Deep Linking: The Big Push for Mobile App Marketing

Banners ads are already obsolete. Marketers increasingly avoid Even video ads just because of undermining user experience.

As many as 41% of young users actively block ads with tools like Adblock. Only 52% users allow Push Messages. These statistics confirm the strong resistance on the part of users against mobile ads. Naturally, marketers need to bank on something that is inherently different from mobile ads allowing natural interaction. Deep linking allowed marketers this scope of customer interaction in an innovative way.

The best thing about deep linking is that it does not come as a forceful invasion in the middle of doing something. It does not undermine user experience but on the contrary help, users to get in touch with their required contents. Deep links silently creeping inside contents and messages offers the powerful yet non-obtrusive scope of the engagement.

What is the Mobile Deep Linking?

Deep linking refers to a practice of providing HTTP web links inside a piece of content to allow users find more such valuable contents in context to their use. In the context of mobile apps they are used to help users to connect between app, to reach the app store page of an app from another webpage or app, to promote an app through a web content and to allow users reach a piece of content, they find relevant right from within the app. By implementing deep linking across a majority of apps, morevmarketing opportunities have been created.

Deep Linking push messages for promotions

Retail apps to promote their products and the retail store can send push messages with deep links to the app’s homepage or other product pages. Whenever your retail app is running a promotional campaign, you can announce the same through a deep linked push message. Users by clicking on the links contained within the app will be able to reach your homepage instantly. Even when the user is using other apps or engaged in other activities a deeply linked notification will take them straight to the product page.

Deep Linking to introduce new features

When your app has come up with a new feature, it may take some time for the users to navigate to that particular feature and come to know that it's there. On the other hand, you should not leave this scope of reaching your users with a value addition by allowing them to know about the newly added feature. But how can you announce this feature to the users innovatively and interactively? The deep links to the particular feature of your app offered through push notifications, in-app messages and emails can introduce the feature and help you reach your users a meaningful way.

Social media virality

It is now an established practice to create content for social media with deep links to the app to help users reach the app page directly and quickly. Now such deep linking can help your app going viral thanks to social media sharing of contents. There can be many users who find it interesting to share the same with their friends on social media and then there will be the people who consume the contents. With the sharing number of user, acquisition can pick up while there will be more usage of the app boosting the retention and engagement metrics.

Now, what happens when many of these content consumers start sharing your content again? Well, this sharing by the subsequent content consumers can make your content viral. Now to push this sharing and consuming further you can incentivise the content sharing leading to more possibility of making your app viral.

How grave is the impact on marketing?

Marketers worldwide know that no longer users subscribe to sales messages if it doesn't provide them with an impetus with utility and relevance. With the user experience getting the main focus across all digital channels, relevance and usefulness are key to making an impact with marketing messages.

Instead of merely amplifying a sales message you need to deliver up to user contexts as meaningfully as possible. Deep linking offers marketers an assured way of staying relevant and contextual while promoting their products, apps and any other business deliverables.

To understand the huge impact deep linking offered on marketing we need to assess the state of things before deep linking really became a reality. Prior to the popularity and inclusion of deep linking as a strategic marketing tool marketers could use links in two specific ways. Firstly, links provided in the content could only take users to a landing page with marketing messages for the app to download and secondly, links could lead users to an app home screen.

In both ways, the users were not taken to valuable contents they are likely to care for or app pages contextually relevant for them. Naturally, such links that are not sufficiently deep were only perceived as a distracting marketing ploy by most users. In complete contrast, the deep links of the contents within the app can take the users to the relevant contents. Moreover, thanks to deep linking marketers can now tweak their contents, in-app messages, notifications and emails to create relevant contexts to accommodate the links of the particular pages where they want to direct users.

User experience is central to any app marketing strategy now, and deep linking just fits well within that strategy. Mobile users are more frantic and restless, and this is why marketing needs to be more focused to user contexts. Deep links help marketers to achieve this in a more meaningful way.