Going the Distance: Four Ways to Build a Better Customer Loyalty Program for Your Brand

It’s easy enough for a customer to join your loyalty program, especially when you’re offering an incentive such as discounts. All your customer has to do is give out some basic information, and voila! They’re in the fold, a brand new loyalty member with your company. From there, it’s happily ever after. You offer the perks; they stand solidly by you, bringing you their continued business. Simple. Or is it? In reality, just how many of those customers are act ively participating in your loyalty program? Do you know? Sure, loyalty program memberships are on the rise according to market research company eMarketer, having jumped 25 percent in the space of just two years. However, that figure may be a bit misleading. The truth is that, while loyalty program sign-ups may be more numerous, active participation in such programs is actually in decline. At the time of the study, the average US household had memberships in 29 loyalty programs; yet consumers were only active in 12 of those. That’s just 41 percent. And even that meager figure represents a drop of 2 percentage points per year over each of the preceding four years, according to a study by loyalty-marketing research company COLLOQUY.

When discounts just aren’t enough

So what’s a brand to do? How can you make your loyalty program worth your customer’s while—as well as your own? After all, gaining a new loyalty member doesn’t mean much if your customer isn’t actively participating in your program. Consider this: Does your customer loyalty program offer members anything different from what your competitors are offering? Chances are your program includes discounts. That’s a given. And what customer doesn’t appreciate a good discount? But when every other company out there is providing this staple benefit in comparable amounts, it becomes less and less likely that customers will remain loyal to any one particular brand. Frankly, it’s all too easy for customers to get lost in a sea of loyalty member discounts. They’re everywhere. In fact, just under half of internet users perceive that all rewards programs are alike, according to a 2015 eMarketer survey. The key to success, then, is to differentiate your business from the crowd. If you can offer your customers something unique and valuable beyond the usual discount, chances are they’ll be more likely to stick with your brand. Here’s some inspiration from companies who get it.

Virgin: Reward more purchases with more benefits.

That’s not to say you need to get rid of discounts entirely. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Customers still love a good discount. The goal is to be creative in terms of the loyalty perks you offer. Take the Virgin Atlantic Flying Club, for example. As part of its loyalty program, the airline allows members to earn miles and tier points. Members are inducted at the Club Red tier, from which they can move up to Club Silver and then Club Gold. Here, it’s not just a discount. It’s status. And people respond to feeling important, elite. Still, even where the rewards themselves are concerned, Virgin is motivating loyalty customers with some pretty attractive offers. At the Club Red tier, members earn flight miles and receive discounts on rental cars, airport parking, hotels and holiday flights. But as members rise in tiers, they get even more. At the Club Silver tier, members earn 50 percent more points on flights, access to expedited check-in, and priority standby seating. And once they reach the top, Club Gold members receive double miles, priority boarding and access to exclusive clubhouses where they can get a drink or a massage before their flight. Now that’s some serious incentive to keep coming back for more. Discounts are still part of the equation – but they are designed with innovation and personal value in mind, elevating them to more than just savings.

Amazon Prime: Pay upfront and become a VIP.

What if your customers only had to pay a one-time upfront fee to get a year’s worth of substantial benefits? It may not sound like the smartest business idea at first glance. But take a closer look. Amazon Prime users pay a nominal $99 a year to gain free, two-day shipping on millions of products with no minimum purchase. And that’s just one benefit of going Prime. It’s true that Amazon loses $1-2 billion a year on Prime. This comes as no surprise given the incredible value the program offers. But get this: Amazon makes up for its losses in markedly higher transaction frequency. Specifically, Prime members spend an average of $1,500 a year on Amazon.com, compared with $625 spent by non-Prime users, a ccording to a 2015 report from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

Patagonia: Cater to customer values.

Sometimes, the draw for consumers isn’t saving money or getting a great deal. The eco-friendly outdoor clothing company Patagonia figured this out back in 2011, when it partnered with eBay to launch its Common Threads Initiative: a program that allows customers to resell their used Patagonia clothing via the company’s website. Why is this program important to customers? And how does it benefit Patagonia? The company’s brand embraces environmental and social responsibility, so it was only fitting that they create a platform for essentially recycling old clothing rather than merely throwing it away. The Common Threads Initiative helps Patagonia build a memorable brand and fierce loyalty by offering its customers a cause that aligns with deep personal values. OK, so their customers get to make a little money, too. Everybody wins.

