8tracks, the popular user-curated music service, has been focused on growing their mobile app among both new users and existing web users. With native app usage surpassing mobile browsing, the 8tracks team aimed to create a seamless experience to draw people into their app. To do this successfully, they leveraged the Branch deep linking platform and rolled Branch links out across mobile web, email, and social. Users who experienced Branch’s enhanced deep linking would spend close to 200% more time active in the app, and came back the next day with nearly 90% more than users that received the generic onboarding flow or were sent to the home screen.
Summary
8tracks, the popular user-curated music service, has been focused on growing their mobile app among both new users and existing web users. With native app usage surpassing mobile browsing, the 8tracks team aimed to create a seamless experience to draw people into their app. To do this, they leveraged the Branch deep linking platform and rolled Branch links out across mobile web, email and social.
8tracks has very loyal users, but there’s always room for improvement. Users who experienced Branch’s enhanced deep linking would spend close to 200% more time active in the app, and came back the next day nearly 90% more than users who received the generic onboarding flow or who were sent to the home screen. It was hugely impactful to 8tracks’ business metrics.
Goals
- Improve user onboarding experience
- Improve user retention rates
- Increase engagement and mobile app usage
Approach
- Add Branch to support deferred and direct deep linking
- Deep link into specific playlists, even for new users
- Integrate Branch links across mobile web and other channels
Results
- Users redirected straight to playlists instead of having to search for it
- 197% increase in time spent in app
- 89% increase in one-day retention
The Problem
The music industry is a very competitive vertical. To get ahead of competitors, 8tracks knew they had to build out a native mobile community of its own. This is not an easy undertaking, as it often requires users to install an app and complete additional onboarding steps to continue where they left off. Conversion rates for this flow are notoriously low, and reliably tracking app installs is challenging (to say the least). However, it’s been shown that the investment in native mobile is a worthwhile one, since users are 300% more likely to convert and spend 7x more time in native apps versus in the mobile web.
The Solution
One example flow built by the team was the mobile web prompt. 8tracks targets users listening on mobile web to switch to the more favorable native app experience through the use of a small interstitial and a simple green button in the mobile web UI. Powered by Branch links, the calls to actions on these banners yield extremely accurate deep linking as well full-funnel attribution across views, clicks, and custom event conversion. Clicking either of these brings the user directly to the same playlist in the app, where they can resume listening with the superior UI.
The results speak for themselves. A user routed directly to his or her desired playlist spends 197% more time in the app than a user that installs and has to search for the desired content themselves. These same users were also 89% more likely to come back the second day. In other words, 8tracks cut app abandonment in half for this portion of their user base.
Conclusion
By leveraging Branch to power deep linking for their channels, 8tracks was able to build powerful new user flows that had a significant impact on their business and keeps users coming back. Beyond the improved user experience, 8tracks was able to get real time feedback into the conversion rates everywhere Branch was placed.
- 197% increase in time spent in app
- 89% increase in one-day retention