In the modern digital marketplace, almost any business you can think of will have their own website. Whether it’s the bakery you love so much in the middle of town or a global corporation like Coca-Cola or Nike. Every brand, big and small, knows how important it can be to make an impact with their online presence.
The good news? Creating a website has never been easier. Content Management Systems like WordPress and endless hosting companies ensure that any organization can design and implement a website without even the slightest bit of technical know-how. The bad news is that it takes a lot more than just a dime-a-dozen site to make your business really stand out.
If you want an online presence that’s appealing enough to attract customers, deliver conversations, and even help you sell your business one day, then you need an incredible website design. Here, we’re going to take a look at just some of the ways that your website can change the value of your online business.
An Attractive Site Prompts Engagement and Conversions
From day one, your website helps your customers and investors to decide whether they want to interact or do business with you. Think of it this way. If you were looking for a place to go for a romantic meal with your other half, and you found a restaurant that was old, run-down, and packed full of outdated furniture, would you rush to book a table? Even if the food inside of that restaurant was great, you may never get a chance to find out, because many of us still do judge a book by its cover.
The same issue applies to your website. If your site looks well-organized, professionally designed and innovative, your customers will associate all those good things with your brand. They’ll assume that you’re a professional organization capable of delivering a professional experience. Something as simple as an easy-to-navigate menu, and an uncluttered design can be enough to help your customers see how effective your business really is.
On the other hand, an unattractive site makes it look as though you haven’t bothered to invest in your business. If you aren’t willing to spend money on making your business look good, why should your customers take you seriously? Most won’t, that’s why 38% of people stop engaging with a website if they think it’s unattractive.
A Great Website Paves the Way for Customer Loyalty
Speaking of making the right impression on your target audience, today’s customers want to establish a connection with their favorite brands. Your website is your first opportunity to show your market what you’re all about, and why they should be interested in connecting with you. After all, there’s more to a business than what it sells. A brand is how you show the personality of your organization and the vision that drives you towards success.
A good website can showcase the important elements of your brand, through the colors you choose, the words you pick, and the experiences you offer. It also helps you to give credibility to your claims. For instance, if you tell your customers that you’ll always put them first, but you fail to make your navigation menu easy to use, that creates a contrast that your customers will pick up on. In fact, 67% of customers say that bad customer experience is the reason why they leave a brand.
Show your customers that you’re authentic, caring, and intuitive with your website design, and they’ll reward you with their loyalty. That instantly improves the value of your online business by giving you long-term clients, and better revenue to show off to a potential business buyer.
Effective Design Makes You Easier to Find
Great website design isn’t just about giving your online presence more aesthetic appeal. It also gives you the tools you need to implement backend solutions that earn the attention of search engines, and eventually customers. A great designer can implement state-of-the-art SEO strategies, complete with meta descriptions, keywords, and other key components, that improve your chances of ranking higher on the search results for certain phrases.
Whether you’re planning on selling your company, or you simply want to make sure that you keep customers coming back to your website, a platform with good SEO gives you the opportunity to place your content and products in front of your customers where they can interact with them best.
It’s not just implementing keywords that you’ll need to think about for SEO purposes either! Bear in mind that bounce rate, or the length of time that people spend on your website before they hit the back button, can have an impact too. If someone comes to your website and thinks it looks unprofessional, or worse – shady, they’ll leave as soon as your pages start to load. On the other hand, if your site looks legitimate, you’re more likely to keep people around for a longer period.
A Good Design Gives People a Reason to Stick Around
Finally, the longer someone spends on your website, the more chance they have of making a purchase. A great website design convinces people to stay around for longer so that they can explore everything you have to offer. This can even lead to an increased rate of newsletter signups, conversions, and followers on your social media page too.
Studies show that when given fifteen minutes to consume content, around two-thirds of all customers would prefer to read something that looks attractive than something that looks plain. As human beings, we’re actively drawn to things that we like the look of. That means that whether you’re trying to connect with your customers or convince someone to buy your business, it all starts with having the right look.
With new innovative design factors like animations, gifs, and videos, you can even add new content elements to your website that help to build up the attractive nature of your company. While there’s more to website design than captivating your audience with shiny objects and great pictures, it helps to give them a reason to stick around.
The Bottom Line on the Value of Website Design
Ultimately, website design is the ultimate chance for you to make a powerful first impression on your audience. If you overlook the importance of a great website impact, then you’re going to end up with a serious problem, as a poorly-designed site can send your customers not only running the opposite way but also fleeing into the arms of your competitors.