American Airlines: Gamify your loyalty program.

If you’re going to offer your customers a loyalty program, why not make it f un? After all, engagement is key to building a strong relationship with your customer. And what better way to achieve that goal than making a game of it. American Airlines had this very thing in mind when it created its AAdvantage Passport Challenge following its merger with USAirways. The goal: find a new way to engage customers as big changes were underway. Using a custom Facebook application, American Airlines created a virtual passport to increase brand awareness while offering members a chance to earn bonus points. Customers earned these rewards through a variety of game-like activities, from answering trivia questions to tracking travel through a personalized dashboard. In the end, participants earned more than 70 percent more stamps than expected – and the airline saw a ROI of more than 500 percent. The takeaway: people like games.

Stand out from the crowd.

Your approach to your customer loyalty program should align with your overall marketing approach. Effective branding is about standing out, not blending it. Being memorable is key. To this end, keep in mind that loyalty programs are no longer a novelty. That means that yesterday’s strategies won’t work moving forward, so look for ways to rise above the noise, setting yourself apart from the cloying drone of countless other cookie-cutter programs.

---

Small Changes, Big Impact: 5 Things You Can (and Should!) Do Today to Boost Your Website’s Performance

Every spring it happens like clockwork: the temperatures get warmer, the days get longer and everything in nature becomes more vibrant and colorful. Along with these changes in the great outdoors comes the irresistible urge to clean house and embrace a fresh start. Why not keep that motivational momentum going and apply it to your business – and, more specifically, to your website – as well? After all, there’s no time like the present to sweep away the old and outdated and bring in fresh new ideas and technologies. But you don’t necessarily need to dive head-first into a full redesign and all of the time and expense that entails to reap measurable results. Instead, here are five small steps you can – and should! – take today to ensure that your site is up-to-date, relevant and doing all it can to bring you new customers and grow the community around your brand:

1. Reposition your contact form.

For most website owners – especially those in service-based businesses such as law, accounting, consulting, real estate, etc. – the key “win” for their site is when it motivates a visitor to request more information or schedule a meeting. Contact forms are a ubiquitous website staple intended to provide a convenient – and highly measurable – avenue to initiate communication between an interested prospect and a company. However, perhaps because they are so commonplace, all too often these forms are given little strategic thought, resulting in a cookie-cutter name/email address/phone number format that yields more bogus spam submissions than legitimate new business opportunities. However, there is one simple change you can make that has been shown to get better results: reposition your standard “Contact us” form as an “Ask our experts” feature. By doing so, you shift the focus of the form to providing your visitors with an opportunity to submit a question that is specific to their needs and concerns. Rather than feeling like they are opening themselves up to an endless barrage of solicitation calls and emails, your visitors will sense that they are initiating a dialogue with an expert who will help them solve their particular problem. Make sure to respond to all inquiries within 24 hours, provide helpful advice that is free of charge and tailored to your prospect’s situation, and leave the door open to continue the conversation in a future meeting or phone call. By doing so, you will establish an important foundation of trust and confidence with your potential new client that will make them more inclined to engage your professional services. I have personally seen the submission rates on these types of forms increase dramatically. On one site where this small change was implemented, form submissions jumped from one or two per week to one or two per day – all legitimate business opportunities that were sparked simply by repositioning the focus of the form.

