As I’ve written about before, email continues to defy the pundits and to be a critical channel for customer engagement. The one thing that does undermine the effectiveness of email, however, is mobile. I recently attended an email innovation conference and was surprised by the lack of attention paid to what happens after a consumer clicks on an email from a mobile device. There have been lots of improvements and studies about the positive impact of personalizing your email, like this recent one from Epsilon citing a 241% lift. With up to 70% of all emails being read on mobile devices, addressing what happens after the click can have significant impact on your top and bottom line.
It’s no surprise that the mobile customer experience is vastly better in an app vs. the mobile web. At every stage of the funnel, consumers demonstrate the behavior that you’d expect from a richer, more satisfactory experience. That leads to conversion rates that are anywhere from 100%-300% better than on the mobile web (and, interestingly, also better than desktop).
And if you give them a better experience, logically, you’d expect them to come back more often and purchase or engage more frequently. Those very benefits are ones that marketers should be relying on and promoting when sending emails to their customers. Unfortunately, apps cannot be directly linked to from an email given today’s technology.
“Getting more mobile users into the app instead of mobile web has always been a big challenge, and email represents one of the biggest deep-linking opportunities to do so,” said Eric Spielman of theCHIVE. “We’re excited that Branch can help us solve this and deliver better experiences to our readers.”
All users are sent to the mobile web, even those with the app already on their phone. (How marketers can take advantage of their mobile web traffic is a topic we touched on here). Branch’s integration with Responsys (and soon other leading ESPs) addresses these shortcomings by ensuring all email links are deep links. 
This inability to link your consumers directly to your app has negative impact on your top and bottom line. How much? It’s actually very quantifiable and we have worked with several clients to estimate that for every 1m emails that are sent without deep linking into your mobile app, you are losing $3,000 in top line revenue. This won’t be the same for everyone so we built a calculator to help you assess. Try it out here and let me know your feedback. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how deep linking your email can help achieve your goals.