Thursday 29 November 2018

Digital Trends That Will Change Businesses In 2019



“By 2022, at least 5% of digital commerce orders will be predicted and initiated by AI”

In the past, purchases were more transactional in nature but now it’s become a journey with more emphasis placed on relationship building, not just buying. Therefore, reinvention in shopper journey is a most universal business trend right now. The ideal shopping journey blends a brand into the entire customer’s experience by providing the value before, during and after the shopping and builds a strong relationship.

Technology is interlinked into almost every step, with the mobile application development keeping their customers bind to the company for forever. With the help of a plethora of available technologies, businesses are in the middle of a head-to-toe makeover.

Now, retailers are more focused on the strategic initiatives that will give them a competitive advantage in the future.  

Though physical stores will continue to play an important role in tracking customer behavior and shopping pattern, they need to evolve more to serve efficiently internet-connected shopper as well. If more experiential shopping experiences will be built around purchases, it will help businesses to know their customer and their requirement more closely.

“Artificial intelligence is expected to be the most impactful technological advancement for businesses in the next five years”.

Nearly 59% of 602 industry professionals surveyed by Euromonitor International in September 2018 ranked AI ahead of other buzz-worthy technologies. It also moved ahead of the IoT, which respondents in a February survey ranked as being the most impactful technology in the next five years.   

Top Digital Trends to Watch in 2019

1. Conversational commerce

Texting and voice chatting via a mobile application such as Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and WhatsApp enable people to discover and purchase goods and services easily. Although conversational commerce bots met with mixed success but with the help of AI mobile application development and related technologies improvements are on the way.


2. Immersive commerce

Today most of the technologies like AR, VR and 360-degree video allow retailers to project their products virtually into the physical environment to configure for fit or function. For example, people can view furniture and clothes in 3D then project the selected items into a physical space to check if they fit, or not.


3. Unified commerce

In the market, there are various mobile applications are available and customers use a number of channels throughout both the buying process. And they want a seamless experience across channels at various stages of the shopping journey. To make their journey seamless and appealing organizations should interact with customers in a way that they want by understanding their preferences.


4. Subscription

Currently, Subscription commerce is in trend, it enables organizations to build and manage a subscription business model. Now everything from socks to video games can be sold on a recurring and automatically renewing basis. Mobile app development companies benefit from repeatable, predictable revenue and customers like the cost savings, customization, and convenience.  
5. Personalization

Now technologies have become more mature as compared to the past because of which personalization throughout the customer journey has become possible. Now, there are more opportunities in hand to personalize the purchase such as landing page, search, product recommendation, banners, and offers. It has various paybacks including increased ROI and lower cart abandonment.


6. Visual configuration

Visual configuration is a combination of technologies such as 2D/3D images and video, floor space planning and computer-aided design, and can be used together with AR and VR. A visual product configurator presents an exact outline of configurable and customizable products, allowing customers to have a compelling experience interacting with the product.


7. IoT-Enabled Digital Commerce

“IoT” provides greater visibility across the fulfillment process. It also enables retailers to meet the demands of the modern consumer who is purchasing online. This furious technology also allows companies to track customer behavior and orders moment.

Today with the blessings of IoT, connected machines can make purchases on behalf of human customers directly by gleaning their demands based on rules and preferences. The main benefit of IoT commerce is to reduce customer effort and friction in purchases.


8. Enterprise marketplace.

Enterprise marketplace is a growing business model, as instead of selling own products, organizations are selling third-party products that are owned by someone else. Early adopters such as shopping malls, mobile app developers and manufacturers already have large numbers of customers and partners for examples Walmart, Fraport, and Sinopec.


9. API based commerce

To enhance the new customer experiences, organizations are partnered with API-based commerce to separate the frontend from the backend and quickly integrate new capabilities without affecting the existing architecture.

Today businesses are building commutable platforms instead of relying on a single commerce solution.  


10. Artificial intelligence

AI is a combination of multiple technologies including machine learning, natural language processing, deep learning and others that can deal with big data and can make conclusions without being specially programmed.  

Now organizations are availing AI for content personalization, price optimization, fraud detection, and virtual assistants for categorization and customer segmentation.

