Deep linking for email marketers

Writing to explore the thought of: “How can an email marketer can use deep links and universal links to provide value to their users?”

I didn’t hear the term deep link or universal link until 2019 when I began working for Braze. In the context of email marketing, it was explained to me in simple terms that these were links that could be used within an email that when clicked, would check to see if the user has the app installed and if so, send the user into the app. If not, the link could drive the subscriber to the App Store to hopefully result in said app download.

Outside of email marketing, deep links seem to be mainly used for mobile ad campaigns and social campaigns. 

An email marketing scenario

Scenario: Zara is having a sale, yahoo! They send me an email that tells me to shop now. My friend and I both receive emails at the same time and both click the main CTA. But our experiences are different. What’s the kicker? The email I have has a deep link used for the main CTA, and the email my friend received has a normal web link.

My experience: When I click the email, the app on my phone opens up because I have the app installed. I can now do all my shopping from the app, which has my wishlist saved. I ended up purchasing most of the items that I saved.

My friend’s experience: My friend clicks the email and is taken to the Zara.com sale collection URL on the web. She spends time scrolling but doesn’t end up purchasing anything and doesn’t add anything to her cart.

The overall result: using a deep link allowed me to land in the app that I am familiar with and have frequently used. Although my friend frequents Zara.com almost just as much as I do the app, if a deep link hadn’t been used and I was sent to the web, I probably wouldn’t have purchased items from my wishlist as I wasn’t automatically logged in.

The overall use of a deep link increased conversion and retention for Zara. 

So, what is a deep link? 

It’s a specific link that leverages a custom URL scheme (iOS Universal Links) or an intent URL (on Android devices). 

Alright, so what’s so tricky about it? Can’t a deep link just be something like www.zara.com/sale? Nope. Web links don’t work with mobile apps. You can’t simply drive a user into your app with a regular link. You’ll most likely need some link that starts with myapp:// instead of www. Yuck!

Alright, what is a universal link? 

Nothing can be simple, can it! Universal links are iOS-specific (iOS 9 and above). Don’t ask me why Apple did this when deep links could probably do just fine, but they did. From my understanding, they’re more secure than deep links. If anyone could elaborate as to why, please email me! 

Opportunities for deep linking from email

Let’s pretend you’re being called for dinner to a friends. But let’s also still talk about deep links.

It might be easiest to have one deep link that drops your user into the home page of your app (think of this as receiving your dinner invite and teleporting into the entry-way of your friend’s mansion), which hypothetically is better than no deep link (being dropped in the driveway). Still, the potential to land in various mansion rooms is much better. 

Ok, hypothetical dinner party over. Here are some natural scenarios that would be beneficial to use a deep link for, I’ve included what I would expect their non-deep link web URL to look like: 

• A terms and conditions update email that asks a user to update their emergency contact info. This email might use a deep link to drive the user into their Account Settings instead of the home page. I’d normally expect this URL slug to look something like /account-settings. 

• Uber sends me an email asking me to review my last trip driver. This email drops me right into a summary of my last trip inside the app. I’d expect this URL slug to look something like /last-trip-summary. 

• A daily journal reminder email. This email asks me to fill out a daily journal entry and drops me right into my app where I can begin typing out my entry. The URL slug I’d expect would look something like /new-entry.

Look at all that marketing possibility! 

Industry Hurdles

Over the years, I’ve noticed that deep and universal links are heavily used by paid ad teams (performance marketing) to encourage app downloads from users and generate leads. But have significant benefits for companies when used by Email and Lifecycle Marketers as well. However, I rarely hear Email and Lifecycle Marketers discuss these types of links — which makes me think that we (as marketers) rarely have an opportunity to own the tools that can generate them (Branch, Adjust, Appsflyer) or are given visibility into how they are generated (somehow always in my experience gated with developers). 

My experience as an Email/Lifecycle Marketer has primarily consisted of asking Product Managers when building out emails “what’s the deep link for this?” in reference to CTA’s or using a web link that redirects to a deep link (entirely out of my realm). These deep links have all been defined and created by Developers and are simply passed back to me to include in the communication. The realm of deep linking has always been somewhat gated to Developers, even with tools on the market that are meant to be DIY marketer solutions. 

I’ve also found that in certain drag-and-drop email editors, I can’t add deep links with this format (myapp://) as a URL as it pushes back as not a supported type. If I wanted to include this link in an email, I had to add it directly within the HTML instead of using a drag-and-drop solution.

When researching how to create a deep link (outside of using a tool like Branch, Appsflyer, or Adjust), I’m hit with the note:

“It requires a little specialist coding. What this will look like is different based on the operating systems that the app is optimized for.”

I think this is where tools like Branch, Adjust, and Appsflyer come in, to marry the “little specialist coding” and the speed at which marketers need these links. If you’ve read articles I’ve written before, you might pick up that I think there are plenty of workarounds for marketers to break the binds that are caused by learning curves, other teams “owning” data, or how data is ingested, and reflecting on this article that I’ve just written, deep linking still has some room to become a potential “marketer” owned initiative.

For any Email Marketer that does own one of these tools — did YOU lead the charge in bringing it onboard? How have you seen success since integrating it?