A little while ago, we wrote a series of articles looking at Micro-moments and how successful brands will have to begin catering to users who experience these micro-moments:
A little hypothetical: walking down the street and someone sees your billboard. This person then wants to know as much about your product as they can in that moment. In that micro-moment, one of the best ways to ensure that you can hook your customer is to provide them with a Progressive Web App.
The shortest way we can describe them is “a website that behaves like an app”. More specifically, it’s an app that’s created through the same technology as a website. There is more to it than one thing that’s like another, though. A way to look at PWAs is by thinking you get two in one. There are countless benefits to having a dynamic web app available for your audience and we’d like to highlight a few of them for you:
Much like native apps, PWAs are designed with minimal load times. In a world where users want demand results as soon as possible, brands now have the chance to give it to them.
Load time is often one of the key factors in a high bounce rate for mobile sites, but with a focus on speed and immediacy, PWAs can help reduce this. For example, Twitter’s PWA helped to reduce their bounce rate by 20%.
The first question that you may ask: how can I get users to download this app? Well, the obvious way is by having a high search engine ranking (PWAs will often appear higher in the ranks due to their speed). Another option is the same way you get users to download any app, through a store. PWAs are currently available in the Windows and Play store, just like native apps but the difference maker, though, is that they are available to put there at a much lower cost.
So once you have the app on your user’s phone, what is there to do except to wait for them to convert?
In terms of e-commerce, with your store available on the PWA, you have the option to send a push notification to users who have left your app with a full basket. Utilising push notifications can help to increase your re-engagement and ultimately drive up conversion rates. Jumia, a leading e-commerce website in Africa, have taken advantage of the push feature and seen 9 times as many conversions from previously abandoned carts.
Apps can be expensive to build and maintain; websites less so. So what if you could build an app using the same code and principles as a website? That’s what you get with PWAs; a cheaper but more dynamic alternative.
By no means “new” to the world of development and marketing, Progressive Web Apps are soon to become the next big thing. They have a very bright future, especially in regards to e-commerce. Fingo believe that a PWA has the potential to take almost any brand to a new level and is something we are very bullish on for 2019.