Summing Up

New digital trends will not only lead to tremendous financial rewards, but also spark new possibilities, and opportunities for seamless and secure sales. Online shopping has undergone several significant transformations with the help of mobile applications as purchases through mobile phones have increased globally.

In 2020, according to the market predictors if next-generation 5G networks achieve their promised super-fast internet speeds then it will start a wild ride for both businesses as well as customers.

To know more about digital trends, contact us at +1 (512) 333-1321 or visit Consagous Technologies.

Monday 26 November 2018

How to Make Money Persistently With Your App without “Creepy Ads”



Nowadays the amount of time spends by people with their smartphones continues to increase. According to comScore’s, “the average American adult spends 2 hours, 51 minutes on their smartphone every day, about 86 hours a month.”  

This is a reason mobile commerce has now become a major attraction of retailers. According to eMarketer “mobile’s share of U.S. online sales will surpass 50% by 2021. In other regions, the figure is already well above that”. Retailers are now investing in mobile app development to know every phase of their customer journey and to earn money consistently. But monetizing an app is not an easy task because most people don’t want to pay for downloading a new app for their smartphones. Therefore to earn money app developer allow ads to be placed within their mobile applications to generating revenue, it seems good but it often backfires when the propagation of ads disrupts the user and make them to delete the app altogether.

It also not makes sense to only rely on advertisements for earning money if your app is doing good in the market: that isn’t possible without a big marketing budget to start with. Therefore for an app, ads are not always an effective method of generating predictable revenue.

Best way to make money persistently

For developers, the efficient way to make money is to offer “freemium” apps; an app itself is free to download. These kinds of apps allow users to make additional transactions and involve subscriptions charges or even permit users to buy physical goods within their digital app. According to a study, only 5.2 percent of smartphone users make in-app purchases, but those users can spend twenty times as much as other users on a monthly basis.

How to make money with your app without ads

There are various ways through which you can monetize your app without ads, let’s discuss a few of them:

·         Use “freemium” app model
·         Develop a paid version of your application
·         Have users subscribe to access your services
·         Start app referral program  

Let’s have look at above-mentioned ways more specifically:

1. Use “freemium” app model

Recently, the freemium app model has become a leading strategy for mobile app monetization as more than 61% of mobile app development companies suggesting it. This app model allows app users to “Try before Buy”, means allow them to download the app for free and pay later for additional features. It can be for one-time use, monthly use or for yearly use.

2. Develop a paid version of your app

For a paid model of an app, users have to pay the full amount to download an app but most of the users are unwilling to pay for an app, therefore, it’s not the best way to earn money. The paid model of an app only work best when:

·         The app belongs to a renowned company
·         There is no free alternative

Other than this, mobile app developers who want to monetize their app using a paid model will mostly create two separate versions of their app; a premium version and a free “lite” version that often has advertisements.

3. Users subscription to access services

This is the best model for businesses that offer oft-used services such as news, music, videos, books etc. This service unlocks the content and other features for users. It can be automatically renewing just like Netflix. In this app you have to pay monthly charges and amount will deduct from your bank account automatically.

4. Start app referral program  

Currently, an app referral program is gaining a huge attraction of users, recently many apps have applied this strategy and have increased their user base. In this program app owners may include a section that directs users to other apps. By directing users to other productivity app is compensated for referring new customers to related apps. Both Apple and Amazon are using this technique to offer affiliate programs for mobile app developers. Amazon permits Android developers to sell its merchandise through their app and share the profit, similarly
Apple’s Affiliate program allows iOS developers to earn money by connecting Apple Music and iTunes content in their app.   

Summing Up

No matter what kind of mobile app you have created, marketing plan to successfully monetize your app should be given just as much consideration as creating a user-friendly platform.
If you have created convenient and repeatable in-app transactions, then the chances of a better app position will automatically increase and you can retain your users and generate lasting revenue.   

To know more about mobile app marketing, contact us at +1 (512) 333-1321 or visit Consagous Technologies.

Thursday 22 November 2018

TRANSFORM THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE WITH MOBILE APP PERSONALIZATION



Ten years ago, Amazon introduced product personalization, now, as huge amounts of data are easily available to marketers and businesses, they are actively participating in changing the customer experience using mobile app personalization on a granular scale.

