The age of return on experience
Building a long-lasting relationship with your customers starts with creating a cross-channel strategy of consistent and personalized user experiences. By providing value to your customer base, and creating meaningful interactions, brands can ensure positive user experiences and a high level of engagement.
Brands that leverage holistic attribution and behavioral data have an advantage when it comes to customer engagement. Using this data, together with advanced engagement tools, you can optimize your owned channels and dramatically lower your mobile app user acquisition costs. By taking users to relevant contextual in-app experiences you’ll be able to meet your users’ high expectations, optimize app conversions, and see a significant return on experience (ROX).
Fueling customer engagement with mobile apps
Companies that prioritize mobile have an advantage when it comes to providing customers with the best possible user experience, and that, in turn, leads to better customer engagement. Over the past year, it’s become increasingly clear that brands should focus their marketing efforts and budgets on creating types of personalized, relevant user experiences that support higher engagement, stronger loyalty, and more business growth.
According to Braze’s 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review, customer engagement is a top priority for brands and a critical growth engine that plays a major role in their success.
The review found that brands which rated their customer engagement as ‘excellent’ and exceeded their revenue goals are more likely to increase their budget spend on customer engagement, compared to brands that rated their customer engagement performance as ‘fair or poor’: 83% of brands who exceeded their revenue goals confirmed that they plan to increase their budget spend on customer engagement efforts in 2021, compared to just 23% who fell short of their revenue goals.
But, what if brands could create a solid customer experience foundation designed to support their growth, using channels they already own, without having to build a paid media strategy behind it?
One of the biggest challenges that many brands face (especially when budgets are down or stagnant) is how to make the most of their existing owned channels to acquire users and re-engage them.
The good news is that driving stronger customer engagement is possible!
If brands adopt the right engagement tools, they can execute truly connected and cross-channel campaigns (leveraging the mobile web, social media, SMS, email, and referrals) and successfully drive users to their mobile app, supporting acquisition and re-engagement strategies.
Campaign orchestration: the cross-channel approach
OneLink, AppsFlyer’s deep linking solution powered by reliable deep linking technology is aimed at increasing mobile app conversions and revenues from owned media to drive ROX. Using OneLink allows brands to direct users to any spot in the app, and ensure the optimal user journey across every digital touchpoint.
According to the 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review, “Great customer engagement doesn’t just drive engagement—it drives revenue.”
When we look at the results achieved by customers that use OneLink across different industries, we can see that there is a substantial impact on the engagement and retention rates. This is made possible by a seamless deep linking and deferred deep linking solution, increasing installs, revenue, and LTV.
Braze found that adopting a cross-channel approach that combines in-product (such as in-app messaging) and out-of-product messaging (such as email or SMS) is more effective than sticking to a single channel.
ROX: Real world examples
Let’s learn how to build exceptional experiences through real-life use cases and explore the impact on customer engagement associated with leveraging the OneLink suite of experiences for owned media.
Use case #1 – offline-to-app: using QR codes to drive app adoption
When Pizza Hut noticed that their most profitable customers were using their mobile app to order food and that a significant amount of mobile orders were being attributed to their loyalty program – “Hut Rewards” – they decided to try and convert traditional offline customers into app users. Using QR codes for in-store displays, direct mailers, and pizza boxes with OneLink’s technology ensure a seamless user experience from QR code scanning to the app across every platform and device.
Results show that those who integrated the Pizza Hut app into their purchasing routine grew to be more loyal than customers who did not. Additionally, mobile app customers who activated the QR code proved to have a higher average rate of engagement and a higher per-user order volume than those who did not.
Use case #2 – referrals-to-app: the never-ending growth loop
As we all know, referral-to-app campaigns drive a deeper level of customer engagement as people are not only using the app, they also share it with their friends and encourage them to download it.
Letgo tapped into the power of word-of-mouth referrals to drive bottom line revenues and create powerful growth loops by getting existing users to share their app with new users through referrals. They repeat this continually with new Letgo app users. The growth loops became possible thanks to OneLink, which enabled Letgo to single out the highest performing banner, helping to generate a 35% conversion uplift. Their personalized referral campaign showed 38% conversion and high post-install engagement.
Use case #3 – web-to-app (from YouTube): keeping users engaged
The global media leader Televisa from Mexico wanted to increase their VOD subscription service and focus on keeping users engaged over time to drive high lifetime value (LTV).
Televisa created hundreds of branded deep links to send users from the YouTube channel to their VOD app called Blim. For the first time they were able to measure the activity of owned media campaigns and analyze the entire user journey. This allowed Televisa to optimize their marketing budgets and access answers and insights they did not have before.
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ROX is the new measure
While we all understand that in order to reach the best ROX, we should focus our customer engagement efforts on mobile apps and other key digital platforms, connecting the dots across all touchpoints can be a challenge.
Braze highlights the importance of coordinating messages across channels, devices, and touch points, and emphasizes that customer engagement success relies largely on the creation of personalized, contextualized experiences across the entire user journey.
If we look, as an example, at an email-to-app journey, we know that without complete measurement data we will not see the full picture of how the campaign’s email opens were actually converted into app installs, in-app events and revenue. To be able to measure the ROX and optimize our campaign performance, we must have complete attribution data for informed, data-driven decisions.
Holistic measurement data, along with smarter segmentation solutions, and advanced tools designed for owned media to improve user experiences and engagement enable you to not only measure your ROX , but also drive more value from your investments.
Read the full Braze 2021 Global Customer Engagement Review here.