2. Productize your offering.

Another challenge that professional services organizations face in creating a website that works as an effective customer conversion engine is that they do not sell a specific product but rather a suite of services that can be customized to each client’s specific needs. This makes it terribly hard to market to visitors who come to their site and simply want to know “What exactly does this company sell, and how much does it cost?”. Because there are so many variables to the company’s offerings, there is not a quick and easy answer to these questions. If this challenge sounds familiar to you, one approach you can try is to “productize” what you have to offer. Create a bundle of services with a fixed price, and market that package on your site in a simple, straightforward manner that makes your offering easy to understand and helps visitors feel like doing business with your company is as simple as buying a product off the shelf at a store. This is exactly what my company did with some of the technology consulting services that we offer. Instead of only listing the array of services we provide, we also created a product that representing a very specific offering. This made it so much easier to answer the “What do you sell?” question, and it gave us something tangible to promote in our marketing campaigns. In reality, this approach in no way limited the range of services we are able to offer our clients; rather, it merely served as a vehicle to open doors to new opportunities and made it easier to start conversations with new customers for whom we could ultimately provide a custom-tailored solution. Examine the services that you offer, and work with your marketing team to create an appealing package that you can market – understanding all the while that this “product” is really just a means for you to connect with customers and begin the sales process with something tangible that they can easily understand.

3. Lose your home page carousel.

One simple change that I have seen many websites make in the past year or so is to remove animated image carousels from their home pages. These carousels have long been a popular fixture of website design, but the reality is that they can sometimes do more harm than good. Home page carousels typically feature giant, screen-spanning images which carry with them heavy download requirements both for the images and for the scripts that power the animation sequences, thereby creating a potential stumbling block in performance for users on mobile devices or with slower connections. Additionally, studies have shown that click-through rates on animated carousels are extremely low, and they drop significantly from the first slide to the subsequent ones. This is why many companies are replacing rotating carousels with a singular static message instead. This one change can greatly reduce a page’s download size (when my company did this on our home page, its file size decreased by 75 percent) while having little to no effect on actual user engagement or click-through. In fact, because the page now loads more quickly, many sites actually see an uptick in user engagement because fewer people are abandoning a site due to poor performance. Do you have a carousel on your website? If so, do you know whether or not it is working well for you? Your marketing team may be able to do some A/B testing between a version of your site with this animation feature and one without it to see which performs better. Since carousels do work well for some sites (like news organizations or sites with lots of frequently updated content), having this data can help you determine whether or not it’s time to ditch the carousel.

4. Update your image(s).

Stock photography is something of a necessary evil of website design, as more often than not, companies don’t have the budget to execute a full-fledged custom professional photo shoot. However, not all stock images are created equal. Stock photos that are overused or that look so obviously staged that they scream of their “stockiness” can cheapen a site’s design and leave visitors with a negative overall impression of the site. Replacing those images can make a big difference in a site’s visual appeal. If your site’s imagery is stale, you can make some simple image swaps to freshen it up. If you are going to change out old stock images for new stock images, make sure to seek out photos that feel fresh and that are not terribly overused (most stock photo sites will tell you how many times an image has been downloaded). An even better option is to try to add some unique imagery to your site. This could be photographs that you hire a professional to take or – in keeping with one of this year’s hottest trends – custom illustrations that you commission from an artist. If your budget is tight, incorporating even just one or two such one-of-a-kind images in key spots on your site can really boost its visual impact. For instance, if you lose that aforementioned carousel on the home page and replace it with one truly compelling static image and message, it can make a really powerful first impression on your visitors.

5. Publish less.

Most experts agree that publishing original, value-add content on your site on a regular basis is key to optimizing its success – both from a sales and marketing standpoint and as an advantage in the never-ending battle of SEO. While I agree with this approach in principal, for many companies, the drive to publish regularly has resulted in putting out mediocre content simply to meet an inflexible standard of frequency. This is often an entirely counterproductive effort, as content that lacks in quality, original thought or value for the reader reflects poorly on the organization and its perceived level of expertise. Publishing original content to your site on a regular basis is still a best practice, but that content must offer value for it to succeed. Let’s say a visitor comes to your site and is impressed to find that you publish new articles weekly or monthly; however, once they click through the headline to see what they can glean from your writing, if what they find is mediocre at best, what motivation do they have to return to your site again in the future, let alone entrust you with their hard-earned dollars? If, on the other hand, you publish new content less frequently, but everything you produce is of the highest quality, then that same visitor will know that the time they spend on your site will always be worth their while, and they will look forward to the next time you post something new. Re-examine your current content marketing strategy, and ask yourself whether you are focused on quality or frequency. If it’s the latter, commit instead to writing less but to improving the quality of what you offer on your site. While this change may not have an immediate impact, it will absolutely yield long-term results that your visitors will appreciate and respond positively to.