Technologies are the main reason behind personalization at scale for companies of all sizes and once they achieved their predefined goal, they developed a fruitful relationship with customers and the ability to offer a frictionless customer experience.

For years now, we’ve been hearing about the benefits of personalized mobile application development and now it already strikes the floor to bombarded with marketing and advertising to offer a tailored experience to customer to enhance online brand visibility.

No doubt mobile application solutions are the most leading medium for businesses to attain great heights, however, without personalizing experience mobile app users move away too fast. Therefore, instead of going with a static experience this won’t live up to the user’s expectations, go with actual needs of users and identify the ways to fulfill that without any compromise.  

Firstly let’s discuss what exactly mobile app personalization is?

What is Mobile App Personalization?

The mobile app personalization is the process to build a customized mobile application that can meet the customer requirement instead of a broad, one-size-fits-all experience for all the users.

In mobile app personalization, all the features are based on customer preference for their particular needs that can generate attention without losing the grip. According to research, there are more than 1.5 million apps are on the play store and around 66% of apps deleted immediately by users due to unfriendly features and the ones who don’t delete, use them rarely.

Thus, owning a personalized mobile application will be a tough competition for your competitors. So ask your mobile app developers to tighten up their belts to make the apps user-friendly, by keeping user’s expectations in mind.

Benefits Of Mobile App Personalization

Following are the benefits of Mobile App Personalization:

Builds loyalty – 


When users feel they are important, they love to visit again at the same shop and it reflects on your ROI that you are not just invested in them but also know them personally. Mobile app personalization allows vendors to know the purchase pattern of their customers more closely by collecting the data from all channels to create a personalized profile.

In this way, they can send offers and notification directly to the user app and can know whether they interested in the offers or not.

Enhances Engagement –


We live in a world, where everybody wants instant gratification, and customers’ expectations have imitated that. A smooth customer experience is only possible through real-time engagement that spans touch points and multistage journeys.

There are countless ways through which mobile app development companies can personalized customer journey only they need to embrace new technologies like machine learning, IoT, AI etc.  to keep up with the impregnation of touch points.

Retains Users-


If your mobile app works on a subscription basis, then it is must to retain app users. Retaining does not simply mean keeping the users engaged with your content, images or with attractive features, it is also about expelling the obstacles in the renewal procedure. When mobile applications are personalized on the basis of user’s behavior patterns and subscription status, it will help you in nibbling users who are more certain to drop off.

That’s the reason; mobile app developers and designers are trying to modify the apps to attract user-traffic and to make them likable to users, so they can enjoy all the app features easily.

Drives More Purchases-


For every online business, it is very disappointing when users leave their shopping cart mid-way without making a payment and this is a most common conversion problem seen in mCommerce mobile apps. However, as a marketer, you can’t send a push notification to all users to encourage them to check out, as not all of them will be having items in their cart. So, by using data based on user-behavior, you can narrow down the segment of users which you want to target and can use demographic data to determine what kind of product and content they like the most.  

Summing Up

According to a recent survey, nearly half of all shoppers made impulse buys from personalized recommendations and nearly three-quarters show disappointment when they do not experience some type of personalization. Approx. 44% of buyers will become repeat buyers if they have a personalized shopping experience.

Above mentioned figures clearly show that successful custom mobile app development is solving real challenges smoothly and become the reason of making happy, long-term customers.  

So, have you got an idea for the next great app? Let us know about it and we will be happy to help you. Contact us today or visit Consagous Technologies.

Monday 19 November 2018

How to Utilize Artificial Intelligence for the Growth of Businesses



These days Artificial Intelligence is getting huge hype and attention, everywhere you can find countless articles on AI-related topics. It has been at the front of commercial innovation ever since the morn of the Digital Revolution. AI has lightened the efficiency of electronic devices with different kinds of software and digital innovations to create a digital environment that is geared toward modifying the way we do business.

According to Gartner, “By 2018, world’s more than half of the large organizations would be exploiting the use of Artificial Intelligence in terms of analytics and proprietary algorithms”. That clearly shows the demand for Artificial Intelligence is increasing day by day. On the basis of Gartner study, by 2020 there will be over 26 billion connected devices and 30% of web browsing sessions will be done without a screen. This increasing demand for this technology means more and more businesses will begin to integrate it into their mobile app development.

