There has been plenty of discourse on “mobile-email” and “social-email” integration, but are marketers taking full advantage of the opportunity to tightly integrate all three?
As our infographic from March 2013 revealed, as many as 69% of B2C enterprise email marketing campaigns are viewed on smartphones or tablets, with desktop representing just 31% of total opens. In addition, recent research from Forrester forecasts that by 2018, the number of U.S. social media users accessing Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn on mobile devices will exceed 200 million (to put that number in perspective, the total U.S. population is currently about 315 million). Forrester also noted that the share of time spent on mobile social networking apps continues to increase, and social media apps are among the top apps that smartphone users use.
So how can marketers make all three of these popular digital channels—mobile, social, and email—integrate more seamlessly?
Forward-thinking email marketers are doing this by deep linking to mobile apps. We covered deep linking last month (check out the blog post: “Deep Linking in Email Marketing: How it Works, and Why it Rocks!”), and shared a few examples of how brands like Comedy Central, Seamless, and American Eagle Outfitters have used deep linking to promote downloads and usage of their brand’s own mobile apps in email campaigns, and have seen great results.
But the macro-trends point to another, major untapped opportunity: Deep linking in email to native-installed social media apps that are ubiquitous on most users’ mobile devices—like Facebook and Twitter. The chances of these apps being on your users’ phones is greater than your own mobile app being installed, after all.
How it works: A mobile email user can click on the Facebook icon next to your logo, and be brought directly to your company’s page inside his or her installed Facebook mobile app, as opposed to prompting www.facebook.com to open in their mobile browser. Yet, if they opened the same exact email on a desktop, www.facebook.com would open. Movable Ink’s technology can detect the open device and check for mobile app installs all within milliseconds, allowing for an optimal user experience.
Twitter stands out as a unique social media use case for deep-linking. We’ve helped leading consumer brands enable pre-populated tweets in email by using deep-linking to the Twitter app. For example, an email recipient can “click to tweet” and if on a mobile device, their Twitter app will open with a pre-populated tweet of the marketer’s choosing. If the recipient opens the same email on a desktop, www.twitter.com is loaded with the same pre-populated tweet ready to send out. Customers can more easily engage with brands on Twitter, and marketers can prompt consumers to share specific language, links, or hashtags.
We’re excited about the ability to deep link to social media apps on mobile, and see this innovation as a game changer for marketers who are hoping to integrate their digital channels. Let us know what you think in the comments below, or reach out to us with any questions or thoughts.