In closing

Eventually, your website will need a redesign, but in the meantime you can make small, strategic, surgical changes that will pay immediate dividends in your site’s success. This approach of implementing gradual but regular modifications will also benefit you when it does come time for that full redesign. By making intelligent improvements over time, you will ultimately be closer to your end goal, leaving less to accomplish with the redesign and thereby paving the way for a smoother and less costly project.

---

Check Your Ego at the Door: Embracing User-Centered Website Design

The creation of a new website is a process filled with important decisions. As the owner, CEO, or decision maker at the organization for which the new site is being designed and developed, you will be asked for your feedback or approval a number of times along the way – but what are you using as the basis for that feedback? Too often decisions are made during a website’s creation that are based on the preferences of the site’s “owners” and not on the needs of the people who will actually use the website. This is the wrong way to go about making decisions for a project, because the reality is that your website should not be designed for you, it should be designed for your audience. In this article, we will take a look at how you can shape the decisions you make on a website’s creation, or its subsequent upkeep, to help you meet the needs of your website’s most important audience - the clients and customers that will bring you business and ultimately make your site a success.

Making design decisions

No one wants to have a website they don’t like the look of, but the fact of the matter is that design decisions are not made for aesthetic reasons only. Visual choices for a project should be made by taking the needs of your audience, and your business’s goals for the website, into account. Many people assume that their website should be a reflection of their personal tastes or sense of style. That is not the case. It’s sometimes hard to hear, but your preferences of what looks good and what doesn’t should be secondary to what is appropriate for your site’s users. You certainly want something that you are proud of, but when reviewing design options, but sure to consistently ask yourself, “what would my audience think?” Or better yet, ask some of your actual users for their feedback and use that data in your decision making process. In the end, the goal is to come up with a design that you love and which properly represents your company, but will also meet the needs of your audience. When in doubt, however, defer to your users’ needs and remember that old saying – “the customer is always right.”

Give users what they want

While a great design is certainly important, the reality is that your customers are not coming to your website to be “wowed” by its visual design - they are coming to your site for its content. If you want your site to succeed, it has to offer the content your audience is looking for and make it easy for them to find it. When considering what content should be presented on the website, and also where it should be presented, you should once again ask yourself what is right for your audience. You may be very proud of the awards your company has won or feel that the “Message from the President” is insightful, but be truthful - is that what your site visitors are coming to find? If not, then does it make sense to present that content on your homepage or someplace else with similar prominence? Oftentimes website content is prioritized based on company egos or a sense of what they want to see, rather than what users are looking for. We are proud of our accomplishments, so we want them front and center for all to see. Our President runs the company, so his words must be important, right? While these may both be true, if your site visitors are not looking for this content, and yet you place them in a spot of prominence instead of content that your audience actually wants, then you are putting your needs or opinions ahead of theirs. Leave the ego aside when making content decisions for the website. Those awards announcements and presidential messages can certainly have a place on the site, just make sure it’s an appropriate place that doesn’t interfere with what your users come to the website to see.

I want my website to do something cool!