At the same time, a great website design doesn’t just improve your business value by giving you more satisfied customers, it could also give you the resources you need to demand a premium when the time comes to sell your company. If your buyer can see that your well-designed website has helped you to develop a strong brand, a good reputation, and a loyal following of customers, they’ll be far more likely to pay more.
This post is written by Jock Purtle.
About the author: Jock is the founder of DigitalExits.com, and an industry leader when it comes to valuing eCommerce brands, websites, and high-growth internet companies. Over the years, he’s shared his thoughts on major publications like CNBC, Forbes, Business Insider, and many more.
Parth Shrivastava
June 12, 2018
Push notifications are simply annoying. They interrupt you and most of the time you feel disappointed once you click on them. Even if you do not, they mostly just make you swipe to get rid of them and that is it.
However, they are necessary. How else would you know what is the weather like today or that a new episode of your favorite TV show was just released?
If you are a brand wondering how to make these interesting for your readers and effective enough to make them click it, here is a list of seven useful tips on how to make them shine.
Be witty
Think about it, witty would spark your interest too. Most people are bored with the plain old statement that says what caused the notification – they want to see something attention-grabbing, something that will make them smile.
Use humor instead of taking your brand too seriously. To the people that receive these notifications, you will seem like a friend, you will make them feel like you see the world they do. And nothing connects people as humor does. Draw inspiration from brands and celebrities whose humor you find appealing.
Create your brand voice and stick to it
Authenticity is what will drive people to you, what will make them recognize your brand whenever they see a notification. Look up to some of the most popular brands and how they do their push notifications.
This approach could potentially win many hearts – you could choose to be funny, honest, serious, sarcastic or anything else that you want to be. Just make sure that you are consistent.
Be Honest
Honesty is always the best policy. People are tired of brands overselling their product and treating them as if they do not know what is going on. This is why being honest will win you many hearts.
“For example, if your terms and services are long and boring to read, tell your users and possibly offer them a short list of what they are accepting. This transparency will also bring an element of surprise – people are so used to being lied to that a transparent brand will automatically get them to pay attention and notice your notifications”, – says Mary Pablo, a Marketing Manager at Assignment help.
Offer valuable information
If your brand is offering something new that could interest your users or there is a discount, let them know. Most people do not care about random notifications about updates and such, but they will genuinely like your effort to give them value.
Try to limit your push notifications to the ones that really offer a helping hand or useful information instead of sending out too many notifications that are ignored.
Write short and accurate notifications
Push notifications are most definitely not the place to put a lengthy text. Keep it short, sweet and catchy. Also, make sure that your notifications are accurate – no one will take you seriously with too many grammar and spelling mistakes.
Here is a list of free resources to help you write perfect notifications:
– State of Writing / Viawriting – in case you need writing guides for your push notifications these websites will give you excellent tips on how to write them.
– UKWritings is an online copywriting tool – recommended here – that will give you excellent tips on writing notifications that demand attention.
– Academadvisor is a formatting guide, which will help you make your notifications properly formatted and structured.
– Essayroo – an online proofreading tool to avoid any mistakes in the notification text
– MyWritingWay and WritingPopulist are great choices and guides for the editing job
– Boomessays is a title or content generating tool, which will provide you with assistance when you are a bit low on inspiration.
Stay up-to-date
This could be extremely valuable for notification writing. Take popular events like elections or football games, TV shows or popular references, memes and such to relate to your readers.
If you do this, your notifications will not be considered boring at all – in fact, they will make the readers feel connected to your brand as someone who loves the same things they do.
Evoke powerful emotions
Your notification may be about a new perfume or something similar but you can certainly connect it with more powerful things – feelings. Whether it’s nostalgia, love or happiness, your readers will like it.
Regular boring notifications do not really have what it takes to invite them in – but if you relate your notification to their feelings, they will gladly click. And the best thing is, they will look forward to your next notification.
Final Thoughts
Push notifications require short text – but it does not mean that a short text cannot pack a punch. Just make sure that whatever you do, you always think of your receivers first and what will appeal to their interest the most.
This post is written by Freddie Tubbs.
About The Author:
Freddie Tubbs is a digital analyst at Paper fellows. He also works as a marketing paper writer at Academized and Australianhelp.
Parth Shrivastava
June 8, 2018
From being a sensational new tool for real-time chatting, today, WhatsApp has become an essential communication tool, even surpassing emails. What made it a sure shot success? Well, because it was introduced to address a grass root trait that humans have always obsessed over. Communication!