Insights

Now, Artificial intelligence (AI) has also entered in the office premises. According to Accenture, nearly 90% of U.S. workers are optimistic about the changes that technology will bring in the next five years. McKinsey estimated that AI techniques could potentially create between $3.5 trillion and $5.8 trillion in value annually across nine business functions in 19 industries. As AI continues to get smarter and more capable because of this employee’s productivity is poised for a sizable shift with the new tools and technology available to them.

With the right techniques, businesses can quickly work on latest trends, patterns, clusters, and eccentricity in customer behavior, supply chains, internal operations, and market dynamics. But as the methodologies of big data become more widely accepted, algorithms of AI technology become less of a competitive differentiator.

In fact, the availability of machine learning and natural language processing via the cloud is likely to accelerate the commodification of AI in the near future, essentially making it table stakes.

How Startups Fueling the AI Revolution

There are many companies spearheading the shift to Artificial Intelligence. Companies like H2O.ai are utilizing AI by creating an open-source machine learning platform that is accessible to everyone. Almost all the Fortune 500 firms use AI to take a powerful decision by combining data science with behavioral science respectively.

In the market, there are various AI integrated platforms like DataRobot, CrowdAI and others are available which is designed for broad adoption and usability across many skill levels in an organization. This level of mutation in AI has created a major change by triggering massive acceleration for both business and human innovation.  

Why Businesses Are Adopting AI To Drive Growth?

While AI is increasingly involving in consumer lives, businesses are still in the early phase of launching AI in their business model. According to the Gartner, the market potential is huge; nearly $3.9 trillion in AI-derived business value will be created by 2022.

Today most of the industries are seeing positive outcomes from the Artificial Intelligence mobile app development. With the help of AI integrated mobile applications, car manufacturing company State Farm, enable customers to detect distracted drivers using their mobile app in order to track driving patterns for safe driving habits. This habit plays an important role in customizing insurance and providing customer offers.

Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Businesses

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now everywhere, it’s been a logical headway. In the era of big data and cloud AI has taken a significant paradigm shift that has enabled AI to become practical and accessible to both consumers and businesses. As the volume of data is increasing day by day, the cloud provides access to scalable, parallel data processing at low cost by allowing cloud vendors to create machine learning algorithms and deploy an artificial intelligence as a service model. No doubt, AI is becoming a utility function that’s the reason you can find it in every industry.

1. Financial Industry

The financial industry is a data-intensive industry; it takes time and fulls proven research before adopting any new trend as there is no scope for any blunder. In this industry, AI has made its place smoothly and become an integral part of the financial industry for offering safety, employment, inclusion, and the financial services value chain.

2. Agriculture Industry

The agriculture sector is continuously evolving with the help of AI and its automating processes is extremely beneficial for the society, lowering costs and help farmers to reap the fruits of their labor all year round.  Agrobot is an autonomous robotic harvester that is revolutionizing the agriculture world. It works with the world’s leading farmers to automate berry harvesting through the potential of AI.

3. Healthcare Industry

In healthcare, errors can be costly as well as horrid. With AI integrated medical equipment, the chance of error reduces to a sizable extent and its recognition has also become easy. From decisions making to strong security, AI is proven to be a better assistant in terms of help needed in the healthcare industry. Artificial intelligence is not developed for replacing doctors and nurses but it definitely takes away a lot of burden off their shoulders.

4. Logistics Industry

Supply chain management needs unbending focus and labor in all its operations. With the help of AI, companies are smoothly managing their supply chain by tracking the whole process at their fingertips. As a result, now complete supply chain process from production to delivery has become automated with the overall improvement in efficiency and speed.  

Conclusion

AI promises hefty transformation and an exciting advancement in the industries that can drive broad-spectrum economic prosperity.

Worldwide popular AI integrated devices and grooming in mobile app development is a proof that AI is now everywhere and become a part of our lives and we cannot deny for the fruitful results of it. We, humans, are sharp in our own right, and if automated decision-making is something we can do, we can also make the tools to control it.   

Consagous specialize in business-centric mobile app development solutions. Please contact us at +1 (512) 333-1321 or email us at projects@consagous.com or get a free quote HERE