Summary
Rent the Runway, pioneer of the “closet in the cloud” concept and the leading fashion rental service based in New York, integrated Branch links to its Sailthru email campaigns and saw total mobile revenue grow by 200%, alongside increased engagement. Beyond the significant performance improvement, Branch’s attribution platform has allowed them to gain a deeper understanding of the entirety of the cross-platform user journey, informing key strategic mobile web and app decisions.
Customized Journeys for targeted audiences
With a highly mobile-savvy audience, Rent the Runway has always known that the app was a critical part of its mobile strategy. The team has done a great job designing the mobile app experience and has seen a steady amount of traffic to the app organically since its launch, so they’ve never taken an active role in promoting it. Recently, they realized that the native app was the best converting channel across all platforms, and they wanted to start making it the core focus of their product strategy to provide an optimal mobile experience for their users while also furthering the concept of “clothing as utility” for RTR customers. They partnered with Branch to help with their acquisition efforts and started leveraging the Journeys web-to-app optimization platform.
Using a combination of top-sticky banners and full page interstitials, targeting the specific web users at the time when they are ready to convert, they started driving substantially more app installs by tapping into their organic mobile web traffic. This has created a large source of highly engaged app users ready to become the most loyal users of Rent the Runway services.
Supercharging email performance
The next stage in starting to take advantage of the significantly higher conversion rates in the app was to utilize the email marketing channel to drive app engagement. Rent the Runway integrated Branch across both the transactional emails and the personalized email campaigns with custom-picked fashion items for its users, and also leveraged Branch’s Sailthru plugin to quickly deep link every email template, providing a seamless email-to-app user experience.
Soon after launch, the impact was clear. About a quarter of all email clicks were now routing users directly into the app where before they were sent to mobile web. Total mobile revenue driven from the email channel rose 200%. Before Branch, some users with the app were sent to mobile web and might have bounced, but after fixing the routing issue, these users were now proceeding to purchase.
Mapping cross-platform email performance
Outside of direct revenue impact, the other crucial facet of email is attribution reporting. Sending users into the app is not trackable by most email service providers, so visibility could be lost. Fortunately, using Branch’s full funnel, cross-platform attribution, Rent the Runway could visualize the performance of each email, broken out by desktop web, iOS web, iOS app, Android web, and Android app from click to purchase.
“Branch attribution has really allowed us to understand the entire digital journey of our users and how to continue to develop the app as well as inform mobile website related decisions. We worked with Branch to support our strategies across nearly all of our channels, with the goal of unifying our mobile experience across web and app, creating immediate results.”
Brooke Hartmann, Chief Product Officer
Rent the Runway
