When major Chinese e-tailer Alibaba created its own app, its customers started spending about $923.5 million more each year. But this ‘Wow’ figure isn’t just for expanding your knowledge. It’s a prime example which shows that with the popularity of mobile apps growing at such an exponential rate, now is the time to use this technology to empower your business.
How mobile devices are running the world
The habits and preferences of millennials are a driving force behind this mobile app phenomenon. It would be wise for businesses not to ignore this fact. Of course, you can always behave like police lieutenant Frank Drebin from the movie “The Naked Gun”, trying to persuade onlookers that there’s ‘nothing to see here’ – as a fireworks factory explodes in the background. But, that would be your loss. Mobile beats the web in so many ways, that there’s not much left for entrepreneurs to do, other than to put their products and services onto the mobile map.
Awake the shopaholic in your customers
Business owners simply can’t ignore the power of mobile devices and what opportunities they bring to the market. So now, many businesses are scrambling to catch up with their more foresighted competitors who have already decided to invest in mobile applications earlier on in the game.
For example, Starbucks created an app allowing customers to order and pay on the go. Of course, this helped customers avoid standing in line. But what’s more, 20% of all Starbucks’s sales shifted to online transactions.
Another statistic shows that mobile shopping apps awake the shopaholic in each person. When individual shoppers started using eBay’s mobile app, the total amount of purchases on the website increased by over $10 billion just in the first year.
People buy impulsively, so investing in mobile apps will help your business capitalize on that spontaneous feeling of buying something just for the heck of it.
Mobile first consuming in numbers
In 2017, mobile app downloads reached 197 billion. By 2021 this figure is expected to reach 350 billion.
As of June 2018, the total number of apps on Google Play exceeded 3.6 million. More than 1,300 new mobile apps appear on Google Play every day.
As of March 2017, about 42% of small businesses in the U.S. had their own mobile application. This figure will increase to 67% in 2018.
In 2018, users will spend more than 80 % of their mobile device usage on task-specific apps.
By 2019, the costs for mobile advertising in the U.S will make up 70% of all online advertising budgets.
90% of American mobile users have their devices’ location service activated at all times, which is extremely helpful for geo-targeting campaigns.
Mobile apps represent your product
PDFfiller considers the needs of its employees, and provides them with easy editing, signing and document sharing experiences through a mobile application. Moreover, PDFfiller’s mobile app helps both marketers and developers learn what users enjoy the most in our product.
“There is a famous colloquialism ‘Eat your own dog food.’ This describes a company using its own products or services for its internal operations. It means that the product is so cool that you want it and you will use it for your own needs.” – says Andrei Andreiev, PM for the PDFfiller mobile team, – “I experienced this for the first time when we began to receive invoices for signing. I got a notification on my mobile phone and simply completed all required actions. The process took a few seconds. After that I realized how our customers should feel.”
One of our customers shared his own story from when he first started using PDFfiller’s mobile application.
Michael Combs is the co-owner of ‘Hearing at Home’, a hearing aid clinic that works according to an innovative model – employees attending to patients in their home: “I give full comprehensive testing to patients that are experiencing hearing difficulties [and] I determine whether it’s a medical issue needing treatment. ”
Because his practice is mobile, Combs needs to be able to fill out forms on the go. Combs and his employees travel all over Virginia treating customers, and with hundreds of patients, time and efficiency are critical. “I’m a mobile practice, so I need something that has electronic forms, so that I can have mobile signatures or fill things out electronically and have them web-based.”
With PDFfiller, Combs can edit and sign patient’s forms on his smartphone
“What I’ve created are templates,” Combs said. “When I have a new patient, I just open the template, do a ‘save as’, make a new form, fill it out, and I download it.”
“Most of my clientele are geriatric, fifty years old and above… and now with PDFfiller I can send them the form through their cell phone right there and they can sign the contract and the invoices, they can electronically sign right there on the spot, either by typing it in or if they feel more comfortable signing with their finger, I can send it to their mobile phone,” Combs explains.
As you can see, in many cases customers first look for a mobile app because it satisfies a unique need and in a timely manner. Only after this, do they start using the desktop version of whatever product or service that your business provides. So, this means that they rate your product based on the experience they have on the mobile application.
Your task is quite straightforward – to meet users’ expectations. By embracing mobility, you can increase your brand visibility, encourage customer loyalty, promote flexibility and increase overall engagement with your customers (and increase your profits, of course!) Don’t hesitate to join the race and seize your opportunity to finally win it.
Try PDFfiller’s mobile app to edit, sign, and share PDF documents, anywhere, anytime, from your mobile device.
