Companies of all sizes, from small and middle to international, have much to take from progressive web apps. They possess universality, allowing clients to interact with brands faster and easier from any browser or device, with or without a worldwide network. PWA represents a perfect combination of a native and web app, adapting content to a mobile interface and providing an excellent customer experience (CX). That results in engagement and conversion growth.
In simple words, you can attract more clients with progressive apps, keep them loyal to the brand in the long view, sell effectively and earn more income. The article will describe the possibilities PWA provides for e-commerce businesses, its pros and cons, and successful companies' stories already following the progressive way.
Best methods of PWA engagement
One of the beneficial factors for converting the website into PWA is the high chance of raising engagement levels. Push notifications, provided by apps, give a splendid opportunity to interact with users across different devices and platforms.
Still, entrepreneurs should ensure they have prepared exciting content to suggest clients make some actions in the application, not simply load the page. The message can contain:
an alert to read a new related article;
some data individuals have to reply to;
a new product or app’s feature they may examine.
Now let’s figure out the customer engagement meaning in marketing. In this way, a company creates long-term relationships with clients, grows its customer base, and fills it with their personal data. Such strategies allow for fostering brand awareness and reaching new areas to operate in. The goal can be accomplished with promotional campaigns through web ads and social media.
PWA messages can boost a few types of customer engagement, which greatly affect the entrepreneur:
contextual, based on buyers' previous purchases, preferences, location, and other aspects of their profile;
emotional, formed on individuals' decision-making specifics (color, images, memories, etc.);
customer engagement via PWA eliminates the need to make a lot of efforts to buy (like a one-click purchase);
social, such as sharing a positive experience from interacting with a brand on personal profiles.
The right push notification strategy will help increase customer loyalty and brand trust. The importance of customer engagement also lies in receiving buyers’ feedback and improving customer experience, which results in sales and companies' popularity growth.
There are several methods to check whether your advertising efforts catch attention. Except asking for direct clients’ reviews, you can examine the bounce and conversion rates, activity time, user effort score, service accessibility, and other ways to measure customer engagement. Analyzing reports, you’ll find bottlenecks in your marketing strategy and generate new ideas for attracting clients with the PWA notifications.
Your app reliability is as important for clients as their interest in your content. If you can’t ensure the stable software work, users may leave a page in a few seconds, not getting a response. So let’s see how to avoid such unpleasant situations in the next chapter.
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Make your PWA reliable in the eyes of customers
Before announcing that your website now has an application available from the browser, check whether the PWA is reliable and can provide the same excellent CX under different conditions.
One of the main advantages of progressive apps vs. web ones is their fast work. So you should ensure the application operates without delays regardless of customers’ internet connection, browser, and the power of their devices.
Another checkpoint is apps' offline functioning. A service worker, as an integral part of PWA, allows the online pages to load without an internet connection, so a Lighthouse audit will emphasize possible mistakes in your code and suggest how to fix them for better app performance.
Here are some tips on how to improve progressive app reliability for a better UX:
use LocalForage to store large quantities of structured data;
provide a cache-first strategy to upload saved information from memory, reducing network requests;
add a stale-while-revalidate code to update saved content with a fresh one in the background.
The described arrangements will ensure your application's stable work and timely content updating. Now you seem ready to promote an app to a larger audience from this stage. So let’s learn how to make it right below.
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Let the world know about you!
If you already have a reliable and attractive PWA, it’s time to grow its popularity. We have compiled a few working methods to make your brand well-known through effective promotional campaigns.
Attract traffic with a social media
Digital networks are undoubtfully effective in streaming content and reaching a target customer. Comparing progressive web apps vs. native, in the last one, users should follow the store link and download an application. PWA solves this problem, so you send visitors right to the program without a distribution middleman.
Create an affiliate program
By providing a referral strategy, you’ll spread the information about your brand PWA to a broader audience. And business partners will help you to deal with this issue. This is a win-to-win promotional method where all the participants benefit: affiliates receive fees for their service, customers become familiar with your company, and you grow the traffic flow.
Use a cross-traffic method
If you have a WordPress progressive web app, for example, and write a blog, make interlinking between the PWA URL and a website. Just add a reference to your application in the relevant place of an article. And conversely, writing content for an app, mention an online page in the text. Thus, you’ll provide traffic growth both to the website and PWA.
Benefit from SEO opportunities
As Google searches the app's content, you should pay more attention to such aspects as adding keywords in the URL and making it shorter. Also, check whether you use an actual link instead of hash parts.
Using a Search Console is another way to optimize PWA and examine how Google sees your web page. Provide an app sitemap because this is the first thing search engines look for while testing the website pages.
The following companies probably have used one or several of these methods to promote their progressive apps. Their results are incredible and definitely worth your attention.
Success stories alternatively created PWAs
Converting a website to PWA draws a successful growth path for many companies and individual entrepreneurs. Although progressive apps aren’t one-size-fits for all businesses, they can bring a lot of benefits and useful tools for various entrepreneurial purposes. Here we’d like to share the best practices of implementing progressive technologies in different fields of activity.
Orange
A Polish telecommunications services provider once reported how their conversion rates depend on the web page loading time. Analysis showed that every additional second of loading reduced the sales quantity and revenue by 15-20%. The Orange team created a PWA for mobile users to solve this issue because 75% of visitors went to the website through their devices.
The company built a PWA on React and Node.js because of the large number of optimization tools the framework can suggest. As a result, Orange provided a 30% faster page loading than its old website had, increased its conversion rates by 52%, and grew session time by 18%.
Blibli
This Indonesian e-commerce marketplace decided to build a progressive web app to improve its CX. As 70% of visitors are mobile users, Blibli provided a beneficial way for them to interact with a platform. The new app took only 1 MB in size, which was 24 times lighter than their previous native Android application. In addition, clients have got an opportunity to scroll items saved in cash, even when they lose internet connection.
PWA allowed the company to reduce bounce rates by 42%, 3x times grow the speed of page loading, achieve 8x better conversion rates, and 10x times top up the revenue.
SVGcode
Thomas Steiner, the innovative developer, decided to build PWA from scratch, allowing users to convert raster images into vector graphics. As the application works with large files, reaching its fast loading and overall performance was crucial. And a progressive app coped with this issue. Now customers can open a tool from their smartphones and get rid of pixels on their images.https://multi-programming.com/blog/why-you-should-audit-your-pwa
SVGcode is fully offline enabled and based on the Vanilla JS template. The app also uses Workbox.js, which provides a production-ready service worker...
https://multi-programming.com/blog/how-to-boost-your-business-with-pwa
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