How to Double App Engagement and Mobile Purchases like Bloom & Wild

It’s no secret that app users are more likely to engage with content and have a higher lifetime value than their mobile web counterparts.

In fact, according to Criteo, 66% of mobile transactions occur within a native app. Similarly, App Annie found that users around the world spend 7X more time in native apps than they do in the mobile web.

However, it can be difficult to seamlessly identify and target users across paid, social, search, and mobile web channels in order to drive them to the native app, where they are much more likely to convert and continue to engage.

Bloom & Wild, a UK-based mobile and online florist with a fresh approach to flower delivery, built an industry-leading mobile app for iOS and Android that enabled app users to select and order carefully curated bouquets and arrangements in under a minute.

Bloom & Wild knew its native app was a critical part of its overall revenue stream, but the team wasn’t satisfied with the app’s install rate. They began to look for ways to quickly increase it at scale.

Delivering A Web-to-App Experience for Organic and Mobile Web Traffic

Bloom & Wild’s data indicated that the company was generating a high volume of organic traffic and mobile web traffic, but that these users weren’t downloading the app the company had so painstakingly built.

Bloom & Wild also knew its native app was a prime conversion point for these users, since it was another extension of the brand’s experience, and since they offered a frictionless checkout through Apple Pay.

Since Bloom & Wild first released its app, it has been leveraging Branch’s best-in-class deep links to build a foundation for its cross-platform brand experience. Now, however, the Bloom & WIld team needed to increase app engagement and purchases by funneling their low-cost, low-conversion organic and mobile web traffic seamlessly into the app. Ultimately, the team decided to turn to Branch’s Journeys to drive web-to-app acquisition and attribution.

Targeted Smart Banners Drove App Installs from Organic and Mobile Web

One of the most critical ways to capture and engage new app users is to display personalized banners and promotions that drive them to the appropriate app store and route new users directly to desired content in-app.

On mobile websites integrated with Journeys, you can present targeted, personalized smart banners or interstitials with the option to download or open specific in-app content if the user chooses. Journeys smart banners contain deferred deep links that retain pre-install context and automatically open up the app when it’s installed, or to fall back to an App Store page if not.

Journeys smart banners supercharge app download strategies by enabling scalable personalization and targeting to appropriate users based on device and behavioral factors, and Journeys’ A/B test functionality ensures that creative messaging resonates.

Overall, Bloom & Wild leveraged Branch’s Journeys for:

  • Audience segmentation: Targeting only web visitors without the app installed, to avoid promoting the app to existing app users.
  • A/B testing: Running as many as a dozen variations of banners simultaneously to test the effectiveness of different colors, calls to action, and placements, so the team can find the most effective combination of message and creative.
  • Intuitive banner editing: Customizing the look and feel of each banner easily without developer involvement, using Branch’s WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Journeys editor.

Bloom & Wild Web-to-App Smart Banner

The ability to segment, A/B test, and edit banners quickly and easily helped Bloom & Wild create the targeted app messaging it needed, and Journey’s world-class deep linking infrastructure ensured that users’ contexts were retained, even through the app install and app open processes.

As a result, the number of Bloom & Wild users completing first purchases in the app doubled almost immediately.

To find out more about how Branch’s Journeys helped Bloom & Wild double first-time app purchases, read the full case study here.

And if you’d like to learn more about how Branch can power similar growth for your app, click here to request a demo.