It’s 2016, and mobile apps are firmly cemented as a cornerstone of digital marketing, in essentially all verticals. Modern consumers have marketers optimizing their efforts at a rapid pace to tap into the emerging mobile revenue stream. The Relevancy Group’s Summer 2016 Executive Marketer Survey, done in partnership with Branch, revealed that marketers rated mobile apps as the fourth most effective channel for driving revenue for their business, surpassing traditional channels such as paid search and print direct marketing.
These same marketers have been using email to directly drive revenue for decades. In the same survey by TRG, nearly 90% of marketers reported email to be their most effective marketing channel. But what if we told you the email experience is broken? And that with the emergence of mobile devices in our digital world, it’s more important than ever for marketers to focus on how to optimize their emails.
The Challenge for Email Marketers on Mobile
Along with The Relevancy Group, we set out to understand the challenges email marketers face in the mobilized world and how marketers can adapt. In the TRG survey, marketers revealed that “email links to the mobile app (deep linking)” is the number one challenge faced when promoting a mobile app with email marketing messages. Other top challenges included:
How Deep Linking Drives Revenue for Email Marketers
Whether you’re an eCommerce business, publisher, or app-only company, email marketing remains an important part of your marketing efforts. Email is the best channel to directly reach potential customers and loyal supporters. However, the links in email campaigns always point consumers to the mobile web where context is lost and the user experience is broken. Providing a superior user experience, a quicker checkout, and the opportunity to engage users in mobile apps are all contributing factors to why mobile apps perform better than the mobile web. And the broken email-to-app experience has a bottom line impact for businesses.
“Using relatively conservative assumptions we found that the mean respondent to our survey could be leaving as much as $157k of monthly revenue on the table by not leveraging contextual data to link users from email campaigns to appropriate app experiences,” The Rise of Mobile Apps and Value of Deep Linking white paper states.
75 percent of enterprise marketers stated that marketing through their mobile app was either their single top marketing priority, or at very least, a key marketing priority for them. So it makes sense that emails should also work with a mobile app. By simply deep linking emails to the mobile app, marketers can see an increase of app generated revenue by as much as 22%. Along with revenue, marketers are able to deliver a cohesive user experience across all of their email marketing efforts within the mobile context.
The Solution to Deep Linking Mobile Emails
Deep linking enables marketers to deliver a seamless consumer experience from emails to mobile apps. An improved user experience equates to more pages viewed, longer time in the app, and improved engagement. In the full white paper by The Relevancy Group and Branch, you’ll also learn about:
- Which marketing channels deliver the best bottom-line results for various vertical
- The biggest challenges that modern marketers face when trying to create a cross channel marketing strategy and how to overcome them
- The next stage of the email evolution in the mobile age and how to leverage contextual data to drive more revenue and engagement
- Recommendations from industry analysts on how to solve the intricacies of mobile emails to deliver an optimal experience and stay ahead of the competition
To download the full white paper from Branch and The Relevancy Group, click here.