There are a lot of great reasons to develop your own dedicated business app. It’s a brilliant marketing opportunity because you can use it to send marketing messages or deals and offers directly to your customer’s phones. Apps are good for branding too because people are seeing your logo every time they open your phone. A lot of businesses include live chat functions on their app too, so it’s a good way to maintain close communication with customers.
The process of designing and building your app can be very expensive and time-consuming, so it’s important that you see tangible benefits when you release it. If you don’t, your investment is wasted. After you have finally finished the development process, it’s time to release your app to the world. The hope is that you will get thousands of downloads in the first few days and all of your customers will leave you excellent reviews. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always go that way. Sometimes, businesses launch their app and it’s a complete flop. Hardly anybody downloads it and those that do only have bad things to say. If this happens, you’ve gone wrong somewhere. Identifying those problems and avoiding them is the best way to make sure that your app launch is a success. These are the most common reasons why your business app launch is a flop.
The App Is Filled With Bugs
When you ask customers to download your app, they expect high standards. They want it to work flawlessly straight from the start without any problems. In order to build up a reputation as a reliable business with a good product, your app needs to be functional and error-free from the very beginning. You can’t rely on customers contacting you or writing reviews for you to notice that there’s a problem with your app. The only way is by checking every little aspect yourself before you send it out into the world.
There are a number of reasons why apps are released with lots of bugs. In most cases, it’s down to a lack of pre-release testing. When you have a team of developers working on an app, it’s easy for them to miss a few things when they’re testing it. It could be something as small as a spelling mistake or a bug that is invisible to the naked eye.
The solution is simple: hire professional testers and give them every aspect of your app to play with before you launch it. This way, any problems will be spotted and worked out before anyone else has the opportunity to discover them. Automated testing tools like testRigor can also test every aspect of the app from the perspective of the end user and then create detailed reports. This will give you an extensive list of anything that doesn’t work as it should so you can fix it before release. Extensive quality assurance and user experience testing are vital if you want your app to be well received on release.
Often, apps are riddled with problems because they were rushed out, and this is usually down to poor organization during the development process. You need all members of the team to stick to a schedule so that things can be completed on time. If one small aspect of your app is taking months to develop, it’s going to disrupt the entire timetable. As soon as you finish creating an element, it should be handed over for approval and testing immediately. If there are delays, this will take even longer and mean that everyone else has to work around them. It would take hours if not days or weeks before problems are spotted during this process, meaning that they’ll probably go unnoticed until release day.
It’s also important not to leave certain things until the last minute because you risk running out of time completely. You should always allocate enough time for QA testing and revisions based on feedback from the team.
Your App Doesn’t Solve A Problem
There’s no point in creating an app if you don’t think that people will need it. The aim of your app should always be to improve things for customers and solve a problem of some kind. By giving them something that makes life easier or more enjoyable, you’re offering them a reason to download the app. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses develop an app because all of their competitors have one, even though they don’t really know what it’s for.
If your app doesn’t solve any problems, you’ll be lucky if anyone downloads it at all, let alone recommends it to their friends and family. Customers can spot when products aren’t very helpful straight away, so be wary of releasing anything that isn’t adding value in some way.
Consider your target audience and the kind of problems they might have. In some cases, it’s easy to work out what the app should do. For example, ecommerce businesses can create a shopping app. Otherwise, you need to think outside the box. For example, a lot of fitness equipment companies develop apps that track calories or provide workout routines. Although not directly selling their products through the app, they are meeting the needs of their customers.
Your App Is Not Original
It’s important to develop an app that is unique and different. If your app is something that has been seen before, it means that you’re not offering anything special if someone can find the same thing on Google or Apple’s App Store. There are millions of apps available for download and many of them do exactly the same things as other apps in their category. There has to be a reason why people would search for one particular app out of millions and download it instead of using one they already have installed on their device.
If your app doesn’t offer anything new, people will delete it after looking at it once or twice because there’s no incentive to keep using it.
You Haven’t Optimized For Different Platforms
It’s not enough to create an app for your platform of choice and hope that everything will be fine. If you want to generate as much traffic as possible, you should make sure that your app can work on other devices and operating systems.
Your app needs to function properly on iOS and Android, and it should be optimized for tablets as well as phones. If the app isn’t optimized for lots of different platforms, you are limiting yourself. People will also leave bad reviews if the app doesn’t work well on their specific device. It only takes a few bad reviews to put people off downloading it, so this can easily cause your app to flop.
You Didn’t Market The App Properly
You could create the best app in the world, but it’ll never go anywhere if no one knows about it. Marketing is often seen as an afterthought when developing an app, but this is a huge mistake. You need to make sure that you promote your app well because this will determine whether or not people download it.
Some businesses believe that they can just release their apps and let them do all the work for them because there are millions of downloads available each day across different devices. Once your app starts getting downloads and good reviews, things will take off. However, it’s up to you to get the ball rolling with a big marketing push.
Start with an email campaign targeting your existing customers. They are most likely to be interested in your app so, hopefully, this should get you a good amount of downloads right away.
You can also use social media to raise awareness of your app and start building a following. When people see how helpful it is, they’ll want to share it with their friends and family. If possible, look into paid advertising as this will also help get more downloads from new customers who aren’t yet familiar with your brand or apps.
Without investing in marketing, your app is unlikely to get the exposure it needs. When budgeting for your app development, it’s important that you consider the cost of marketing and set aside some money for it so you can successfully promote the app. Make sure that you start well in advance of the release date so you can build a bit of excitement and get more downloads on launch day.
Building an app can benefit your business in a lot of different ways. But it’s a big investment and it’s crucial that you get enough downloads to make it worthwhile. However, a lot of apps flop on launch day and all of the money you spend on development is wasted. In order to avoid this, you need to focus on building a high-quality app that isn’t filled with bugs. You also need to design something that solves a customer issue and adds value. Finally, you need to make sure that you market the app properly so when launch day comes, people are eager to download it straight away.