Website owners love pizzazz. We see another site that does something “cool” and we want something similar on our own site. Unfortunately, we rarely ever stop to consider whether that awesome animation or cool feature is actually effective or if it helps meet the goals of your site. When considering adding something you think is “awesome”, you should once again (I imagine you are starting to see a pattern here) ask yourself how that addition will help meet your business’s goals or your users’ needs. Does it help at all, or is it just something cool to add? Almost always, it is the later – nothing more than some “wow factor.” That alone would not be a bad thing, but too often, the “wow” that is added actually makes it harder for our users to do what they came to the website for in the first place. Take animated introductions or “welcome” videos on websites, features that are one of the more popular requests made to add some wow to a site. Would you ever start a business meeting with a song and dance number, trying to entertain your audience before the meeting begins? Probably not – yet that is exactly what you are doing when to you add that animated blast of pizzazz to your website. It is all show and no substance and your site visitors will see right through it – that is if they stick around long enough to even see it. Oftentimes, overblown effects such as unnecessary animation, videos, or music files that play when the site is loaded do the opposite of “wowing” your audience. Instead, those effects often drive them away. If you surprise site visitors with an audio track or a video that autoplays on page load, a likely response is to quickly click the ‘BACK’ button – taking the traffic you worked hard to get away from your website and your business. Your customers, and potential customers, come to your site for a reason. Anything that gets in the way of what they are looking to accomplish lowers the chance that they will continue deeper into your site to complete their task. When adding wow factor to make your site more memorable, always be sure that whatever you add is not done at the expense of your site’s usability. Furthermore, ask yourself if you really even need it, because a site that welcomes visitors and easily allows them to find the information they need to complete the task they came to complete is certainly doing “something cool” – it is meeting your users’ need and driving business results for you. Let’s take a minute to look at a few examples of wow factor added in appropriate, and inappropriate, ways so we can compare the two.

Video – the right way vs. the wrong way

We’ve already mentioned adding “welcome” videos to a website. Often, this video takes the form of a commercial or advertisement that a company ran on television. They receive a web- ready copy of the spot and, wanting to make the investment they made in that video stretch as far as possible, they decide to add it to the website. But for what purpose? If the goal of the initial commercial was to introduce viewers to your company and get them to the website, then why put it on the website to show users who are already there? The website for cosmetic dentist Gary D. Light & Associates starts with a video that pops up on the site and autoplays, distracting users from the rest of the site’s information. Even worse, if you’re in Internet Explorer – which many of your users will be, the video opens again on every single page you visit, even though you may have already closed it two or three times. That is a recipe for annoying your audience. The website for car dealership Tasca also begins with a video that autoplays, showing one of the company’s commercials. Visit the site for the first time and the video overtakes the screen with a commercial. It’s a bit jarring if you are not expecting it the video and audio to begin blaring out of your speakers. Overall, this is a quality website with lots of useful features for someone shopping for a vehicle. Does that opening video help in that search or does it drive you away when it pops up unexpectedly? A better way to present video is what you will see at the United Way of Rhode Island. Their annual “campaign video” is one of the feature pieces of content for the website, and it is presented directly on the homepage in the large billboard area. Rather than autoplay the video, however, a site visitor has to request to see it by clicking the large red “Watch” button. In this way, the video is made readily available to those who want to see it, without interrupting the user experience of those who do not.

The three questions

When new visitors come to your website, they will ask themselves a few questions, namely:

1. Who is this company?
2. What do they do?
3. What do I do next?

Not only do users ask these questions, they do it quickly, in as little as 4-8 seconds once they visit the page. To successfully meet your users’ needs, you need to make sure the content you place in front of them helps answer these questions and directs their experience. The website for Bradford Soapworks is a nice looking site with quality information throughout, but the homepage opens with a letter from the company chairman. There is no mention of what the company actually does, no images of their products and no clear calls-to-action to answer the question of “what do I do next?” That message from the Chairman, however important to the company, does not seem to be in line with the needs of site visitors. In contrast, the website for The Savannah Soap Company does a great job of answering these 3 basic questions and the eye-catching visuals, presented in the site’s large billboard area, also include calls-to-action to “start learning” or to “learn more”, giving visitors a clear direction as to what to do next. When presenting content on your website, consider the answers to the 3 visitor questions outlined above and consistently ask yourself whether the placement of the content you are using is appropriate to meet your visitors’ needs and answer those questions.

Talk to your audience

If you truly want a site that will be a success, continually ask yourself what your customers would want as you make decisions on the site – both during initial design and development phases and again later on during the site’s maintenance. Or, as I mentioned earlier, take it a step further and don’t only ask yourself what your users would want – actually ask them! Whenever appropriate, ask real customers how you are doing on your website. Did the decisions you made along the way help them in the ways you intended? What else could you do to make their experience better? You will be amazed at the quality feedback you can get simply by asking a few questions. Now, this doesn’t mean you should simply put a “tell us how we are doing” form on your site and call it a day. The most likely submissions you will get through those forms are spam-bots or angry visitors who are more likely to fill out such a form when they are upset. While you certainly want to know if someone is upset with the site, this feedback form alone will give you a very skewed picture of how you are doing. Soliciting feedback from your site means truly interacting with your audience. Pick up the phone and call some customers to ask them your questions – or work with a firm that specializes in user testing and see how the site holds up in those tests. However you gather the data, the best way to meet your users’ needs is to learn what those needs are and the best way to learn what they are is to speak to your audience.

