box and cube. The brain can identify levels, depths, features, and textures. From the user perspective, Skeuomorphism is a more intuitive design as the objects are closer to reality. As you work with this type of design the brain tends to recognize the shapes with fewer details and shadows. Once you reach this point, it’s easier for the designer to use Skeuomorphism as the brain sees it as being stylish.

Why is Flat Design Used?
Flat design has a focus on the raw functionality and opposes artificial design so there’s a very simple design. The flat design concept can be done through the iOS interface and the Microsoft operating system interface. Since there’s a focus on the functionality, the experience for the user is more efficient and practical. The user is able to focus on the purpose of the application whether it’s a gaming app, retail and so on.

Guideline or Not?
You don’t want to have limitations on design since it’s artistic creation and it reflects upon the brand. You need design guidelines must be based upon the goal of your project, the audience, the platform, the brand itself, and the market requirements.

When you look to mobile device design style, you have a lot to think about. You may be designing for the small screen so you’ll want a minimalistic style. You may want the app to be designed for the user so you need to prioritize the functionality of the app. If you want more flash and animations for example, then you might choose the skeuomorphism style. For some design you might want to combine the two styles, but still keep your app very user-friendly.

You need to pick a design style which will meet the goals of your organization. You want to communicate your content in a way that’s effective. You have to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of the design styles as this will help the design team build an app which will reflect the image of your brand. It doesn’t matter which design style you pick; you want user-centric navigation so the user-experience is optimized.

How Responsive Website Design Can Take Your Business Forward

It is easy to understand this concept even if you don’t have special technical knowledge. The idea behind responsive design is to make the website usable across all connected devices. It responds to the environment created by the hardware to make viewing and interaction comfortable, pleasant and productive.
Simply put, the website is equally easy to view and to use on desktop computers, laptops, smartphones and tablets. What value can it bring to a business? Let me answer this question from the point of view of an experienced web development consultant.

Cost Efficiency
With global mobile web traffic already surpassing desktop traffic, it has become perfectly clear that there is no way back – mobile is here to stay. If businesses want to keep up with the trends and stay competitive, their website has to be optimised for mobile. It is possible to have a mobile website in addition to your existing one. This option typically requires a smaller initial investment. However, it is not cost-efficient as you will have to invest in the search engine optimisation, marketing, maintenance and future development of two different platforms. Furthermore, content duplication issues may occur and you can be severely penalised for this by Google.
With responsive website design, you will be able to focus your effort and investment on a single platform. You can expect higher return since the platform will continue to work effectively for all of your marketing and other business purposes in the long term.

Improved Visibility
Since April 2015, Google has been giving priority to websites which are optimised for mobile devices. This means that responsive website design has now become fundamental for SEO and digital marketing in general. If you want your optimisation efforts from content creation to link building to pay off, you will need to have a website which is equally functional on all mobile devices. With higher search engine rankings, your website will have more qualified leads and this will help for increasing the rate of conversion.

Higher Conversion
Eventually, it all boils down to sales and revenue and responsive design can help to improve both. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, mobile is becoming an ever more important channel for generating information and social sharing. With a website optimised for smartphones and tablets, you and your products and services will get found more easily and quickly not only via the search engines, but via the social networks too.
Around half of all online shoppers use multiple devices to make a transaction. For instance, they may find a cool product on their tablet and then buy it later on via their desktop computer. Additionally, one in four e-commerce sales is now made via a smartphone. These statistics come to prove that responsive design is necessary not only for gaining new customers, but for keeping existing ones.
As mentioned in the beginning, the core purpose of this design is to improve user experience. When the user enjoys satisfactory experience, the chance of sale increases by two thirds. You will not have to worry about missing to capture a prospect customer because your website is difficult to navigate with gestures or slow to load on mobile devices.

Become even more competitive with responsive design for your business website.

You already have a vision for your business’s responsive website? Share it with me.

How Do You Achieve High Website Traffic and Conversion Rate?

The simple answer is digital marketing, but you probably already know this. The bigger question is what’s behind this seemingly complex and constantly expanding term. In my experience as a web development consultant, the best way to look at digital marketing is from a strategic point of view. With a complete digital strategy, you will be able to achieve your business goals online. Let’s look at the main elements of the strategy more closely.

