Times have certainly changed. Not long ago, mobile applications were associated with only the large corporations and businesses. But that part of the story is history now. Today, majority of the smaller companies make use of the benefits of mobile apps to serve their clients in a better way, and see a higher ROI.

The business world is no more about handing leaflets, printing advertisements, hanging billboards and your technical people answering each and every customer queries. The world has gone mobile, and you should too!

Let me take a guess on what might be running in your mind right now; ‘I don’t need mobile apps to sell my products to my loyal customers. Mobile app, or no mobile app, I can always retain them’. Well, this maybe the case right now, but in the near future, it will be a completely different story, and you need to be prepared for that.

I think mobile apps for business are the driving force of prosperity and success! Don’t agree? Take a look at these 4 ways in which your business will reap the benefits of a mobile app. I’m sure you will be on my side by the end of this article.

Value To Your Customers

Business is all about the engagement you have with your customers when they come seeking out for products or services. You and your employees may have had hundreds of meetings to narrow down into the best possible way to encourage this engagement with the customers.

You have to increase interaction for a better promotion of sales, but also at the same time you need to provide a certain value to your customers which can be found only with you, and not anywhere else.

So where does mobile application come into the picture here? Check this out : Starbucks (An American coffee house chain) uses their mobile app to offer rewards exclusively for the customers who are subscribed to their app. This in turn motivates their customers to buy coffee from them. To add to this approach, they even allow users to pay directly from the app, speeding up the entire process resulting in a better customer experience.

A program like this, incorporated into your mobile application will play a major role in digitization of the entire process.

Stronger Brand Building

There were times when refrigerator magnets, calenders, posters and billboards played a huge role in advertisement. Every company would have had their logos on such mementos in order to advertise their products or services. Well, these memorabilia have been replaced by mobile apps now!

One of the salient features of mobile apps for business is that, it offers awareness and recognition of your brand to the customers for an enhanced communication. It is this regular interaction with your target market, which sows the seeds to grow trust and belief between you and your customers.

Mobile apps aim at strengthening and educating the customer about your brand. The more he believes in you, the more he listens to you and your sales pitches, and eventually commits to your brand.

Better Customer Connection

A smiling sales associate in his office, a customer sitting across his table, and both of them discussing about the various assistance and services which the company provides to its audience! This was the exact scene a few years ago. But over the years, customer service has grown beyond the face to face communication into a game-changing digital experience.

With the entire world in the pockets of the people, this was bound to happen. Mobile applications have taken customer service into a whole new level, courtesy of their adaptability and resilient features.

Imagine a person gets to know about your company in the middle of the night, and he has some queries. Would you have an app ( that responds on any given time) or a human being ( who responds only during normal business hours) to respond to that person at that time of the hour?

Mobile applications for businesses give an interface which is aimed at providing the customers with seamless experience of studying and decision making on the company’s products and services. Seen as a primary means to improve customer service by majority of marketers, mobile apps make sure your business is always with your customer.

Profit Boosts

I’m sure each one us loves Pizza. A leading American pizza restaurant chain; Domino’s pizza saw an e-commerce rise of 28% in their half-year pre-tax profits, after launching an app for ordering delivery or in-store pickups of their pizzas.

So do you think in 6 months, the number of people like you and me, who love pizza, increased? No! It was a simple strategy to introduce a mobile app and make things simpler for their customers, so that they don’t opt for any other options available. On any given day, any customer would prefer using their app rather than calling up their store, or any other store as well.

On the other side, according to a study, 35.4% of the Black Friday sales last year were completed using mobile devices. And the fact that it is an increase of more than 16% from just a few years ago is quite astonishing.

Do you see the shift here? If you don’t have a mobile app for business that encourages your customers, and excites them about your product or service, you are a miles away from the trends of an ever-growing market.

If you think that mobile apps are solely for big brands like Walmart and Bank of America, you are wrong. More and more small and mid-size businesses are following the mobile trend, understanding that an effective mobile strategy involves more than just a mobile-friendly website and that their business needs a mobile app.

