Checkout 51, a leading rebate app that offers users great deals and cashback rewards for their grocery shopping, has been a mobile-first company since its inception. Founded in Toronto, the company quickly gained popularity among shoppers and experienced rapid growth.
In the mobile space, however, acquiring app users is only the beginning of the story. In fact, most major brands go through three distinct stages of mobile growth—investing in the app and launching it, acquiring new users, and finally, with the right engagement strategies, driving progressively more revenue.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the third stage is often the most challenging to achieve. Re-engaging existing app users who have installed but haven’t engaged and converted is a steep hill to climb, and Checkout 51 needed the right partner to solve that challenge.
The challenge: Driving app engagement and revenue beyond the install
With such a saturated app space, it’s up to forward-thinking companies like Checkout 51 to activate engagement strategies that put mobile first and drive revenue.
According to Braze, the average iPhone user has 119 apps installed, but spends 70% of his or her time in just three apps. Based on that data, it’s crucial to consider user experience beyond simply the app install—and that’s exactly how Checkout 51 made sure their app didn’t get lost in the mobile mix.
Checkout 51 was already using paid advertising to attempt to re-engage app users, but without contextual deep links, anyone who clicked on a Checkout 51 ad was sent to the App Store. This led to a subpar new user experience, and isolated app installation from pre-install context.
This one-size-fits-all user routing resulted in a disjointed experience that led between 30,000 and 40,000 users to drop off each week.
The solution: Re-engaging app users with Universal Ads and deep linking
Checkout 51 turned to Branch’s Universal Ads to integrate deep links into the company’s paid advertising mix. Branch’s Deep Links enabled Checkout 51 to contextually link users from various channels directly into the app if they had it installed.
Using traditional links, Checkout 51 would only have been able to drive mobile web users to the App Store or Play Store, depending on their device. This experience is broken, disjointed, and is less likely to result in a conversion.
With deep links, Checkout 51 was able to link existing app users directly to a specific offer or promotion featured in a given ad. Furthermore, the Checkout 51 team can apply any relevant promotions or cash back rewards directly to users who travel to the app via a Branch deep link. Deep linking provided a better, more relevant user experience and helped ensure these users took the desired conversion action within the app.
Beyond the power of deep linking, Universal Ads also enabled Checkout 51 to track ad conversions across every device, platform, and channel. With access to cross-channel, cross-platform insights, Checkout 51 can confidently analyze, iterate, and optimize ad campaign performance, tracking ROI seamlessly and scalably.
Equipped with Universal Ads, Checkout 51 launched a new deep linked re-engagement campaign targeted specifically at users who already had their app installed.
The result: Deep linking with Universal Ads takes open rates to new heights
The seamless experience of clicking a paid advertisement and being deep linked directly to the desired offer in the app ensured users received a seamless ad-to-app experience.
In response, Checkout 51 saw click-to-open rates increase from 50% to 93% in just one month. This incredible and near-immediate increase in open rates had a huge effect down-funnel, resulting in 10% higher app conversions among users who engaged with the new user experience specific to deep linked remarketing ads.
The moral of this mobile story? Leveraging deep links can help today’s brands drive contextualized engagement, conversion, and revenue by routing users to the app when it makes sense to do so—all while giving the team better insights and measurement across today’s complicated cross-platform customer journey.
Alex Potichnyj, Director of Marketing at Checkout 51, says, “Deep link users directly to content with Branch and you’ll see positive effects on re-engagement spend from day one.” If you’d like to inspire similar growth for your mobile app, request a Branch demo. We’d love to help you form a plan.