The Goal
With digital marketing, the details are paramount. You don’t simply need lots of visitors to your website, but targeted traffic. These are users who are interested in your products and services and seek them as a solution to a particular problem.
At the same time, even high targeted traffic does not guarantee you a good conversion rate if you don’t have a well-developed marketing funnel on your website. It has a lot of elements to it from the design of the pages, menus and CTA buttons to the selection of sign-up and payment options available.
Keeping these factors in mind, you can set measurable goals. Reliable website analytics will help you to monitor your performance, analyse it and make adjustments to your marketing strategy, when required.

Target Audience
Defining your target market is in the core of every business strategy executed either online or offline. You will need to do through research to define your audience’s demographics. Your website’s analytics will help you to learn more about user preferences and behaviour which is crucial for marketing and for building a loyal customer base.
Currently, the trend is for websites and all web-based services and products to become ever more personalised to match the individual user’s preferences and needs even more perfectly. There is a broad set of tools for achieving this. These range from personalised product suggestions to tools for finding your preferred style.

Marketing Channels
Which ones will have the highest return on investment? A well-rounded strategy will include a set of channels, which are focused on your target audience and can be used together for achieving higher efficiency and better results. A key consideration here is that modern digital marketing channels are highly interlinked and the best way to exploit them is to go for full integration.
Modern search engine optimisation and content marketing go hand in hand. The idea is to create content, which is valuable to users and optimised for the current Google algorithms. Social media marketing is an effective channel for promotion your website and content. It can be used for direct advertising and for customer engagement via different campaigns.
Video marketing emerges as a top trend as web video traffic continues to grow and consumers increasingly using this type of content for making purchase decisions. Email marketing has been highly underrated in recent years, but it still has high ROI, especially in the B2B field. This is a highly effective channel for delivering marketing content and personalised offers and for building loyalty.

A digital marketing strategy using multiple integrated channels may seem complex to implement, but you can always rely on automation with custom software especially developed for your business.

Need a solid digital strategy bringing high ROI? Let’s discuss it.

3 E-commerce Website Fundamentals

The benefits of e-commerce are well-known – lower initial and fixed costs, exposure to a larger audience and plenty of affordable opportunities for marketing and promotion. At the same time, the competition for customers on the web is very high and continues to grow in practically all industries. The fast pace of technological development also poses a challenge for online retailers as they cannot afford to stay behind. How do you get competitive and achieve success in an environment like this? Let me take you through the main prerequisites for a successful e-commerce website.

Responsive Design
We live in a digital world in which consumers use multiple devices to browse the web and shop online. The list includes desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones. Data from the third quarter of 2015 shows that 49% of e-commerce transactions in the UK were made with the use of multiple connected devices. With responsive design, your website will have equally influential presence and dependable functionalities on all gadgets.
The layout and navigation are modified to match the screen size, features and capabilities of each specific device while the content remains the same. The website will work equally well with mouse clicks and swipe gestures, for example. Responsive design will not only help you facilitate the making of purchases at your online store. It is also effective for lead generation as Google now gives higher ranking to websites optimised for mobile.

Well-Developed Purchase Funnel
The purchase funnel is the journey which the customer makes from the moment they land on your website to completing the payment. There are two questions that have to be answered here: how to make this journey smooth and pleasant and how to increase the chances of completing the transaction? You can achieve both with the right website design elements and functionalities related to marketing and performance.
Attractive product presentation is key. Card design and large digital images will increase the appeal of your products. Sleek menus offering more options when you click or tap on them will make the products stand out even more. Clutter-free pages with large CTA buttons will simplify the purchase process and help for higher sales. A convenient and well-organised shopping cart will make purchases even easier. It is now mandatory for all brands and retailers to offer secure shopping experience online and a comprehensive set of payment options.

Reliable Management System
The checklist of tools which you will require to run your online store is quite long. It includes inventory management, procurement and shipping, customer relationship management, marketing and analytics. It is neither productive nor cost-efficient to get a software program which lacks any of these functions.
The best solution is to have a web-based software integrated with your e-commerce website. This gives you a higher level of automation and increases productivity immensely. When the software is custom made, it will fit your needs precisely and develop and expand along with your online business.

Finally, for growing your e-commerce business, you will also need a complete digital marketing strategy. The goal is to increase the number of visitors to your website and the level of conversion and to keep them high in the long term. As an e-commerce development consultant, I can help you at every stage of the building of your online business.

For consultation and e-commerce website development, get in touch with me.