Native apps will increase customer engagement, grow sales and help market your products. The following article highlights a few of the reasons why native is the only way to go when you want to see business growth. All in the context of Apps for sales people to sell and Apps for consumers to buy...

Consumer Driven Native Apps Are On the App Store
One of the big benefits of having a native app is that it will be on the app store. As such, users have to actively search for or find your app or respond to your marketing efforts, and then take the active steps to download it. Right off the bat, you have a more engaged user that has made a dedicated decision to try out your app.

As such, they are more invested in your app from the start expending more than a few seconds that usually people expend on landing pages. In the long run, this will increase the likelihood that your users will return to your app and continue to engage with it, make purchases and so on. By contrast, a HTML5 app doesn’t show up every time a person scrolls through their smartphone apps. Native, on the other hand, will constantly remind users of your business and its app presence on their phone, increasing the likelihood that it will be used, specially if the brands use push notification intelligently to keep users engagement.

Additionally, the very fact that your app will be on an app store increases its visibility and marketing. Built-in marketing is a huge benefit of developing a native app since the mere presence on the app store will do essential marketing work for your business. Then, if you have a strong app, quality user reviews will ensure that your app gets even more built-in attention for marketing purposes.

Business Apps are tools, not toys

This does not mean that business apps cannot be fun. They should and they must create value for its users even before creating value for the businesses. Apps without adoption do not contribute to ROI. Apps that are not better the standard web browser tools have no chance of been adopted.

Sales need client-facing tools to sell; they wont use the back office tools to engage customers or to close orders. The attempts of software vendors to make their web browser centric tools mobile friendly barely get used simply because the user experience it no better than a regular laptop.

In the other hand well designed business Apps that boost convenience, create fun and help users to get things done are widely adopted. Look at Apps like Square that changed the experience of merchants and customers at the same time. If you are thinking on Apps as business tools for your team to sell more or to increase retention, make sure you provide a superb native user experience and go beyond providing a smaller screen to do what people can do in their laptops.

Native Apps Run Faster

Another huge benefit of native apps is that they simply run faster than HTML5 apps. Mobile phones have taken off primarily because 21st century living is busy and constantly on the go. As a result, many mobile users just don’t have the patience to deal with a slow app. The speed of native, then, will make app use a more pleasant experience, thereby increasing the chances that a mobile user will enjoy the app enough to use it again. In short, the enhanced speed of native apps will enhance your business in the process. In addition please remember that carriers have dark spots where signal is poor and you may not want to rely on HTML apps.

Native Apps Refresh Your Memory

If you forget your native apps, they certainly have not forgotten you. Native apps are capable of sending you push notifications and reminders, ensuring that the app is always on the user’s mind. To use an HTML5 app, a user has to actually remember the app, and in a busy world, it is easy to forget about important things, much less apps. This is just one more way that native apps really allow businesses to reap the benefit of increased user engagement.

One advanced strategy that really takes advantage of native’s push notification is to have sophisticated contextual content that is pushed to users. In this way, users will see a push notification as a welcome interruption, rather than a nuisance. In this way, push notifications become a fun and exciting part of a user’s day, while also boosting the profile of your business.

Follow the Leaders

If world leaders in their respective industries are going native, why shouldn’t you? All big businesses like Facebook, LinkedIn Amazon, and Uber have made the move to native apps, that does not mean they wont make their websites responsive, but they are not going to bet into responsive only.

These businesses can pour millions into their marketing and development strategies, so rest assured that the benefits of going native are clear when giants like these are making the switch. For anyone that doesn’t want to read the fine print of native’s benefits, this evidence makes it readily apparent that native offers benefits to businesses that HTML5 simply cannot.

And, Of Course, Native Provides Offline Support

While the main focus of this article is on highlighting the lesser-known benefits of native apps, it would be a mistake not to at least briefly mention this key benefit. Offline use means your app is always available to users at any time, increasing the ease of use, when and where it can be use and even how often it can be used. As such, native is the only way to go if your business sells products through the app.

After all, many carriers provide poor communications. Ultimately, this means that even if you want to use an HTML5 app, you may be unable to do so, and native apps circumvent this issue. If your app is used to make sales, this will be the critical difference between a customer buying from you or not. Plainly stated, first impressions are key, so make yours count by going native and guarantee that your sales team would be able to rely on your Apps to runt their business instead of having to run their business on paper forms and wait until the night to use their back office tools.

Choosing a native app will empower your sales team, so ignore any software vendors that strongly recommend going with mobile friendly HTML5 tools. If they try to dissuade you from native apps, it is likely that they simply lack the expertise to deliver a strong native app, and these vendors should be ignored and avoided as a result.

Look at your statistics and see how many orders you currently get from “replicated web sites” even if they are mobile friendly. If you looking for way to increase customer engagement, more sales or increased order size consider a Native app for your customers.

Taking all of these factors into account, it is little wonder why so many app developers prefer the wide range of benefits that native app development offers.