Use Branch links with Braze’s CRM to discover more about your users and to build better engagement campaigns.
Recently I heard a story about a parking app startup that was struggling to gain traction in its home market. They had a well designed product and decent awareness, but users weren’t engaging with the app where or when they needed to. The problem, the app’s marketers realized, was that they were trying to use broadly applied marketing tactics to sell a product whose value-add is presented differently for each user at a specific time and a specific place.
One group of users may have needed to find parking as they were approaching the downtown area of a nearby city, while another group of users may have needed to find parking 30 minutes before an event they RSVP’d for on Facebook. While all this data is relatively easy to collect if you have the correct permissions enabled for your app, it is much more difficult to capitalize on this information at the right time and place or over the right channel for each user.
So how could this app’s small marketing team serve different messages to users based on their individual circumstances in order to maximize engagement? The answer: using a customer relationship suite like Braze.
A Powerful Combination of Engagement and User Experience Optimization Tools
Branch’s mission statement is to help apps get their content in front of the right users in order to maximize engagement, retention, and growth. But serving the right content to the right user at the right time and place (and doing it at scale) can be a daunting task.
Fortunately, Branch has partnered with Braze to allow our apps to serve deep links to their users via intelligent, automated engagement campaigns. If you’ve ever wanted to use Branch links for push notifications, multivariate tests, or multi-channel campaigns, you can now do so with Braze’s customer relationship management suite. The Branch – Braze partnership also allows apps to use Branch’s organic user acquisition data to build targeted audiences from user profiles for Braze’s engagement campaigns (we’ve included links below on getting this integration set up on both the Branch and Braze dashboards).
Braze user profile snapshot, demonstrating the data with which you can build audiences for engagement campaigns
This simple, powerful combination will allow you to combine the experience of a Branch deep link with the intelligence of Braze’s campaign and audience platform to create a more personalized customer outreach and gain deeper user insights.
What Can You Build with Braze and Branch?
Better targeting for your engagement campaigns
The channel through which a user downloads your app can tell a lot about them as a user as well as the best methods to engage them. For example, you could assume that a user who comes into your app via an email invite from a friend is more likely to engage with promotions served over email. Using Braze’s audience insights and campaigns with Branch links, you can actually test that hypothesis for your own user base and leverage your findings to re-engage your users more effectively.
The point is that Branch has always provided you a wealth of data about how and why users originally installed your app. Now, you can leverage those insights further by adding them to Braze’s marketing platform to target users with the engagement campaign that is most likely to increase their value to your app.
Once you have your Branch – Braze integration up and running, all you have to do is build new customer segments in the “Engagement” section of the Braze dashboard based off a user’s organic install attribution source (as provided by Branch). Then simply build the appropriate engagement campaigns to target those customer segments.
Engage Users at the Right Moment
Any mobile marketer worth their salt knows deep linking provides better engagement rates, but serving deep links at the exact right moment — deep links that are based on triggers such as location or behavior – makes for an even more powerful combination.
Braze’s campaign triggers are a great way to re-engage users at the moment they are most likely to purchase, register, send invites to friends, or do whatever it is you are trying to get them to do.
Let’s take the parking app example that is mentioned above. By leveraging Braze’s user insights and geo-triggers, it would be very easy to target users who you know are interested in baseball, from the bay area, and within a half mile of AT&T Park with a push notification promoting a 20% game day discount for a parking garage near the stadium.
Using Branch links in these push campaigns, you could deep link users who click on this notification directly to the in-app booking page for that specific garage with the 20% discount already applied, automatically increasing their likelihood to complete a purchase.
You could also use Braze’s audience segments to target users matching the above criteria with this same campaign through the other channels that you have determined are likely to drive engagement for specific user groups. By building campaigns like these with Braze and Branch, you capitalize on every opportunity to engage your users by serving them the best possible experience at the exact right moment.
Looking to Dig Deeper?
For more information about the Branch / Braze integration, click here for the integration guide on the Braze site, and here for the integration guide on the Branch site.