People love talking to each other.
SMS texting, social media messages, personal chats, and calls have always been highly sought after. WhatsApp simply gave new and efficient means for personal messaging to people, and it was accepted in daily lives in no time.
(Source)
As the chart shows, millions of people are used to communicate via mobile apps. Their unparalleled popularity is a sheer indicator that communication industry is transforming and in-app messaging is taking it towards future.
Easy availability of mobile internet and smartphones has spiked up mobile app usage. Clearly, this opens up a new avenue for businesses to approach and engage with their users like never before. That being so, we have written this article to shed more light on how you can leverage your business by means of a mobile app with WhatsApp like conversation features.
So fellas, buckle up and get to work!
Essential features that make your app more influential
Basically, a WhatsApp like app for business allows people to interact with their contacts, social connections or business networks synced in the app. For such app to remain in demand continually, it must have the features highly solicited by users worldwide. These features constitute the core of the app and attract new users to associate with you. Accordingly, here is a list of must-haves and nice-to-haves features your app should’ve.
User profiling
Upon entering the app, the user must sign into it. Users’ phone number can be a unique parameter to create distinct users in the app. Besides, with the mobile number, the security verification using SMS becomes instant and faster. Furthermore, a user should be able to create his own profile with details and media of his choice to aptly express his persona.
Syncing contacts
Basically, your messaging apps should conveniently facilitate the user with contacts he can communicate to. It can be contacts stored in phone, social media connections or list of people he needs to interact within your business network. In accordance with your objective of building the app, you can make the app fetch such contacts from various sources.
Enabling real-time messaging, the essence of building messaging apps
Needless to say, the app should connect the user with contact synced with the app. It must deliver the messages or the media attachments promptly to another person. Evidently, the technologies you use in app development must ensure dexterous one-to-one chat as well as group conversations in real time.
Voice and Video calling
Skype paved the path of VoIP calling across countries right from the app. Today, this is exceedingly used in all messaging apps. Be it FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber, or Skype, the calling feature makes them further interactive. Hence, you should give the user the liberty to decide whether to use audio, video call or simply text to communicate.
Multimedia attachment transfer
Every day, chat apps circulate millions of videos and billions of images, in addition to documents and GIFs and more supported formats. That is, the user would prefer to be able to send and receive documents while chatting without having to leave the app.
Notifications
Notifications are an efficient way to alert the users that the app has something inside that they should have a look at. Using Firebase Cloud Messaging by Google (FCM) and Apple Push Notifications would make implementing in-app alerts easier. You can even allow the user to customize how they wish to receive notifications.
- Geo-location sharing
- App scalability
- Quick search within conversations
- Message broadcasting
- Integration with social platforms
- Status indicators
- Calendar sync
- Self-destructive messages
- Subscriptions and in-app purchases
- Cross-platform app operability
- Chatbot integration
The list can keep growing further. However, you must enlist the top features that are indispensable for you to attract users. You can launch a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that is an app with only essential features, and later keep updating the app while adding new features based on the user feedback. Please note that each feature development consumes a big deal in terms of time and efforts. Here is a suggestion, try using open-source messaging libraries and speed up development while incurring a lesser cost.
For a programmer’s curiosity: What does it take to develop a messenger app
Before everything else, you need the industry research observations and app architecture on paper. Here is the plan you can follow if you want,
- Enlist your requirements. What do you want the app to do?
- Observe industry standard, best practices, and current trends.
- How does your competitor’s app look?
- Lay down the app architecture that describes how the app components would interact, layers in the app, data caching, data flow and accessibility, development environment, supported devices, resolution, and hardware connectivity,
- Here is where you visualize worst-case scenarios that might need to operate in such an intermittent network,
- Envisage the future of the app in the marketplace
- Then, design and examine a prototype before beginning with development.
Finally, this is how you go about developing the app for real.
- Database Framework or cloud media storages would build the foundation to raise the app on.
- Application server for real time messaging and calling, such as XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) or MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport)
- Then, you would need a Rest API to communicate data to and from the app.
- In the end, Firebase Cloud Messaging shall keep you covered for the app notification part.
Voila! You are pretty much done with the backend construction. Next is, developing the app for different platforms such as Android, iOS, Windows, and BlackBerry. Take a good look at your target audience and the platforms they prefer to use. Without a doubt, iOS and Android platforms would suffice to address the majority of your users.
