Many marketers have spent many hours getting users to click a link. Now, a New York City-based mobile marketing agency is launching a way for marketers to create links that know your surrounding conditions.
Life in Mobile is the name of the agency, and they are today announcing Linknexus. The new platform allows marketers to drag and drop a flowchart whose various if/then conditions, fed by live data, immediately determine where the link will go.
It’s part of a new trend toward highly personalized, highly granular marketing and advertising that is tailored to you at that moment. For years, Web pages have been built for your behavior and history. Now we're seeing new online ads that can generate on-the-spot configurations just for you.
Let’s say you click on a Linknexus-connected mobile link for Smirnoff’s liquors, one of Life in Mobile’s clients during its just-concluded private beta for the platform.
It’s warm where you are, a weekend early evening, and you’re near a participating liquor store. Therefore, the link directs you to a landing page that suggests a fruity cocktail (popular in warm weather) and offers a 15-percent-off coupon for Smirnoff’s vodka at that liquor store, good for the next four hours.
If it’s cold outside, a weekday, early morning, and you’re in the middle of nowhere, the same link instead leads to a general ad page for Smirnoff’s product line and a 10 percent discount for online purchases.
Life in Mobile’s CEO and founder John Lim told me that the Smirnoff test resulted in a 36 percent increase in users who took advantage of the discount.
I asked him if he was familiar with IFTTT, which stands for If-This-Then-That. It allows users to create what it calls “recipes,” where conditions can be set for one action or device to interact with another. If it’s raining, for instance, send me a text reminder to take an umbrella.
Lim replied that he is quite familiar with IFTTT, and sees them as the only major competitor at the moment for these kind of conditional links. IFTTT’s recipes, he said, are limited, plus that platform is oriented toward consumers as a way to handle life.
Linknexus, by contrast, is built for marketers and is extendable. It can handle up to 20 conditional variables, including weather, a search keyword trending on Google, location, proximity, or device, while Lim said IFTTT generally maxes out at 3 or so.
Linknexus also has an API so it can feed data to, or take direction from, a marketing automation tool. For instance, Linknexus’ anonymous profiles on users and their most common conditions -- lives in warm weather and buys vodka, for instance -- can be used by a customer relationship management system or a lead generation platform.
Lim also suggests this kind of “post-click optimization” can lead to a different kind of A/B testing. Instead of alternatives built for parallel environments or varying times, live results with many alternate outcomes driven from the same source can be continually tweaked.
The link can be generated by Linknexus, or the platform can use the marketer’s link, which is directed to the Linknexus platform by Javascript or APIs. The link can live on a Web page, a mobile Web page, a digital ad, email, text, or an app. If it’s directed into another app, Lim says the platform supports deep linking so the destination can be within an app.