Behind the scenes of a successful email-to-app campaign in Salesforce

As connected consumers, we tend to like brands that offer great experiences on mobile, and we are highly engaged and loyal to brands that deliver carefully tailored mobile experiences that we feel bring added value to our life. 

While email is the most preferred channels of communication, ensuring a smooth path to your app from your users’ mobile inbox is not as simple as it sounds, due primarily to the fragmented nature of the mobile ecosystem: different OSs and a wide variety of devices, channels, and platforms.

Mobile fragmentation leads to broken mobile experiences at unprecedented rates, resulting in frustrated customers and lost business.
Fortunately, deep linking technologies lead users to the right app destination ensuring the optimal user journey across every digital touchpoint – increasing installs, revenue, and lifetime value.

Salesforce and AppsFlyer’s OneLink to the rescue

Based on OneLink, AppsFlyer’s deep linking solution, that is now available directly on AppExchange to Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email studio, AppsFlyer helps marketers build seamless email-to-app experiences that lift conversions and keep consumers happy. 

Let’s review the example below to better understand what makes a mobile experience work or break.

Mobile links prone to breakage

Meet Sophia. Sophia checks her mobile inbox everyday at lunch and does most of her purchases online.

Today she is excited to see a new promotion from her favorite shoe store for VIP status members only, offering 40-60% off throughout the store plus extra 10% off applied automatically at checkout for purchases on the mobile app.

Sophia had actually never downloaded the app because the emails she receives from this specific store direct her to the mobile website. With this recent promotion she is highly motivated to download the app. She clicks on the link, excited to soon start her purchase, but unfortunately this regular link immediately breaks, bringing her to the mobile website’s home page, with no apparent way to download the app.

Sophia quickly gets distracted and the journey is abandoned. 

Sophia feels disappointed and frustrated and may lose her interest to come back. The shoe store lost a potential deal of a customer that could become a loyal app user. 

In a smart digital world, the shoe store that is interested to significantly grow its mobile business and enhance app usage would want to deliver Sophia a completely different user experience: direct her to the relevant app store to download the app and have her app open up where she left off to the specific new promotion that drove her click. 

Let’s continue with the same example of the shoe store and focus on the perspective of the marketing team involved.

Avoiding disruptive user journeys

The new email campaign the shoe store launched a week ago via Salesforce Marketing Cloud – Email Studio had very high open rates and click rates, but there was not a significant impact on mobile purchases since then.

With recent budget cuts, the marketing team understands that owned media needs to be leveraged. Directing users to the mobile app has become a key success factor as mobile sales in apps are rising, and mobile users like Sophia are becoming more common. 

The team is concerned that the current email flow that is based on regular links breaks the mobile experience. They are tired of sending email promotions and just hoping that as many people will open it, click on the CTA and get to their desired destination on the mobile app. 

They are also unable to see attribution data for email campaigns after an app launches and want to gain full visibility on what happened post email, beyond opens and clicks, to start measuring email-to-mobile app conversions.

The team decided to address the following challenges once and for all: 

• Ensure all their email campaigns have mobile use cases in mind by implementing smart links that always work regardless of OS, channel, and platform to create frictionless user experiences. 
• Include complete measurement data and analytics to understand the end-to-end mobile user journey.
• Deploy a solution that can be easily and quickly integrated within Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

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Creating a seamless mobile journey 

Here’s what the shoe store marketing team can achieve with AppsFlyer’s OneLink deep linking solution within Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

• Deliver personalized experiences specifically tailored to every user’s needs – OneLink detects whether a user has already installed the app. If a user has already installed it, the link opens the right page directly in the app. New users are sent to install the app first and then directed to the correct destination. The beauty is that OneLink always works across every platform and device. 
• Easy setup and seamless integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud – Email Studio – the installation of the AppsFlyer app from Salesforce AppExchange is very simple, and enables immediate integration of mobile deep links into email CTAs directly from Salesforce Marketing Cloud by dragging and dropping it into the email template. Consolidated deep linking management capabilities that support the execution of email campaigns at scale allow the team to operate in maximum efficiency.
• Move from darkness to light seeing the entire user journey – complete mobile attribution data can be viewed on the AppsFlyer dashboard or exported, allowing to optimize email campaigns results. In addition, mobile app behavioral data can be leveraged to enhance audience segmentation to automate journey builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
• Improve ROI of email campaigns – OneLink shows 25% click-to-install rate through frictionless email-to-app journeys (up to 4X compared to regular links). This means brands can constantly optimize their user acquisition strategy creating rich and meaningful in-app experiences for users.

Revamping email-to-app campaigns 

With OneLink, the shoe store’s marketing team starts to see new data flowing into their organization analytics tools with attribution data that allows them to explore if their email campaigns are effectively driving users into the mobile app and gives them visibility into the key in-app events. 

The team is confident that from now on the email-to-app campaigns they launch will support end-to-end customer journeys across platforms and turn users like Sophia into loyal app users.

To learn more about optimizing your email campaigns within Salesforce Marketing Cloud click here.