A disjointed customer experience
Customers prefer apps and businesses realize better business results in apps, but providing seamless user experiences across a fragmented mobile ecosystem can be very challenging, with marketers often not knowing where to turn.
Inevitably, this prevents marketing teams from accurately mapping the customer experience, measuring customer lifetime value (LTV), or getting a better return for their marketing spend. In a fiercely competitive market — where brands compete against not only the experiences in their own verticals but the very best experiences in the marketplace — these shortcomings can determine success or failure.
A few years ago, the Adobe Spark team faced a similar challenge as it sought to drive more downloads of Adobe Spark, a free graphic design app used to create impactful graphics, web pages, and video stories. As part of its customer acquisition strategy, the Spark team created of series of SEO landing pages tied to specific keyword searches. However, difficulty linking across channels and devices made it challenging for customers to find the specific information they were looking for within the Spark app.
“The new customer would download the app, only to be perplexed when they were dropped onto the app’s home screen and expected to find and pull in their own design manually,” remembers Thibault Imbert, former head of growth for Adobe Spark. “Obviously, this wasn’t just a bad experience, but terrible for conversion because the customer was lost. Many of us considered it a broken experience.”
Knowing they had to fix their linking problem, Thibault and his team began looking for possible solutions. They soon found Branch, a mobile deep linking platform that enables brands to create a consistent user experience across channels, platforms, and devices, attribute mobile marketing activities properly and optimize campaign spend. Branch’s deep linking technology allowed the Adobe Spark team to use the same links across channels, while at the same time tracking insight for all its marketing activities — which was exactly what Imbert’s team needed.
Connecting the customer experience
One of the biggest advantages of using Branch, an Adobe Premier Partner that powers Adobe’s entire portfolio of products, was the platform’s integration with Adobe Experience Cloud. “It seamlessly integrates into products like Adobe Campaign, Adobe Target, and Adobe Advertising Cloud, so that when you deliver a piece of content — whether it’s an email with Campaign or a targeted message with Target or an ad across the Ad Cloud — those messages can deliver an optimized customer experience,” says Eric Stein, executive vice president and general manager at Branch.
The way Branch works is pretty straightforward — instead of using the typical tracking links to monitor campaign performance, you can use a Branch deep link on anything your customer might click on. Imbert’s team decided to do a comprehensive implementation where it used Branch links on all its landing pages, allowing the team to more precisely track the customer journey from these pages directly into a specific page on the Spark app. For example, when a user searched for YouTube Thumbnails on Google, they would land on Spark’s YouTube thumbnail landing page and then click on a call-to-action link to sign up. Then they would be deep linked straight into the editor within the Spark app with a YouTube thumbnail template from which to start creating.
This process allowed the Spark marketers to deliver a more connected customer experience, maintain context for the customer from one page to the next, and get better data to improve attribution. With that information, the team could make more informed decisions about where to invest marketing dollars.
Better visibility, better performance
With Branch, the Adobe Spark team saw massive increases in conversion. After integrating Branch’s deep links, conversions — or customers going from visiting one of the landing pages to publishing their second piece of content in Spark — increased by 95 percent. The Spark team also saw a 44% increase in customers creating their first project with Spark, a 17% increase in customers publishing their first project, and a 16% increase in customers publishing their second project with Spark. These performance improvements contributed to more engagement and higher retention within the Spark app.
“Branch has helped us dramatically improve activation and engagement of first-time Spark users,” says Michael Cao, Spark’s senior growth marketing manager. “Not only are users getting a more personalized experience that better matches their expectations, but their higher level of success leaves them with a better overall first impression of the product.” With Branch, the Adobe Spark team can better track customer lifetime value. The technology integrates with Adobe Analytics so the team can get enhanced reporting into what channels drive better performance. For example, the Spark team can determine which channels produce customers who continue to use the product three months or more after purchase. This, in turn, empowers the team to be more strategic about its marketing spend.
“Branch provides the Spark team with the entire story, from acquisition to retention, and the ability to understand where the best users are coming from,” Stein says.
For the Adobe Spark team, attribution is another major benefit of Branch’s solution.
Each Branch deep link is essentially another data point into the customer experience, allowing mobile apps like Adobe Spark to determine what percentage of their installs come from display or banner ads, SEO or email. Branch’s Identity Graph, which uses deterministic matching to identify and link users across devices, channels, and platforms, also lets the Adobe Spark team track customer identity across channels to drive more personalization and better attribution.
“That kind of insight is hard to get from mobile, and it’s what marketers are really looking for in order to have confidence spending money in mobile marketing activities,” Stein adds. Branch has helped Spark increase user engagement for first-time users. And the longer users engage with the product, this could potentially benefit SEO and brand awareness. Adobe Spark already has experienced an increase in organic landing page traffic to a whopping 1 million users per month.
But just as important, Branch gives Adobe Spark users a more connected experience — free from the frustrations they usually have as they engage with a brand across channels. “We have been able to fix the experience,” Imbert adds. “For the team, it’s clear that Branch is allowing us to deliver a seamless, unbroken experience.”
“With the success of our apps, we are excited to roll out Branch across Adobe Creative Cloud and enable deep-linking services to improve the consumer experience and gain insights into the impact of our marketing activities.”
Thibault Imbert, Former Head of Growth
Adobe Spark
