Your mobile app is the best tool you have for connecting with your customers: it allows you to reach them anywhere and everywhere, instilling brand loyalty and ensuring that you’re never far from their minds. However, your application is only as good as its engagement, so it’s necessary that you make it highly useful by adding functionality beyond the basics.
One of the best features you can include is one that you might not expect, depending on your industry: weather data from API software. This interface allows you to share highly accurate, localized weather forecasts with your users, and they are incredibly easy to include in your app’s code. Today, we’ll look at both the engagement and retention aspects of including weather API in your app so that you can recognize the innumerable benefits of this quick and easy addition.
Weather information is immediately useful to users, which keeps them clicking
Regardless of the world region or time zone, everyone experiences weather, and everyone needs to prepare for it. Timely updates on temperature, precipitation, humidity, and cloud cover are of instant benefit to anyone heading outside, and they can serve as the “hook” that gets users to look at the rest of the content available in your app.
This is especially true for shopping and food delivery apps, which must predict a user’s fickle interests at any given time. If a user opens your application, they have something they are searching for; however, if you’re not able to quickly show them a useful item, they may lose interest and seek another option. By personalizing the front page of your app with current weather events, you can get their attention and make them think about other possible purchases, filling their shopping carts with topical products they may not have bought otherwise. In this way, you not only satisfy your customers by providing them with useful information and services, but you also drive engagement and ensure more purchases.
Having perpetually useful content will prevent users from uninstalling your app and moving on
The average consumer ditches quite a lot of apps: Insider reports that 30% of all apps across both Android and iPhone are removed from a user’s device, often within just a few days of installation. This churn is a serious issue for developers, who must continually consider new ways to keep users interested; it’s an especially serious problem for mobile games, as these apps have the highest uninstall rate of every category.
To retain users, you need to provide something unique – something that all others in your field don’t have. One of those possibilities is to provide real-world, noncommercial value: in other words, offer your users something that entirely benefits them.
Providing users with straightforward information about the weather, even if it is also used to create targeted advertisements, adds utility beyond your app’s intended purpose, and it can be the reason that they keep your particular app. Make it easy for them to quickly click on your app and see the weather, and they may find themselves poking around for more information, whether that’s checking the news or playing a round of your mobile game.
Even better, you can create a weather widget that, when clicked, sends users straight to your full app; not only can they quickly check the weather, but they can get more details – and engage with more of your content – with the press of a button. Add a bit of customization that continually reminds users of your brand, and you will immediately have an application that they simply can’t live without.
Every app needs a different strategy, but apps in every industry can benefit from using a weather API
Unlike other added features, a weather API doesn’t require a great deal of technical expertise to include, and it takes up little space in your app; you are simply sending requests to the API and displaying the receipts to your users as they arise. Though the interface itself is very simple, it can be implemented in thousands of ways to better complement your content. Shopping apps can use this information to display more relevant products; food delivery apps can not only utilize targeted advertising but also afford their customers more precise ETAs based on weather conditions.
Mobile apps, which are most vulnerable to deletion, can utilize weather APIs to create a more immersive experience for their players, such as changing their maps or theming based on the user’s local weather conditions. This is especially valuable if the assets already exist in your game but aren’t being used to their best effect: you will get more engagement with your game with the addition of only a bit more code.
It’s clear that weather APIs can help apps of all stripes keep users active, preventing the dreaded churn and providing real value to their clients. With such a low-cost quick implementation, there’s little reason to delay adding this highly valuable aspect to your app.
