Email marketing typically has the biggest ROI of any marketing channel. Today, 69% of emails are opened on mobile rather than on desktop, and year over year that percentage gets larger. Not only are users spending more and more time on mobile, but also, when those users are in your app instead of your mobile website, they are 3 times more likely on average to convert to purchase. Any successful email marketing strategy must optimize for driving users to the app.
However, different platforms, email clients, and devices handle emails differently, and the way they handle emails can change at any moment – making it incredibly difficult for an email marketing team to provide an optimal experience in all of these cases. On top of this, email click tracking is essential for measuring ROI on email campaigns, and yet the link wrapping that most email service providers use to track clicks will break iOS’ Universal Links into an app. The choice email marketers have had to make is to either turn off click tracking and have no visibility into ROI for email, turn it on and break links into apps for iOS users, or give up on linking into apps and lose out on greater engagement and ROI potential.
Through these eight new partnerships, Branch’s Universal Email solves these problems by intelligently sending the user to the point of purchase that is optimal for them – to the content in app when they have it, and to the content on mobile web when not. This solution also allows email marketers to support both Universal Links and click tracking. With email marketing powered by Branch links, you can get a complete picture of revenue from an email campaign on mobile web, desktop web, and app. No matter where you decide to send your users for the optimal experience, you will be able to capture conversions downstream of the email click. If you use Branch in other marketing channels, deep linking your emails means you get a more complete picture of the impact of all of your marketing efforts.
The majority of the email service provider market now supports deep linking with Branch
With the addition of Blueshift, Epsilon, Mailjet, Mailgun, PostUp, Sailthru, Vero, and Zeta Global, and Branch’s existing partners such as Oracle Responsys and SendGrid, chances are high that your email service provider is integrated with Branch. These email service providers support deep linking at scale, meaning that each provider offers a way to generate deep links programmatically – you will not have to paste in deep links one by one. They also support web-only links, so if you do not want some of your links to send the user to app content even when they have it installed, there is a solution with your ESP. If you do not see your ESP on the list, we can still help! Let us know who we’re missing here.
We’re continuously partnering with new ESPs, so check back in on the dashboard or watch our product updates for your email service provider.
Enhanced onboarding
Based on your feedback over the past several months, Branch has made some changes to make it easier to onboard to Universal Email. You can now choose how you want your email links to behave and configure deep linking settings for email, right in the dashboard UI.
In addition, you can add multiple email domains for testing and view the apple-app-site-association file that makes your emails work with Universal Links. When you get further with your integration, Branch validates all the necessary setup steps, with links that tell you how to fix each item. You can generate test links for email here, too.
Branch has also streamlined the link generation process for certain ESPs, so all you have to do is add an HTML attribute or a query parameter to transform your web URL into a deep link. We’ll add this feature for more ESPs over time.
As mobile market share and app usage continue to rise, the issue of engaging consumers with app content through email has grown more and more acute. In order to have an effective email marketing strategy today that offers high conversions and an optimal end user experience, email marketers must find a much more robust solution. With the help of ESP partners, Branch offers a solution with coverage of all linking edge cases, deep link generation at scale, and cross-platform and cross-channel attribution.