In fact, these days you’ll notice that many small businesses you interact with on a frequent basis have their own dedicated mobile app—be it the corner coffeeshop or the beauty spa downtown. These companies are ahead of the game when it comes to taking their digital marketing to the next level.

In case you are still not sure why anyone would want to build their own mobile application, here are the top seven benefits of going down this path sooner rather than later.

1. Be visible to customers at all times

Statistics show that the average American adult spends an average of 3 hours and 43 minutes on their mobile device. While probably only a handful of applications make up the bulk of this total usage, it doesn’t change the fact that each user has to unlock, scroll, and scan their device for the apps they’re looking for. Being “in the way” can be an advantage to your company, as our mind subconsciously records every image and text (or well-designed app icon!) it comes across.

2. Create a direct marketing channel

Apps serve many functions: they can provide general info, prices, booking forms, search features, user accounts, messengers, news feeds, and much more.

One of the biggest benefits of having a mobile app is that all the information you’d like to provide to your customers—including special sales and promotions—is right at their fingertips. Via push notifications you’re getting even closer to a direct interaction, and can easily remind customers about your products and services whenever it makes sense.

3. Provide value to your customers

Talking about on-hand information, how about digitalizing that loyalty program you have in place? Instead of sticking to the old point-collection card, make it possible for your customers to collect their rewards via your mobile app. The result? More downloads and more return customers.

4. Build brand recognition

A mobile app for your business can greatly contribute to your brand awareness. I’d like to break this topic down into two aspects, the combination of which will make your app a true winner:

• Brand. A mobile app is like a blank billboard sign. You can do what you want with it; you can make it stylish, hip, functional, bold, or informative. But what you really want to do is create an app that has features your customers will love, while at the same time is well branded and beautifully designed.
• Recognition. The more often you can get customers involved with your app, the sooner they will be inclined to buy your product and/or service. In advertising this is called the “effective frequency”: as a rule of thumb, hearing and/or seeing your brand approximately 20 times is what will get you truly noticed.

5. Improve customer engagement

No matter whether you are selling flowers or spa services, your customers need a way to reach you. Having a messaging (or help desk) feature within your app can really make a difference in the way you communicate with your customers. Think about it: OpenTable, for example, built its entire business model around this principle. Instead of calling a restaurant for a table, you can book it with less than five clicks on their platform. Now think about it: How many customers would prefer to communicate with you via text than via phone?

6. Stand out from the competition

These days mobile apps at the small business level are still less common, and this is where you can take a big leap ahead of your competitors. Be the first in your neighborhood to offer a mobile app to your customers. They’ll be impressed by your forward-thinking approach!

7. Cultivate customer loyalty

Last, but not least, the most important reason why you should consider building your own mobile app is customer loyalty. With all the noise out there—roadside banners, billboards, flashing signs, newspaper ads, flyers, coupons, websites, website banners, Facebook ads, and email marketing—we slowly lose our impact on customers because of the immense amount of advertising surrounding us all.

It’s time to go back to making a true and sincere connection with your customers, and making them a loyal lover of your product and/or service. I am not saying a mobile app is going to save your business, but it can be a way of staying closer to your customers, and be just a “fingertip” away at all times.

What Are PowerApps?

Put simply, Microsoft PowerApps were developed to democratise software development, reducing both the difficulty and complexity of launching a new application for use by an organisation.

Using PowerApp’s a citizen developer (someone with little or no coding/design experience) can rapidly create a custom app for use by their organisation, either internally or externally.

PowerApps do this by using a low code/no code approach that lets users create apps using a simple click, drag and drop system.

Low code/No code development has been massively gaining in popularity over the last few years and the COVID pandemic has only seen that interest increase, with many organisations needing to pivot to a new way of working, thus speeding up their digital transformation plans ahead of original schedules.

Using PowerApps, a citizen developer can create either a canvas app or a model driven app… which obviously leads on nicely to the next questions, being… what are they, which is best and when should you use them?

