At Carcloud we help car rental companies with their technology problems – so I often get asked about car rental mobile apps vs mobile sites.

Which is right for your business? This post will explain some of the concepts and help you decide.

UPDATE: Since writing this post, responsive technology has provided another option for mobile, with websites that look great on any device. Learn about responsive websites.

What’s the difference?

Ok, so let’s start by defining some of the terms:

Mobile app (or mobile application)

When somebody asks for a mobile app or application, they’re typically talking about something that is installed onto a smartphone (such as an iPhone or Android) from an app store (such as the Apple App Store). If you’ve ever used an iPhone, you’ll know there are thousands of apps available – more on this later.

Mobile site (or mobile web)

You already have a car rental website? Excellent. A mobile website is another version of your site that is specially designed for customers visiting your site from their smartphones. It sits alongside your existing website and is automatically shown when a customer visits the site from an iPhone, Android or other smartphone.

Do you have a strategy?

I wanted to include a short note on a couple of groups that I call “Me first” and “Me too”.

I often speak to businesses that want an app because they want to be the first amongst their competitive group to launch one (“Me first!”) – or they want an app because one of their major competitors has got one (“Me too!”).

These are probably the worst reasons to create an app.

Before engaging on any marketing or technology project you must fully understand your business drivers and return-on-investment. What’s your strategy?

Deciding which path to take

There are many similarities between apps and sites – they can both connect into your existing car rental software and provide a similar user experience. For most car rental comapnies, the major thing to consider in mobile app vs mobile site selection is actually very simple: how are you going to get customers to use it?

Marketing a car rental app

A benefit of an app is that once it’s installed on your customer’s phone, they only need to press a button to launch your car rental app. This may sound great – but how do you get on the customer’s phone in the first place? There are over 500,000 applications in the Apple App Store – how can you ensure that yours will be found amongst the others?

If you already spend large amounts of money on car rental marketing then you know how competitive it is to get found on Google.

If you’ve tried to engage car rental customers through Facebook and Twitter, you’ll have experienced how difficult it is to grow these channels and how much you need to invest in them.

Think of the App Store as another channel that you need to market to. If you have a strong mailing list this is a great way to promote a new app to existing customers but you can’t guarantee that your customers will install your app, no matter how amazing it is.

Also keep in mind that customers can leave and read public reviews on any application in the App Store, so it’s critical to “get it right’ by the time you go public.

Marketing a car rental mobile site

If you create a mobile site, you aren’t installed on your customer’s smartphone – you are relying upon incoming traffic to your website. The good news is that you already have customer’s visiting your website from their smartphones so you don’t need to spend an extra cent on marketing your new mobile site.

How much mobile traffic does your current website get today? Go into your analytics account and take a look – in many regions we find that mobile traffic to car rental sites is already over 20%.

While you’re in analytics, take a look at the conversion rate of your mobile traffic compared to your other traffic. If it’s not as high then you’re losing money every day.

Summing up

There’s no doubt that apps have additional loyalty and promotional benefits once you’re installed on the customer’s phone – but  how will you get the customer to install your app in the first place? Also keep in mind that mobile traffic is growing to your site every day and that sooner or later you will need to have  mobile site. With this in mind, I usually recommend a balanced strategy:

1. Create and launch a mobile car rental site

2. Evolve your site as you learn more about your customer’s behaviour

3. Use your learnings from (2) to make an informed decision about creating an app.

This is just a short overview but hopefully some of this information will help you in your decision making.

UPDATE: Since writing this post, responsive technology has provided another option for mobile, with websites that look great on any device. Learn about responsive websites.