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The notification can remind users of why they’re using your app. When a project is complete, if all stakeholders get a notification with that information, they have visible evidence of how much the app improves coordination.
There are lots of possibilities for messaging, and many of them don’t even require opening the app (see table). It’s an easy sale to send a message to your user when they’re about to run out of storage space, with a link to upgrade their plan. Or to send a message about an upgraded package to a user who uses a particular feature a lot. Mobile messaging is a powerful way to increase customer loyalty.
Add Features That A Web App Can’t Match
A mobile phone isn’t really a phone, as Benedict Evans at Andreessen Horowitz reminds us. A mobile phone is really an internet-connected pocket supercomputer, with lots of interesting sensors - camera, microphone, touch, GPS, Bluetooth and more - and the ability to communicate with anyone, anytime, instantly.
The more useful functionality you can provide in your app, the more value your user will realize, and less likely they are to churn. A mobile app lets you take advantage of these sensors and other mobile-only capabilities to deliver functionality that you wouldn’t be able to in a desktop app.
Take Expensify, for example. Expensify can use your phone’s camera to upload receipts - functionality that a web app can’t match, since the camera on a phone is much easier to use, and a user’s phone is likely to be with them as they’re at a meal or traveling.
Many apps find clever ways to take advantage of GPS data, as well. For example, an enterprise social networking app could let colleagues know who’s in the office, and who isn’t - much harder to accomplish without a GPS sensor. And any app dealing with sensitive information can require fingerprint authentication for enhanced security.
Develop The Features That Matter Most
Remember “mobile-first” design? The idea is that we should design apps to look good and work well on mobile first, and then add more features and functionality to the desktop version, as needed. Mobile is a huge portion, if not the majority, of web traffic, and over a billion people use the mobile web. So mobile-first is still an appropriate way of thinking about product design, in order to serve the greatest number of users most efficiently.
But even if that weren’t the case, mobile-first design is a useful tool for focusing on creating the best possible user experience, which is important for reducing churn.
Apps have limitations. Mobile device screens are smaller, and there’s no keyboard or mouse. Users on mobile devices are also often paying less attention, or are stealing moments between other activities. And mobile devices sometimes suffer from degraded connectivity, or lose it altogether.
Working around these limitations on mobile can be helpful for the experience of your desktop app:
- Designing for users who have less time forces you to make workflows easier and more straightforward.
- Designing for users who don’t have a keyboard and mouse in front of them forces you to be thoughtful about how much information you require your users to enter, and when.
- Even building in an offline mode can help laptop users who are trying to use your app while traveling.
If your mobile app has the same features as your web app, the mobile app can be a really useful tool to optimize the user experience.
And even if it doesn’t, the functionality that your mobile app provides can be an incredible complement to the desktop app. Take Apple’s iWork suite. Is anyone creating a Pages deck from scratch from their phone? Probably not. But lots of people respond to comments, make quick edits, and even present from their mobile devices. The ability to do these things from the mobile app makes the full-screen app much more valuable.
Getting Started
Whether you’re building a mobile app from scratch, or have an existing app you can use to implement these strategies,
Urban Airship can help. Our mobile messaging and analytics platform is really easy to install, and gives you the edge to make your product indispensable.
The best part is: you can use our
Starter Edition for free! Try it out today.