Restaurants
2) Development planning
Our IT team had 4 years' preparation time while we developed software to be used in 4 other industries (motor, property, financial and accommodation).
We had enough time to study the positive and negative aspects of Whatsapp and of Facebook. (Facebook owns Whatsapp and they bought it for $19 billion in 2014 without Whatsapp earning a single penny in revenue)
We can position the Enjoy Life app where we ensure that negative aspects are limited.
Positives
You can message a single person or a group at once. You target people you want to reach and it is only possible when you have their cell phone numbers, and when they also have installed Whatsapp on their phones.
It is a low-cost message platform. It might change in future where users will have to pay a monthly subscription to use the platform. They used to ask a percentage of users to pay after one year’s usage a subscription fee. Whatsapp later decided that they will rather try to see if financial institutions and other companies cannot pay them when these companies want to communicate with Whatsapp users. https://blog.whatsapp.com/615/Making-WhatsApp-free-and-more-useful
We cannot predict the future. People might in future be asked to donate or pay subscription fees to use the communication platform.
Negatives
The only negative for users is that they often get messages from people on their phones while they are busy in work meetings. There is unfortunately no way to manage when a message should reach the receiver. Users can turn their phones onto “silence mode”, but they often forget about it.
Out of a business perspective, it is difficult to use Whatsapp as a tool to communicate with all the people within your geographical area. Businesses do not always have all the people’s cell phone numbers. There are businesses that work hard to collect this data. You cannot guarantee that the cell phone users will all have downloaded Whatsapp onto their phones. Therefore, you cannot be sure that all the people will receive Whatsapp messages. Most companies still use sms as communication as they know that sms messages reach the entire database. It is very costly though.
Positives
Facebook enables companies to post messages on their own Facebook pages, and followers of the business can be reached if they liked the business page.
You can post specials and use images etc. It is a great tool when you have a large Facebook friend network.
Negatives
Facebook sends mail communications to all the friends in the network without managing time slots. They also over do their communication strategy. When one friend comments on a picture Facebook will notify all the other “friends” that this person commented on a picture.
You might get annoyed if you are a Facebook user and is in the wrong friend network. People are often bothered at work and this results in the person getting into trouble at work. Companies ban Facebook pages at the works place.
Negative aspects for business.
A company can only reach people who are Facebook followers of the company. You cannot reach people who do not know about your business.
We took the negatives and the positives into consideration and we realized that the most challenging part is to communicate with people when it is convenient to them, and more importantly, to communicate with them on aspects they are interested in.
We can position an app between Facebook and Whatsapp. The only “negative” is that we will not reach lower income people. This might actually be better for businesses. You want to use a “special” to draw clients to your business, but you want these people to spend money on other products at your business as well.
We support companies that are categorized as businesses that want to help a person “Enjoy Life”. This might seem like a small group of companies, but in reality, the list is almost endless. This includes restaurants, coffee shops, hairdressers, beauty salons, video shops, cinemas, cycle shops, golf shops, event companies (Cycling events, marathons, and numerous sport events) fuel stations, lodges, guesthouses, guest farms, hotels, wine farms and even butcheries. A butcher will be able to publish specials on meat that people need for a braai… enjoy the weekend, enjoy Life!
There is limited space on a phone for Apps
The Enjoy Life app can also provide marketing support to companies such as boutiques that sell clothes and shoes. The Enjoy Life app provides marketing solutions to thousands of companies that cannot develop their own phone apps.
We explain three parts of the phone app’s development planning:
a) Media section
b) Bucket list software that also help us to ask clients to notify management when they receive poor service
c) Reward program offered to loyal clients
a) Media section
Media has and will always play a critical role in a business ability to earn income. People act on information (media). Media has evolved through different stages. It used to be numerous text in newspapers, that eventually changed to less text and more images in magazines, that changed to websites on the internet, and the latest trend is to use “Push technology” to post media onto a person’s phone. The best results are less text, combined with an image. People have less time to read, and images on a phone will draw the most attention.
The challenge is that people are now more phone users than “internet” users. To have a website is important, but it is almost out-dated. People “search” less and they act more on messages they receive on their phones.
Google provided a solution to help people reach websites of interest. Without Google and other search engine platforms that followed, the internet would have been impossible to use. Google helped people to reach websites that host relevant information towards what a person wants on the internet. There are even other companies that help people to find relevant information from one website in industries where there are too many companies in a specific industry. A great example is accommodation booking companies that list all the accommodation companies per area in one site. It would have been a challenge if all the accommodation companies only relied on their individual websites for business. It would have remained a challenge to be on the top list of websites on the Google browser when people searched for accommodation in a specific area.
Latest trend
In the past
Internet users searched for information on pc's in their own time
Phone apps push information towards phone users
Phone apps created a new challenge. It is arguably the most effective method of marketing, as information can reach a person within seconds, but the challenge is that there is not enough space on a person’s phone to install thousands of phone apps.
We create a porthole for all the companies that offer services to make a client Enjoy Life so that they can share one app on a person’s cell phone. It will be impossible for up to 10 000 companies to each develop their own phone apps and expect all the phone users to install all their individual apps. (The software can support 10 000 companies, although we foresee to support at least 6 000 companies in South Africa.)
There are numerous things to take into account when developing phone apps. One is to realize that apps are used, based on their functionality. Gaming apps are used by younger people to play games. They often remove older games from their phones and install new games. (Limited space on phones)
Companies who develop phone apps for themselves aim to reach people via their apps with media messages.
Up to 10 000 companies
share one app
Most companies cannot develop phone apps where people can use their apps on a daily basis. The actual usage of a phone app is limited to its design and functionality. If we for example look at the Dstv phone app. Their app offers the same functionality as the Dstv website. The public can also manage their personal profiles on the Dstv website, so why bother to download the Dstv app?
The Homecare team developed a phone app that can help different companies with media exposure. It is much more challenging than one would expect. We explain our media support strategy later, as well as other functions that will entice people to often use the Enjoy Life app as well.
There are a lot of trade secrets we cannot reveal, but we want to give readers some idea of what we can do, that will help companies save money and also increase business.
Software settings
The best service we provide to app users is to allow them to be in control regarding information they receive. There are numerous settings the person can select, to streamline the communication into his/her phone. Our objective is to help partners save money, and to help them reach people they would otherwise only been able to do if they use “National media” platforms. National media (print) is declining because people buy less newspapers etc.
Smart phones and satellite tracking creates new media strategies. We can, with advanced technology, broadcast messages from companies in certain radiuses from where the phone user is at present.
The settings that the App user select can help the Enjoy Life app to profile people better and this benefits all the companies we work with. The phone app relies on three different settings that users will select when they download the app:
1. Personal settings (Age, language preference, sex, where the person resides etc.)
2. Sport & hobby interests
3. Media settings (which media sections the person do not want media messages)
We ask users to identify what make their lives enjoyable. Do they love movies, do they enjoy books, what sport interests, if they love cycling, is it mountain biking or road cycling?
The user can also indicate the maximum number of messages he/she will accept per day, or during weekends. The app will know if the person is on leave (holiday) or at work. We know what time slots to communicate… There are so many things we take into consideration to ensure that the app user will use the app and it will be to their interest and benefit.