Today, I’m excited to unveil a suite of new premium solutions, built upon our core linking infrastructure, that represent the future of the Branch platform. The release of Journeys™ Web to App Marketing and Universal Email premium solutions fix broken experiences for the two most important channels that mobile marketers care about: mobile web and email.
Journeys™ Web to App Marketing
Mobile web is the absolute top of funnel for most businesses, where users come to evaluate your brand or passively consume content. It’s the single largest opportunity to convert users into loyal, high converting app users. The Journeys platform allows you to design custom audiences, create high converting banners and interstitials to the right users with the right messaging, then deep link them to the product after install. Early beta tests indicate that this channel drives users that are 7x more likely to convert in the first week.
Branch’s Universal Email
Over 70% of emails are opened from mobile phones, yet email marketers are still sending 100% of traffic to their mobile website, even when the clicking user has downloaded and registered within your app. Early data from our beta shows that ~ 40% of clicking users from email already have the app installed.
Why send users to your app? Using Branch’s Universal Email solution solves this problem, giving your app users the native experience they deserve. Moreover, if you’re a commerce company, you’re leaving ~ $4k of revenue on the table for every 1 million emails by sending your app users to the website. Check out how much you can benefit at our online calculator here.
{{ script_embed(‘wistia’, ‘k6vv671sk4’, ‘undefined’, ‘responsive’) }}
The Past, Present, and Future of Branch
While it’s been more than two years, it feels like just yesterday when our team of four was struggling to know what to do next in order to grow our photobook app. We had tried everything, from getting influential bloggers to promote us, to outright buying installs on Facebook. We felt hopeless since we had no sustainable path to drive awareness.
It was then that we started to invest our engineering efforts into the powerful mobile linking platform that Branch is today. The deep linking and robust cross-platform support of the links we created unlocked powerful new marketing channels for us. Branch links fixed the broken, cross platform, and cross channel experience that users were facing at the time and opened a new era of mobile marketing. An era where a user can finally get a continuous experience no matter if they have the app, no matter what mobile OS they were using, and no matter the channel they were converting through. Most importantly, Branch links gave us, and now tens of thousands of mobile businesses, hope for successful mobile growth strategies.
Deep links are now the cornerstone of a successful cross platform and cross channel marketing strategy that includes web and app together, driving a significant lift in conversions and revenue.
More broadly, these premium solutions indicate the direction of Branch. We’re moving up the marketing stack and directly into the key digital channels that you care about the most to drive awareness and growth to your mobile business. When we’re finished, expect every single marketing channel you use to be automatically configured to use Branch links. We’ll be your single, top-of-funnel conversion platform, guaranteeing that your new and returning users get an optimized, consistent user experience. Using our enterprise Data Integrations, you can send your Branch attribution and conversion data to the analytics platform of your choosing or just export giant heaps of it for your own internal management.
Premium Solutions Pricing
Our new premium solutions introduced different pricing structures for their use, which is a new philosophy for our company compared with how we’ve operated in the past. We charge for our new premium solutions because the features offer a service well beyond deep linking – they are features that provide a level of automation or integration that will enable you to drive business outcomes or measure the overall impact on your business in even more advanced ways. We believe the value these products provide will greatly outweigh the costs associated with them. All of our premium products will have a two week free trial, allowing you to see for yourself the value your business will get from these products. More information can be found on our pricing page.
We want to be completely clear, that the core Branch linking platform is and will always be available for use at no charge. We do this because we fundamentally believe that linking is vital to fixing the mobile app ecosystem, and that no matter how small or large an app is, they should have access to it for free. However, we exist in a world where there is no unified platform now and web represents only a fraction of users time, which has created technical barriers to linking. We fixed that problem with the core infrastructure and believe it should always be available to every company, no matter the size.
This is definitely not our final form. Expect even more platform-changing products to continue to roll out in the future.
Along with the release of Journeys and Universal Email, Data Integrations has been released out of beta. Click here to get started.