Increase Your Apps Open Rate

The main purpose of having a mobile app for your business is to drive traffic to your store. One way you can certainly drive traffic to your store is communicating with your customers. Grand Apps offers businesses a chance to communicate to customers with mobile technologies. We offer mobile apps built for businesses that allow them to send out unlimited push notification messages that can send pictures, words and links. Our robust push notification system is the way of the future. We have built in GEO Fencing push messages that allow you to specifically target consumers at particular locations, allowing you to personalize messages for them.

For example, you can setup a fence around a golf course and schedule a message for app users saying "You know what goes great with golfing? A nice cold beer from our restaurant".

Let's say you're not selling beer, that's okay. Maybe you're a fitness center. You can setup a fence around a GNC or Supplement store saying "This is the best supplement to buy, get this".

We found that clients who are frequently using the push messages, especially the GEO Fence technologies are finding about a 26% better app open rate than those not using it. If you are not frequently using your app or sending customers messages, you have stopped the conversation. When you stop talking to your customers they soon forget about you. If they forget about you, your bottom line will suffer.

Don't hurt your bottom line & get chatting with your customers today. If you are a Grand Apps client, send out a push note. If you are curious how you can implement this, give us a call or email.

616.717.1151
support@grandapps.com

New Mobile App User Interfaces

We are pretty excited for our new feature update that is coming soon and wanted to give you another sneak peak for our "more" navigation tab. Designing an easy to use user interface is not easy and making it simple, yet effective can be very challenging. Our apps have come a long way since we first launch Grand Apps in 2012 and our UI have improved drastically. If you have used some of our apps at your favorite local business, you will know that majority of our apps have a "more" button. This more button has all of the remaining app features in there.

More Button Changes
We are now changing the way this looks in our apps. The app screenshot above is a fitness app and notice how it has a "more" button. When you click that button you will be taken to the more page. Checkout below the before and after pictures of our newly designed more page.

Before

After

Users can now swipe to the left to get to the "more" screen with all of the app features. 

Mobile App Tip | One Touch Contact

We have another great mobile app tip for you today, regarding mobile app marketing. In case you missed our latest video about this, CLICK HERE to watch it. But if you prefer reading over watching, we still have you covered. 

This app feature is utilized by many of our clients, yet highly overlooked. So if you are using this feature then this article may be a bit of a refresher for you and for all of you not using Grand Apps yet, this is a must read. 

One Touch Contact

This app feature works by hosting all of your useful contact information into on button or one touch. 

As you see above the image of the mobile device, users can click the contact or info button and be directed to a page in your app that looks like this. This feature will hold your GPS Directions, ability to call your business, ability to visit your website & even send your business an email. Seems pretty basic, right? Well let's cover why this feature beats mobile web. 

Mobile Web

When users want to search a business or go to your business because maybe they forgot a service / menu item. Maybe they want to call you for hours tonight or possibly just see if you have any specials going on. The second they decide to do this, they will go to their mobile smartphones Internet and launch it. Depending on their network, they will have to let it load up and wait a few seconds. After this huge hassle they will then have to type your businesses name in the search box, if your business has a longer name then that means the more time to type to search. After they are done typing in the search box they must then browse to make sure they have the right business they were searching for. 

After minutes have passed by they will finally be on a search page with your business listings. Don't get us wrong, mobile web browsing is awesome and if you have Google Places registered, then your business listings are right there and in front of the user. But, if you don't have Google Places registered then they must visit your website to gather this information. Sometimes businesses do not even have an optimized website for users to browse over. What do we mean by an optimized website you might ask? Put it this way, if you have to pinch and zoom around the website to find information like finding Waldo in your children's books, then your website is probably not optimized at all. 

Now our user has finally landed on your website, after minutes, and wants to get a hold of you. Is your number displayed in an easy to find format? Is there a way for them to contact you via email if they choose? This part will be up to your web team, but chances are if your site is not optimized it will be harder than easier to find. This might sound like they user is simply lazy because they actually have to do some work and spend a few extra minutes. But you must remember that in today's fast paced world, people want things "now,now & now"...which is why fast food restaurants are so popular, it's all about convenience. So why might a mobile app be better for your users to get ahold of you? 

Mobile App

This brings us to the conclusion of a mobile app and how powerful this small, simple feature can be. Imagine that your customer wants to find your business, call you, view your website or view specials as we mentioned in the above scenario. Now picture this, they simple go to your app, open it, click info/contact & there it is. This will literally take seconds, not minutes. And if we can agree that today's world for most people is about convenience then this would conclude the One Touch Contact feature is very powerful. This feature is overlooked or taken for granted by many, but seriously it's a charm. 

As we mentioned, most of the businesses using our platform already have added this feature but we wanted to reinforce to you that it is working wonderfully for getting your information out there QUICK to the people. If you have not already gone Grand Apps yet, begin thinking about it. In 2013, smartphone imports / exports actually surpassed dumbphones, meaning the mobile revolution has begin and will be in full swing in 2014. 

As always, if you loved this article and found it useful, please Google +1 us!  Thanks for the read & share. 

Very Important Update from Grand Apps

 

Attention Grand Apps Readers: We just wanted to inform you that the Apple Developer Website is currently being updated. Last Thursday there was an attempt to hack the Apple Developer Website. Below is a screenshot of an email we received from Apple in regards to this website update. 

We just wanted to reassure all of our clients that your mobile apps were not affected. We have also sent out an email blast to everyone in regards to this. Thank you for all of your patience at this moment. Again, this is completely out of any developers hands at the moment and we are waiting on Apple to give us the final word their site is back up. 

If your mobile app is waiting approval from Apple or awaiting to upload, it may take longer than expected. We will notify you along every step of this process.

Again, thank you for your support & patience!

-Grand Apps