For marketers, leveraging Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant for consumer engagement can seem daunting. When it comes to driving awareness and usage of a new voice experience, it seems there are multiple hurdles to get over. Getting users to discover and use your voice app on Amazon Alexa has been a top challenge for some time. Until recently, the process of promoting your voice app was akin to pulling out 1,000 cactus glochids with tweezers - necessary but very painful.
For digital marketers of voice apps today, it's been more education than value promotion. Answering the basic question of "How do I get started?" has been an essential hurdle to address with consumers.
You could wing it and go with the simple one-liners. "Alexa, open my insurance resource" or "Ok Google, open my workout buddy" but then you risk losing 90-95% of consumers who don't experience "the perfect outcome." Let's face it, the world is far from perfect (especially today) so are you going to bet on your one-liners working perfectly?
What if Alexa doesn't understand what you mean and maniacally starts spitting out suggestions? "Did you mean my intuit advisor?," "Did you mean advisors for sure?," "Did you mean insurance advisor pro?" It's any marketers nightmare. Even worse than the end-consumer experience is that your efforts might just end up promoting your competitors voice app. Shame! Shame! Shame!
Ok, so you quickly figured out that the "wing it strategy" isn't going to fly. Epic failure. Looks like we need to teach them how to find us. You dive in to write the most beautiful instructional copy anyone has ever written - ever. This is seriously good stuff. You should win a Nobel Prize for this, it's that good. The world is about to bend to your will and users will be flocking to your voice app at $.03 per conversion!
Some time later...
The discovery/thought pattern from here probably looked something like this:
- The copy is too long to fit in the ad!
- Ok, so we move the copy to a landing page and put the instructions there.
- Above the fold? Below the fold?
- Why isn't this working? Zero conversions!
- How can I make this shorter? It needs to be shorter
Needless to say, a digital marketers nightmare - regardless of your industry.
But then...one shinny, beautiful morning, prayers were answered. The heavens opened and the Amazon Gods bestowed upon us...
Quick Links are Amazon's answer to the mobile app deep link. Deep links allowed marketers to push users directly into the install page of a mobile app. Before deep links were introduced, marketers had to rely on "search and brand awareness" - not all that different than the nightmare I described above. The good ole days.
Deep links literally changed the game for mobile app marketers practically over night. Amazons Quick Links for Alexa Skills feels like that big of a game changer. A single link that drops users directly into your voice app. Good bye instructional marketing hell, welcome back value promotion! Whoop whoop!
Quick links provide your end users with a "launch page" which allows users to immediately jump into your voice app by simply selecting which of their devices they'd like to try it on. Not quite ready to give the voice app a go? No worries, there's a button to send a notification to their device allowing their device to remind them about it later.
Such a simple thing but the impact to the end user experience is incredible. Absolute genius!
Quick links are great and it really shows how Amazon is ahead of the game against it's competitors when it comes to making Amazon Alexa accessible. That being said, we here at True Reply thought we could make them just a tinsy tiny bit better.
Enter Voice App Links from True Reply. Quick Links are a great, quick way of driving users into your voice app but they are also very long and very ugly. We like things pretty. So we created Voice App Links or just "App Links."
True Reply Voice App Links are generated automatically when your voice app goes live with True Reply and they create a "pretty" way of sharing your voice app with your community, drop them in your ads, share them via newsletter, etc. Your App Links drop your users right into the same Launch Page as the longer (uglier) Quick Link, nothing lost. Everything gained. Only with True Reply. True Reply Voice App Links also come with a nifty, handy QR code to boot!
(Scan me please!)
Your True Reply Voice App Links are available right via your voice app dashboard as soon as your app is live. Just go to your voice app and click the link to copy it to your clipboard. From there, share it how and wherever you'd like. Tweet it, insta it, TikTok it, tattoo it on your bum just for fun. You can do whatever you want with it, share it however you want and users will always be able to use it to dive right into your voice app.
Boom! Mic dropped!