Evidently, native development is an uphill battle of building Messaging APIs, Chat SDK, libraries, Google and Apple cloud services for Android and iOS platforms and the whole lot. Your programmer would be certainly well versed with how to go about the native app development.
Design!
You must design the appearance of the app very carefully and creatively. Undeniably, the ‘look and feel’ do the hard-hitting piece of work and keep the users engaged with your app while enticing them to return to the app again. While designing you must focus on sentimental usage aspects, such as:
- App logo: The users see the app icon before they can experience how beautiful your app is. Thus, it is as pivotal as the UI. Icons duly influence the users’ decision of whether or not download the app. Hence, make sure that your logo communicates your brand identity efficiently.
- App color and theme: choose them wisely. Because, color psychology works indeed. Just so you know, monochrome colors remain in always. Ever wondered why Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype, WhatsApp and more app giants exude blue and green hues? Well, give it a thought.
- Easy navigation. Not to be forgotten that you must handle navigation deftly both at front and back end. Distribute the features and buttons on app screen such that everything comes handy to users. Try to understand whether your customers would want a single window navigation, stacked navigation bar, search driven or gesture based navigation. Take extra care of those most frequently used features. The user friendliness is a trump card that can make your app a hit or a miss.
When you have a decently working version of the app ready, begin testing. Alpha testing, beta testing, keep on testing. It is very crucial. Run all the possible test case scenarios to ensure that you have built an all-weather robust app.
How would this chat app accelerate your business?
First off, keep in mind that you are building an app for a special business niche for your clients and prospects of the local area as well as worldwide and not any general-purpose texting application.
Businesses can deploy a messaging app for a range of utilities and can reap wholesome rewards for the same, such as;
- Well, you get to attract more users, more of those who prefer everything done on the go, and to communicate with those who are already using the app.
- The app even fosters the relationship between users and service providers, thereby churn reduces and more users engage with business. Thus, cross sell and upsell potential increases.
- Your business can provide better customer support. Through the app, you are accessible 24/7, users can easily submit their queries.
- You can establish a direct communication and feedback channel directly with the end user.
- Increases conversion rate as well as customer satisfaction.
See, you can taste a bunch of amazing benefits when you decide to serve and connect with the end user through a mobile app with a built in chatting feature inside.
Time and resources: What does the development cost you?
Seemingly, you have made up your mind to develop all that we discussed about so far. An interactive business app will present you with a channel to acquire more customers and monetize in addition to the perks mentioned above.
So to speak, building such a messenger app would cost you a big sum in terms of time, energy and money. If you begin from the scratch and code yourself, approximately you will need more than 6 months of full time work.
In addition, you will need a team of programming rock stars, that include iOS programmer, Android programmer, front end and back end developers, UI and UX designers, Quality Analyst and a learned person to oversee the happenings aka a project manager.
All in all, it can cost you up to and beyond $25,000 to develop such an app for your business. However, this is a ballpark number, the type and nature of the features in your app more or less influence the cost of development.
How Applozic lends you a helping hand with in-app messaging
Apparently, adding chat feature in mobile app indeed is a tough job. By now you must be wondering whether to do it yourself or outsource it. Here is a detailed answer to your ‘buy it Vs build it’ dilemma. In a nutshell, your engineers should work upon what they are good at, i.e. developing your business, and leave the ‘in-app messaging’ to experts like Applozic.
To put it briefly, at Applozic we offer best in class chat API & In-App Messaging SDK that you can use to integrate messaging in web or your mobile app. The comprehensive toolkit
- Saves you huge development cost
- Gives rich cross platform and multi device conversational interface
- Make your web and mobile apps more interactive
- Seamlessly integrates in your product
Thus, with plenty of more intuitive features, Applozic looks after your in-app chat essentials, while allowing you to concentrate on your business. Connect us to know more.
Bringing it all together
Building a messaging app that brings your business a desired output, is a lot more than just programming and launching the app. The whole lot involves post release support, maintenance, timely upgrades, integration with enterprise systems and much more. Therefore, your decision of building or buying in-app chat features has many repercussions that you can imagine. Take all the time you need to make this decision of great magnitude.
In the end, this is how one can go about developing a WhatApp like messaging app from the very scratch. Do remember that even if Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are dominating the in-app communication industry, there is still room for an intuitive app like yours to accommodate in the marketplace. You must build an app that stands out with its unique value proposition.
Without a doubt, conversational apps are a significant part of the end to end communication for businesses. It is high time you must have a dedicated interactive app for your business.
Carpe diem!