Blog

Improving the Customer Experience with Deep Linking

Mar 26, 2019
Nick Ziech-Lopez

With the recent roll-out of our cross-channel capabilities, MessageGears is putting a focus on empowering mobile marketing messaging and driving more audience engagement through a user’s mobile device. We’re complementing our cross-channel offering this week with Deep Linking functionality, now available as part of the MessageGears platform.

Through Deep Linking, we will have support for both iOS Universal Links and Android Deep Links, enabling marketers to create content in email or SMS messages that opens links to destinations within their app instead of in a mobile browser. For example, if you’re sending a hot new deal to a recipient for a purchase page that is part of your app, you can have mobile users go straight to the application while desktop users and recipients without your app land at your destination URL on your website, just like today.

To see how this works, here’s the user experience for clicking a video when it isn’t a deep link:

Now contrast that with the deep linking experience that delivers me to the app to watch the video:

Since so much of your content is optimized for your app, it only makes sense that the user experience is better when not funneled to the mobile web.

Email is still an important and trusted channel for today’s marketer, bringing in better engagement and ROI than any other channel for many. But we recognize that the ability to drive personalized engagement to mobile devices is increasingly essential for enterprise marketing teams. Mobile device usage has eclipsed desktop usage by 15% — even more among younger people — and email engagement rates are highest among mobile users.

That’s why the evolution of our cross-channel platform necessitated the introduction of deep links to better enable our clients to truly integrate their messaging across the spectrum of channels, from email to mobile and their app. Drawing that link between messaging and app engagement is critical as marketers and consumers embrace this technology. As app traffic has a 50% higher average conversion rate than desktop and is twice as effective as a standard mobile browser, we know how important it is that we create a seamless experience for our users.

Getting started with deep linking content is easy and requires small changes to your content and mobile app. If you’d like to find out how you can raise your conversion rates by drawing more of your users to your mobile app, reach out, and we can get started.

About the Author

Nick Ziech-Lopez

Nick is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at MessageGears. He applies his background in engineering and data analytics to organizing his product backlog, understanding user experience, and obsessing over the Chicago Cubs.