What Are Model-Driven Apps?

Again, putting it as simply as we can, Model-Driven Apps aren’t ‘stand-alone’.

They’re based on sets of underlying data, or being more precise, underlying data held in the Microsoft Dataverse (apologies for throwing more jargon at you! The Dataverse, what used to be the Common Data Model, is a cloud-based storage environment that organisations can use to store their business application data safely and securely).

All Model-Driven Apps will be integrated in some way with the Microsoft Dataverse. In fact, most Microsoft Apps are Model Driven Apps themselves as, on some level, they’ll be integrated with the Dataverse (up to and including the entire Dynamics 365 platform).

That level of integration with the Dataverse means Model-Driven Apps can be described as ‘data-first’.

They’re far more rigid in their functionality than a Canvas App will be, with the UI (User Interface) components likely being selected from pre-made choices (although some customisation is still possible). That premade element makes Model-Driven Apps incredibly simple and easy to design and build, with absolutely no coding ability needed.

The flip side to all that rigidity however is that a Model-Driven App will always be a lot more sophisticated than a Canvas App, making them much better solutions for anything requiring complex busines logic to function efficiently.

The other plus to those premade User Interfaces is that they’re Responsive-by-Design, so will always look great, no matter what kind of device they’re accessed from.

What Are Canvas-Apps?

A Canvas-App does exactly what it says on the tin… they provide you with a completely blank canvas to create with.

You’re not left completely on your own though, as Canvas Apps are still designed for citizen developers, so there’s still a click, drag and drop format powering the interface.

Once you’ve got a setup you’re happy with though, you can make further adjustments to a Canvas App to change the size, shape and formatting of all the disparate elements.

Then, once you’re happy with that, you can connect it up to either a single or multiple data source(s) using nothing more than simple excel-style formulas.

And therein lies the main appeal of a Canvas App over a Model-Driven App; since there’s no need to worry about how your data is structured as there is with a Model-Driven App, you get a much more intuitive design experience.

Sounds complicated?

Don’t worry. If you can use PowerPoint and have an entry-level understanding of excel formulas, then you’ll be able to whip up a Canvas App with no problems.

Building a Canvas App is a lot of fun as it really lets you flex your creative side as no two Canvas Apps will ever be exactly the same, plus, as a bit of an added bonus, Canvas Apps are capable of pulling data from over two hundred unique data integration sources as an Out-of-the-Box feature, making them infinitely more flexible than a Model-Driven App could ever hope to be.

The downside to that however is that Canvas Apps aren’t responsive by design. The two basic layout functions are portrait and landscape but depending on the amount of customisation that’s happened, some work is often required to make them fit across a range of devices by adjusting the size and positions of the various elements in relation to the screen size.

To do that you’ll need hard-coded values that will have to be repeated for every individual control that’s been created within your app… so whilst a Canvas App is endlessly customisable, making it then responsive can be a long-winded process.

When To Use A Canvas App Vs When To Use A Model-Driven App

In case you hadn’t guessed already, the title of this article is a little misleading as it isn’t really a case of Canvas Apps vs Model-Driven Apps or which is better.

Instead, there’s appropriate use cases for both; complementing rather than competing with each other.

A Canvas App is perfect for creating a task/roles-based application such as a ticket system for an IT team. As this task is focussed solely on one issue, it really doesn’t require the full use of the entire Microsoft Suite… that would literally be the definition of over-engineered (or in simpler terms overkill), potentially impacting on the functionality of the app by making it too complicated.

Model-Driven Apps then, are much more suited to creating a complete end-to-end solution.

Going back to the IT ticket system use case, A Model-Driven App would be useful after the ticket has been created to route it to the right place with the right location address, allow it to be updated so both sides can track its progress and mark it as complete.

In the above use case, it’s almost certain there’ll be multiple stakeholders wishing to view, update and document the ticket so for a well-rounded app capable of tracking the whole cycle, a Model-Driven app would be best suited.