How a Solar Company Boosted Growth With a Strategic Mobile App

Mobile phones are deeply ingrained in our daily lives—from the moment we wake up to scrolling late at night, the average American checks their phone 344 times per day, or every four minutes. With such large numbers, more and more companies are prioritizing mobile apps to meet their users where they are — on their phones.

Why a Mobile App?

Mobile apps have proven tremendous value for businesses — particularly for any business looking for new ways to engage their customers and create a better experience.

With a mobile app, a business can achieve omnichannel marketing, which allows marketing campaigns to hit users in their inbox and also where they’re most active: on their phone w/in-app or push notifications.

Plus, having a mobile app presence — even the mere fact of having the icon and app on a mobile phone — promotes brand loyalty and recognition. At LaunchPad Lab, we take this one step further by partnering with companies to build custom mobile apps that provide a unique digital experience to help them engage with customers and grow their businesses further.

A Leading Solar Company’s New Mobile App

One great example of this is our ongoing partnership with a leading solar company. Its mobile app not only provides existing users with a positive experience but also serves as a referral tool to build a pipeline of future customers.

This leading solar company recognized the opportunities it was missing without a custom mobile app to reap the benefits a mobile app could provide and chose to partner with our LaunchPad Lab team to build an app that helped grow its business immensely.

With the new app, users are greeted with a branded experience, visualizing their real-time solar usage, a summary of their positive environmental impacts, and reports on their historic energy production. This data automatically refreshes, so a user can access up-to-the-minute data at any time. The app also shares how much money they’ve saved over the product’s lifetime.

Referral Functionality

Using referrals is one of the most effective marketing strategies that businesses have today: 83% of consumers trust referrals from people they know, and a word-of-mouth recommendation is a primary factor behind 20%–50% of all purchasing decisions.

Although the user experience was a high priority, the solar company was looking to leverage the mobile app as a tool to grow the business as a whole. By building a referral functionality, customers can easily send referrals via any communication app on their phone (iMessage, Slack, Facebook, Twitter) or through a unique link tied to their account.

The feature is not only a tool for expanding solar access and awareness but it also provides existing customers with a reason to share interesting findings with friends or colleagues.

Since the new version of the app was released in April 2022, the business has seen a drastic 2.5x increase in app-based referrals.

Additional App Features

In addition to a high-level overview of their solar production and usage, the mobile app is integrated with Salesforce. When a user logs in, their contact record in Salesforce is linked — and project managers or contact owners can easily access user details, including when the solar panel was sold or installed.

When a referral is received, this also generates a qualified lead within Salesforce, and app users can utilize the app and referral functionality to see the status of the people they referred and if they too purchased a system.

Push Notifications: In a world where it’s all too easy to ignore an email sent from a business, push notifications are a great way to cut through the noise and connect with customers. By using Salesforce integration, the company can create custom push notifications directly in Salesforce and then enroll customers using Salesforce Process Builder. This allows its marketing team to send push notifications to customers who meet certain criteria within Salesforce.
User Authentication: When users register for the mobile app, they sign up using their email address. It must match the customer record in Salesforce for full integration.

App Integration to Come

The LaunchPad Lab team is currently partnering with the solar company to integrate the app with Salesforce Marketing Cloud for automated omnichannel marketing and customer outreach with campaigns and workflows that touch email, push notifications, and in-app messaging.

The Results

The implementation of the mobile app resulted in several exciting statistics, signaling the efficacy of the app:

85%+ average user retention. More than 85% of users who download the app are still using it three months later.
2 minutes average session duration. Users spend more than 2 minutes on the app each day, reviewing their solar production data.
2.5x increase in referrals.

For any company with a Salesforce-integrated mobile app, the possibilities for reaching your users and establishing an even better customer experience are endless. From leveraging Marketing Cloud to exploring marketing tactics through push notifications and in-app features, mobile apps are the future — and a great way to expand your business.

Let’s Work Together

At LaunchPad Lab, we are a digital product agency and Salesforce partner that specializes in mobile app development services. We have an experienced team of professionals who can help you create a powerful, user-friendly mobile app to facilitate customer engagement and grow your business.

Schedule your free discovery call with us today to learn more about our expertise in solving digital problems with innovative solutions!

Nick Lindeke

Product Manager

Nick learned his product fundamentals in mechanical engineering and brought his love of continuous improvement and process development to digital products when he shifted his career to the software industry. He found his calling as a Product Manager because he is fascinated by the intersection of technology and business. Outside of work, Nick enjoys throwing a frisbee around and learning everything he can about space exploration.