What Types of Businesses Would Benefit from Having a Mobile App?

The financial services industry seamlessly lends itself to B2C mobile apps as more customers are using their mobile devices for banking, budgeting, investments, and payments. Check out these statistics that speak to the popularity of mobile apps for financial services.

•  A Consumer Reports survey of 2,097 U.S. adults conducted in February 2023 found that 75% of Americans use one or more banking apps.
• More than half (58%) of Millennial respondents report performing finance-related tasks on a mobile app at least once a day.
• 48% of consumers have 3 or more finance-related mobile apps currently downloaded to their mobile phone.

Mobile apps make your financial services more accessible to users, providing a fast and easy way to track and manage money, make payments, or leverage personalized features and tools. A mobile app is a must-have to stay competitive in the financial services sector.

The health and wellness industry is becoming more digital. Customers are making telehealth appointments to see doctors, nutritionists, therapists, and more; they are getting prescriptions online; and using fitness apps for workouts or to track activity.

Besides providing customers with more flexibility, mobile apps can also empower providers to deliver better care to patients. For instance, our long-time customer, Radloop, has a mobile app that allows radiologists to easily access actionable findings that are automatically extracted from reports, enabling seamless communication for follow-up care. Learn more about the app and how we built it in our case study.

So, if your business is in the health and wellness industry, a mobile app can be a great solution to build a community around common goals, offer more personalized guidance, streamline healthcare operations, and make your services more accessible.

Since the pandemic, apps have taken the education industry by storm. Professionals and students are increasingly turning to apps like Duolingo and Khan Academy to learn a new language, train for a new skill, or supplement classroom-based learning. Many academic institutions are also leveraging e-learning tools to better engage their students.

If your business is in the education industry, creating a mobile app is a great way to expand the reach of your content or service. You can offer subscription-based modules to boost revenue or create gamified or personalized learning experiences to increase engagement.

Similarly, mobile apps can help academic institutions meet students where they are – on their phones! The higher education space is competitive. Having a mobile app shows students that your institution is keeping up with technology and cares about the campus experience. You can leverage the mobile app to create a centralized place for students to access campus news and resources, share communications, pay bills, manage courses and assignments, and much more. For instance, check out Emerson College’s mobile app.

Mobile apps make it much easier for users to access travel information on the go. Most people today use an app to plan a trip or book flights and accommodations. Think Airbnb, Hopper, and Tripadvisor.

Many food and beverage businesses, and even hotel chains, use mobile apps to deliver push notifications with discounts or offers, enable contactless check-in, streamline booking management, run loyalty programs, and more.

Building a mobile app for your travel or hospitality business is a great way to offer convenience and leverage the increasing use of smartphones to make your brand more accessible to customers.

Mobile apps are a big deal in the gaming industry. According to a Statista Global Consumer Survey, 54 percent of the more than 7,000 U.S. adults surveyed use their smartphone to play games regularly. Consoles only come in a distant second place for Americans – around a third regularly play on one of these devices. PC/laptop takes third place with 32 percent of the survey participants.

A gaming console or PC/laptop may be out of reach for many, but a majority of the global population now owns a smartphone.

Building a mobile app for your gaming business is a great way to widen the reach of your product and allow for immersive, on-the-go experiences. You can also leverage device-specific functionality to deliver a more intuitive gaming experience.

Most field services businesses have agents that are on the ground, moving from one customer location to another. Having a mobile app that can operate offline, these agents can access information about work orders, communicate with team members in real-time, manage time, and schedule or close tasks. This helps simplify their day-to-day work experience and empower them to deliver better customer service.

Similarly, for distribution businesses, a mobile app can streamline and bring more automation to inventory management and enable seamless shipment tracking. For instance, our team built an iOS app for distribution company, Omni Services, which allows warehouse workers to create orders for customers by scanning barcodes without requiring network connectivity and later export them to their ERP system. This mobile app helps Omni Services improve efficiency in inventory and data management. Read more about the app in our case study.

This can also serve as a great touchpoint to engage with your customers. Whether you send out surveys or leverage social media, find ways to directly connect with your customers and ask how they prefer to engage with your business. Are they able to sufficiently interact with your business through a mobile-friendly website, or would a mobile app enhance their user experience? You can also leverage analytics to gather some data on customer engagement. For instance, if most of your audience includes repeat customers who primarily visit your website on mobile devices, then building a mobile app may be beneficial. With a mobile app, these customers can enjoy a faster and more convenient experience.

Give customers some compelling incentive to download your app. This can be app-exclusive features such as discounts, reward points, loyalty program, or subscriptions. If your mobile app offers something that customers cannot get on other platforms, they will be more likely to convert.

A mobile app can be a great value-add to your business’ offerings. But a mobile app requires an upfront investment in development and ongoing maintenance. So, make sure the path to ROI is clear, whether you’re looking for enhanced customer engagement, increased revenue, or more. A good idea might be to start with a minimum viable product (MVP) to gauge user feedback and adoption.

The type of mobile app is also an important consideration for ROI because it can impact the overall cost of a project and the user engagement. Learn more about native mobile apps and cross-platform apps in our blog post.