5 ways dynamic linking can help grow your business

As marketers, we spend a lot of time carefully piecing together campaigns that we think will appeal to our target audience. And when you take into account how many segments within that target audience we’re trying to appeal to, that adds up to a whole lot of work.

So why do we do it?

Marketing without targeting is like running in quicksand- there’s nothing stopping you from doing it, but you won’t get very far.

This wasn’t always the case, though. Mass marketing was once a very popular way to market and advertise to consumers. Its “one-size-fits-all” approach suited a lot of companies because it saved them time and resources. And no doubt lost them a lot of potential customers along the way.

In recent years we’ve seen a massive shift in the marketing industry from being company-driven to customer-driven. So now everything we do is hyper-targeted.

But, this hyper-targeted culture often means creating multiple assets- with multiple links, for multiple destinations- for every campaign, which is an effort to even say aloud, let alone do.

With dynamic linking, you can personalize the content your audience sees based on who’s clicking on your links.

In this article you’ll learn how to use dynamic linking to not only save valuable time when creating marketing campaigns, but to ensure your audience is consistently served relevant, up-to-date content and never lands on a dead or expired page. Win/win, right?

But before we get into that, let’s cover the basics.

What is dynamic linking?

Usually, when you share a link and someone clicks on it, they’re brought straight to the page or website that’s associated with that link. But this can prove difficult if, say, the website you’re sending them to is in French, and they don’t speak the language. Or if you’re sending them to a pricing page in Yen, but they’re not familiar with the currency. Any of these things can result in major drop off from potential customers- which is the last thing anyone wants.

If you haven’t already guessed, dynamic linking is a simple solution to this problem.

When you create what’s known as a dynamic link, you can actually program that link to send your customers to a wide variety of destinations based on their behavior.

How it works

Dynamic linking is a great way to ensure your marketing campaigns are super targeted, accessible and relevant to your diverse audience. In a time when mass marketing is the furthest thing from what customers want, attention to detail is vital.

Similar to workflow automations, dynamic linking works in a “if this, then that” format.

And because it’s rare that anyone’s audience would be restricted to one spoken language, country or even timezone, it means that you can set the link to know that if the person clicking falls under X rule, they’ll be brought to Y destination.

There are 5 main rules you can use to segment your audience using dynamic linking, so let’s dive in and take a look at what they are.

1. Country

International campaigns that cater to currencies and time zones of different countries can be difficult to set up and monitor. And it stands to reason that the nature of the content you’re directing people to will need to change depending on these factors.

For example, let’s say that you’re an international, online retailer and you want to have a flash sale across your site.

You also want to make sure that you have different levels of discounts displayed for different currencies so it’s weighted evenly (and doesn’t hurt your profits 😉). How should you go about doing this?

Using dynamic links to set a country-based rule means you can offer your customers discounts that line up with the rate of currency exchange, so everyone’s getting a fair deal.

Popular online clothing store Missguided use this method across their geo-segmented site.

In the images below you’ll see that their US site is offering a 50% discount:

Whereas the UK site visitors are seeing a discount of 25%:

2. Device

When planning a campaign, it’s important to consider the device your target audience will be viewing your content from. With dynamic linking, you can set a rule that anyone who accesses the link from a mobile device automatically gets redirected to a mobile-optimized page or your app.

The ability to link people directly to your app is a combination of two link technologies- dynamic linking and deep linking.

A deep link acts as a bridge between a traditional web link and a mobile application. If users haven’t already downloaded your app, it will direct them to the App or Play Store and prompt them to download it, ensuring that they get the best user experience possible.

3. Language

Lots of companies have their websites segmented by language. But when it comes to planning a campaign, this can often mean splitting up the target audience for your ads by language and setting the destination URL for each to be different. Like so:

• yourbrand.com/en
• yourbrand.com/fr
• yourbrand.com/es

Dynamic linking lets you add rules to a single link to your homepage, will automatically detect the browser language of the person clicking on the link and direct them to the appropriate, localized page.

4. Time

There are many ways time parameters can influence your marketing campaigns. Depending on the nature of your business, you might have the need to advertise different products or services at different hours of the day.

For example, a restaurant that has lunch specials from 1-2 everyday, or a bar that does a cocktail hour on a Thursday evening needs to be able to point people to their temporary menu for the time period its available, and then back to their full menu on either side of that window.

Can you imagine having to alternate the destination URLs of your campaigns to direct people to these offers at these specific times, and then having to switch them back?

Well, that’s a reality for a lot of people.  

Dynamic linking enables you to shift destinations to promotional pages like the lunch specials menu for that set period of time. And when the offer is no longer available, it automatically switches back to your normal page or website.

5. Date

Broken or expired links are every marketer’s worst nightmare. And when you’re managing time-sensitive or temporary promotional campaigns at scale, there’s always a chance that one or two legacy links might slip under the radar.

You can use a dynamic link to set a rule that after the promotion’s timeframe has elapsed, anyone who clicks on that same link is directed to another page. Much better than sending people to an expired offer or worse- an error 404 page!

Wrapping up

As the old saying goes, the customer is always right. And In a time when competition for attention is rife among brands, every window of opportunity to give them a good brand experience is like gold dust.  

Dynamic linking is a super helpful way to make sure your audience is always seeing content that’s tailored specifically to them, as well as avoiding them having bad experiences by landing on dead pages.

As with anything personalized, this will let current and potential customers know that you’re paying attention and going the extra mile, which at the end of the day is what will set you apart from your competitors.

How have you used dynamic linking in a creative way? We’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Further reading: 

• The 6 Best URL Shorteners and How to Choose The Right One
• How to Shorten a URL and Showcase Your Brand

This article is about: 

• Dynamic linking
• Link routing
• Traffic routing
• Deep linking

Dario De Guz