Love your website

A website is a reflection of our business, so it makes sense that we want it to also be a reflection of us – our likes and preferences. We want our website to be “ours” - but in the end, while the website itself may be yours, the experience it creates belongs to your audience. If you truly want to make the site a success, start by making sure that the experience it creates - from the design visuals, to the content presented, to the wow factor you decide to (or not to) add, is a wonderful experience for your users. Meet their needs and they will make your site a success. I don’t know about you, but to me, a site that does that is about as “cool” as it gets.

---

Should There Be an App for That?

Getting into your customers’ pockets is no easy task.

With the tablet wars heating up and smartphone sales skyrocketing, at some point, the thought is bound to cross your mind: Is it time to create an app? The lure of being with your customers everywhere they go and being readily accessible with the tap of a finger is certainly hard to resist. And with over 350,000 iOS apps in Apple's App Store and over 200,0000 apps in Google's Android Market, it’s clear that many companies have eagerly climbed aboard the app development bandwagon. Thanks to a proliferation of DIY app templates, the barriers to entry in the app marketplace are not as steep as they once were. But you can't simply judge the merits of creating an app as you would would any other marketing tactic. Instead, you should look at your potential app as a product in and of itself. You wouldn't put time and money into developing a product without a reasonable amount of confidence that a market exists for it. Same goes for an app. You can build it. You can get it into the app store. But if it's not something people want, your efforts will be for naught.

Your app must meet these eight basic criteria, or else it's not worth the investment:

1. It must be designed around business growth objectives.

To justify the necessary investment, your app must be aimed at promoting the growth of your business, whether it does so by making it easier for your customers to buy from you or keeping your brand at the forefront of their awareness. Sure, plenty of big names have created vanity apps that don’t serve a business growth function, but that’s not a luxury the average company can afford. For example, Mercedes offers an iPad game called SLS AMG HD that allows users to put their driving skills to the test through a series of tunnel challenges. Sure, it’s a slick-looking gimmick. But is it actually doing anything to improve the company’s bottom line? Does anyone who is inclined to buy a Mercedes really need an iPad racing game to tip them over the edge? An app in and of itself is not a marketing campaign. If your goal is to boost the visibility of your brand, creating an app is a very indirect and costly means to reach your desired end. Remember that you'll be competing with hundreds of thousands of other apps to be discovered by smartphone users. Your chances of creating something so new, so different and so out-of-the box that it will go viral and jump to the top of the download charts are slim to none. What's more, even the number of downloads your app gets is no guarantee of ongoing exposure to your customers. According to a recent study, as many as twenty-six percent of apps are opened only once after download. With odds like that, if your sole purpose is elevating the visibility of your brand, there are no shortage of other tactics – from SEO to pay-per-click advertising to social media-based PR campaigns – that will likely deliver a better ROI.

2. Its utility must be customer-driven.

No matter what, your app development process shouldn't be an exercise in ego-stroking. Forget what you think is cool or cutting-edge and look at your app through your customers' eyes. For your app to be successful, it needs to offer something people want, whether that's in the form of utility, convenience, content or all of the above. For the most part, your customers use their mobile devices for one of two purposes: productivity or entertainment. If you want to create an app that entertains, be prepared to bring the big guns because you're competing in a space with the heavy-hitters, from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to a slew of professional game developers. The productivity space is easier to enter, but conquering it is still no easy feat. A useful productivity-oriented app must make it easy for your customers to accomplish the types of tasks they commonly perform while on-the-go. If your app is content-driven, it needs to be encyclopedia-worthy to warrant a spot on the reference shelf of your customer’s mobile device. It must be comprehensive and updated frequently, and its interface must be ultra-searchable and scannable. Whole Foods offers a great content-based app. Users can search its extensive library of recipes by keyword, input ingredients they have on-hand to get suggestions and create shopping lists on-the-fly. Search results are even classified by dietary preference, such as gluten-free or low-fat. This type of utility aligns squarely with Whole Foods’ target market. Undoubtedly, their app is the go-to resource for many health-conscious, time-strapped working parents who leave the office with no idea of what they’re going to make for dinner when they get home.

