FAQs of the week #9: Is it worth creating an app, and how to drive traffic to it?

This week, Jerome covers 2 interesting subjects: the value of an app in your communication strategy, and the way to drive traffic to it from your website.

As a representative of GoodBarber I obviously say yes to this question. It is worth creating an app so go for it.

There are tons of reasons to do it but let me outline two. First your users are already on mobile and second the best user experience you can give is with a native app.

So, as for your users if you look at the sales in the mobile industry you see that it overcomes the sales of PC. A lot of people are using mobile devices to go to the Internet and that means that your existing users are using mobile devices to access your content, and your future users are going to use mobile devices.
If you look at your website analytics, you will see that there is an increasing part of the traffic that comes from mobile devices.

As for the user experience there is no better way to give a good one than by creating a native app. Look at companies like LinkedIn and Facebook, they started to create an app using html5. Those were web apps, but they changed their minds to create native apps instead. It allowed them to give a good user experience to their users. After that, they increase their figures on mobile use and loyalty.

So if you're asking yourself: is it worth creating an app? I would say yes to this question because your users are mainly using mobile devices and the best experience you can provide is delivered by a native app.

To drive traffic from my website to my app, I would do two easy things.

The first one is to make your app part of your communication plan.
The second one is to make it very easy to download your app.

As for the communication part, try to promote your app as much as you can. You have a website, you are on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on, so each time you can, promote your app, speak about you app, tell your users the benefits they will get if they download and use your app every day.

As for the tools, when you promote your app and people can't download it easily, you create a frustration and you shouldn't. So use the right tools to make it easy to download your app. To do so you can use widgets with the correct URLs to drive the user directly to the page where he can download your app. You can also use smart app banners. This is the banner that appears in the mobile version of your site and points people to download directly your app.

At GoodBarber for instance we provide to our users a single URL that works on any device. Depending on the device,  it will direct the user to the right store so if the user opens this URL from an iOS device he will go directly to the App Store if he opens it from an Android device he will go directly to Google Play.

To drive traffic from your website to your app, first, promote your app as much as you can on your website and second give your users the right tools to download your app easily.