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Amazon Web Services (AWS) SES

Connect Branch and Amazon Simple Email Service to enable a seamless email-to-app linking experience.

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Overview

Driving your customers from email to app is an amazing way for them to get more comfortable with your brand and increase conversions. Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES) is a cloud-based email sending service designed to help digital marketers and application developers send marketing, notification, and transactional emails.

How does it work?

  1. User clicks on a link in an email from their mobile mail client (Gmail, Apple Mail, etc.)
  2. If the user has the app installed and the link has a corresponding screen in the app, the app will open and deep link the user to the right content.
    • Ex. Product detail page, category shopping page, etc.
  3. If the user does not have the app installed or the link only corresponds to a screen on the web, the user is routed to the website using their default mobile web browser.
    • Ex. Unsubscribe link, privacy policy, etc.
  4. Obtained or set up your Amazon Simple Email Service click tracking domain (CTD). Reach out to your Amazon SES account manager for assistance on this.

Prerequisites

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Required Roles

Branch's Universal Email requires the following roles involved in order to enable:

  • Developers
  • CRM/Email Team
  • AWS SES Account Manager / Support Team

In order to enable Amazon Simple Email Service, you need to have completed the following:

  1. Admin access to your Branch Dashboard.
  2. Have Branch's Engagement product enabled for your Branch Account.
  3. Implemented the Branch SDK into your mobile app (iOS | Android)

Enable Amazon SES

Connect Amazon Simple Email Service in Branch

In the Branch Dashboard in Email → Manager tab, find AWS and click Enable

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Input Click Tracking Domain

Click tracking domains allow you to track engagement on email opens and link clicks.

The Amazon SES integration requires you provide the following:

  • Click Tracking Domain - The domain you use with Amazon SES for links in emails
  • Amazon SES Domain - The domain Amazon SES uses to collect data

For additional help, please see Amazon's documentation.

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Click Tracking Domain

  • Remove https:// when adding your click tracking domain.
  • Never add the same CTD to both your Live and Test Branch environments.
  • You can enable the integration with multiple CTDs, if needed, but you cannot add the same CTD to multiple Branch Dashboards or ESP integrations.

Configure your App

Add your Amazon Simple Email Service CTD to your Associated Domains

For your iOS App, you must add the CTD to the Associated Domains. Additional details can be found here.

Add Handle Web-Only Content App Code

If you have links to content that exist only on the web and not in the app (for example, a temporary marketing webpage that isn't in the app), then this code snippet will ensure all links that have not had deep linking script applied will open in a browser. Details can be found here.

Return YES to continueUserActivity

Additionally, you will need to add the CTD to your iOS app's info.plist file. Additional details can be found here.

Point DNS CNAME to Branch

Please follow your web hosting provider’s instructions on how to configure your DNS CNAME.

Here are a few common provider’s instructions for reference:

Update the DNS CNAME and point it to thirdparty.bnc.lt. Once the CNAME record is added, please allow up to an hour for Branch to generate SSL and AASA files for your click tracking domain.

Important CNAME Info

  • The Branch dashboard must be enabled & reflect the CTD BEFORE you add the CNAME.
  • If the CTD already has SSL setup, confirm if your security credentials allow a 3rd party to submit a CSR on behalf of the domain. If not, contact Branch's Support team, to coordinate providing an SSL certificate manually to Branch.
  • Once the CNAME is added, Branch auto-generates an SSL certificate and AASA file for your click tracking domain. It may take up to an hour to resolve SSL errors once you change the CNAME. During this time, link redirects on the click tracking domain will redirect to the Default URL you provided in the General Configuration section of your account.
  • If you are making this change to a live domain with active email click traffic, schedule the CNAME change to occur during an off-hours time with low click traffic.

Add Branch Links to your Emails

Before you start sending your email campaigns, you need to determine what flow you want the user to experience and flag your email links accordingly.

Add Deep Linking Flag

For the email links that you would like to deep link to content, add $deep_link=true to the URL as a query parameter, for example:

<a href="links.example.com?$deep_link=true" >Link to your app!</a>

This will ensure that your links are converted to Branch links that will open the app on iOS and Android, with full tracking and attribution.

Add Web-only Flag

With your email service provider, all email links will open the app by default. In order for your app to know that the email link should bounce to web after opening the app, add $web_only=true to your links as a query parameter, for example:

<a href="links.example.com?$web_only=true" >Link to your app!</a>

Analytics on the Branch Dashboard

To see how the email campaigns have performed and break it down into campaigns, it is very essential to tag your email links with the ~campaign tag. If your team uses UTM tags, Branch will also ingest the UTM_campaign tag. This will help dedupe the numbers and hence see the downstream events. You can add the campaign tag in any comparisons and filters in any Dashboard views.

Updated 3 months ago