3. It must offer an optimal balance of usefulness and simplicity.

Your app should not attempt to be all things to all potential users, or it will be doomed to failure. Likewise, it also shouldn't simply be a mirror of your website's features. If that's your plan, you'll be better served by optimizing your existing site for mobile browsers. Generally speaking, the more features you try to cram into an app, the less intuitive it becomes to use. And as hard as it may be to imagine, app users are even less patient and more fickle than Web surfers. If your app is difficult to figure out or frustrating to use, they'll wipe you from their phone with nary a second thought. Therefore, it’s critical that your app’s purpose is clearly defined and that its functionality is streamlined. The FedEx Mobile for iPhone app is a perfect example of this balance of utility and simplicity. FedEx is a massive global corporation that offers a broad array of services to a highly diverse customer base. Its app, however, is limited to four main functions: obtaining a quote, creating a shipping label, tracking a package and finding a location – exactly the type of time-sensitive features you need at the ready when you’re trying to get that all-important document out in tonight’s shipment or awaiting an important delivery.

4. It must be mobility-oriented.

There are some tasks people like to do on their phones and some they do not. Any task that involves too many steps and is not urgent in nature is not going to be something your customers would choose to do on their phone rather than just waiting until they are in front of their computer screen again.

5. It must take advantage of the mobile device’s unique features.

Mobile devices have a number of built-in features that even many laptops don’t necessarily have, such as GPS, the ability to deliver push notifications, a camera and video camera. If you don’t plan to tie the utility of your app to any of these functions, it’s hard to justify creating a dedicated mobile app rather than just enhancing your current site to provide an optimal experience for mobile users. Amazon's Price Check is a great example of an app that takes advantage of the phone's camera function to allow users to scan barcodes and compare prices on-the-go. GPS is a little more tricky to use wisely. A lot of branded apps – from Gap's StyleMixer to USPS Mobile – use GPS to allow users to find their closest brick-and-mortar location. As an auxiliary feature it's a nice convenience for users who are already plugged into the app, but this type of function is not enough to justify the existence of an app in and of itself, as there are plenty of other mapping and searching apps that can deliver the same information with broader utility. Also, you should weigh the pros and cons of integrating push notifications carefully. If you can provide legitimate value to your customers with timely alerts, that's fine. But if you cross the line into intrusiveness, you're just asking to get deleted.

6. It must be applicable to a broad customer base.

The Chipotle Mobile Ordering app lets users place a completely customized order and pay directly from their phone in advance of arriving at the store. For a national chain with thousands of time-starved customers who have little patience for waiting in line, the app represents the perfect marriage of utility and marketing savvy. But apps like this require a certain scale to make sense. If you're a mom-and-pop bakery, you could theoretically develop an app that would let your customers design their own cupcakes and place their order right from their phone. While it would surely be a fun gimmick, it doesn't fulfill a broad-based need, and the app's ability to generate additional revenue would probably never offset the cost to create and maintain it.

7. It must be well-designed and thoroughly tested before launch.

The app marketplace is no place for experimentation. You have to get it right out of the gate. If you go live prematurely with an app that's underdeveloped, lacking utility or plagued with bugs, your bad reviews will haunt you for a long time. What's more, disenchanted users won't be likely to give you another shot even if you come out with something better later.

8. It must continue to evolve.

If you’re going to get into the app development game, you must be prepared to be in it for the long-haul. Once you launch your app, your job is only just beginning. App developers have raised the bar of user expectation for updates. You must monitor your feedback and respond with interface tweaks that provide a better experience. You should also add to and improve upon the functionality of your app regularly and keep it fresh with current data. If users see an app that has gone stale on the shelf, they're not going to be inclined to download it.

---