Our Product Updates give you a rundown of all the features and bug fixes that are being deployed - plus one handy tip of the week. Here's what's happening:
New Welcome Emails
We've received great feedback from you, the network, that there is room for improvement in our welcome emails. So, we dug in to figure out how we could make them as effective as possible at directing new users to the parts of our sites that would make them engaged and keep them engaged.
A big part of this work was launching a month-long test with seven different metros to test four alternate versions of our welcome email.
The results of the test indicate that the most effective welcome email for us is a plain-text email with a single call to download the app followed by a request for feedback.
Plain-text email....
We chose the plain text format as opposed to a designed email because the plain-text email had a 9% higher open rate than the control emails with the same subject line in testing. This commitment to plain-text is further supported by similar network tests which have consistently indicated that, in general, plain-text emails are more deliverable than designed ones.
A single call to action....
Focusing on the app download....
In our tests, more people who opened the welcome emails clicked on the app download links than any other link in the test or control emails. Out of all welcome email recipients, 6.23% of them clicked the app link, compared to 3.61% for giveaways, .61% for the homepage and .61% for syncing their Facebook or Spotify accounts. An app download click is also more likely to lead to long-term engagement with your metro than a link to your giveaways page, and informing users about the app after signup is a logical next step in the onboarding process.
We'll be rolling out these emails to the network tomorrow morning. We'll continue to monitor their performance across the network - and if you have any ideas for further tests with these (or any other emails), please let us know!
Deep Links - An Update & New Recommendation
While deep links are an attractive and effective partnership tool when they work effectively, the nature of our platform's development process and the available deep link providers' functionality is such that deep links are too unreliable to be counted on. We keep fixing them and they keep breaking with each new update - and there's nothing to ensure that this won't keep happening, despite our continued efforts.
Therefore, you should no longer use deep links to direct users to specific pages within the app, you should no longer pitch them into partnerships and we are not going to spend any more time working to fix them within the near future.
This said, it's important to note the difference between deep links and linking people to download the app. You can (and should) still track installs with dedicated branch links that take people to the proper version of the app store depending on their device (such as app.doXYZ.com). You should still pitch these into partnerships - and you should be reaching out to Support for us to provide you with a download link whenever directing people to the app store as part of a download campaign.
Your messaging - when directing people to partnership content in the app via a branch link - should be similar to deep links in that you'll say "Download the DoStuff app to do this thing..." but you'll want to make sure that either (A) users can easily find what they're looking for once landing on your app home page or (B) you provide them with any instructions they need to find the thing that the promotion is tied to.
As always, please let us know if you have any questions about this.
New Subject Lines For Band Notification Emails
You may have noticed a slight change in the subject lines of your band notification emails. They used to be "Just Announced: {bands}" - and now they're "{bands} - Just Announced".
This change was the result of another recent growth test, in which we tested our existing subject lines against four alternate versions in three different metros. "{bands} - Just Announced" was the winner in every metro - so we've rolled that line out to the whole network (and the Spanish equivalent for our Spanish metros, of course).
This data echoes a larger trend that has popped up in many of our tests - whenever possible, naming specific bands in subject lines and social posts increases engagement across the board.
Tip Of The Week: Send Us Your Test Ideas
Since our #1 priority for this year is audience growth, we've been rolling out two unique tests every week in order to learn more about what drives real long-term growth. We have a lot of great ideas for tests - some we thought of and some that came through conversations with you, the network.
But we want more! So, if you have a focused idea for a growth opportunity that we can test, shoot it over to Support! If it's awesome, we'll do it - and if it passes, we'll roll it out to the whole network.
