When engaging with your customers, it’s important to consider how and what you’re communicating.
Are you sharing the right information? Getting to the point fast enough? Making it easy for your customers to take action? Are you providing them with a top-notch experience every time they interact with your brand?
Businesses come to Bitly for help optimizing their critical customer touchpoints—whether they engage with several dozen customers or several million. Here are nine ways businesses use Bitly, from brand building to SMS.
1 – Brand building
Many businesses turn their customer communications into branding opportunities using branded Bitly links. With branded links, businesses can replace the generic “bit.ly” with something that better suits their brand. For example, look at how online media titan BuzzFeed uses Bitly with their “bzfd.it” link.
Companies attract more clicks on branded links compared to non-branded ones. Plus, using branded links, they can maintain a consistent brand across all of their channels, content and communications.
2 – App installs & mobile engagement
Some customers take advantage of mobile deep links, which allow them to route people to a specific place in their app or to the app store to download it.
One widely-used telecommunications company used a branded deep link to directly drive viewers from the TV to its mobile app to redeem a promotion. For those who didn’t already have the app installed on their devices, they were prompted to download it. As a result, the company saw a significant boost in app engagement and downloads.
3 – SMS appointment reminders & delivery tracking
The second largest package delivery service in the United Kingdom leverages Bitly to deliver informative, branded SMS messages to as many as a quarter of a million customers a day. Using the Bitly API, they can generate unique links at scale to enable their customers to track the status of their packages.
Many other businesses take advantage of the API to send appointment reminders to their clientele. For example, some healthcare companies send their patients unique links via SMS with information on their upcoming appointment, including time, location and other important details.
Read: The Complete Guide to Using Short Links for SMS
4 – Kiosk ordering
One popular restaurant chain uses Bitly for online and kiosk ordering. They give their customers who order online or at a kiosk the ability to track the life cycle of their order using a unique Bitly link.
By doing this, the company has been able to improve its customer experience, since customers can quickly and easily place their order, and then track it from the convenience of their desktop or mobile device.
5 – Loyalty rewards
Some businesses use Bitly in their loyalty rewards programs, which offers perks to customers who make frequent purchases.
A popular bookstore chain has customers sign up with their phone numbers to join their loyalty program. This enables the business to send members promotional content, like coupons and deals, then use Bitly to understand which offers receive the most engagement.
6 – Influencer marketing
Another way businesses use Bitly is to provide their influencers unique tracking links quickly and easily. When an influencer shares their link out across their channels, click activity is reflected in Bitly in real-time.
The data businesses get on each click is critical to the optimization of their influencer programs. For example, a retail chain might find that influencers who are located in a city that has a storefront in it drive the most value. As a result, the business might decide to invest more in those specific influencers.
7 – Offline campaigns
Businesses can also leverage Bitly QR Codes to move people from their offline to online experience in seconds.
Customers use QR Codes in many ways, like building their email subscriber lists, boosting their social media followings and sharing promotions and discounts. Using QR Codes, businesses give their audiences an even easier and direct way to access their content.
8 – Customer service
Customer service teams use Bitly to manually and programmatically offer support, deliver product information and provide customer service.
Teams can leverage Bitly links to point customers to help articles and website pages, whether they’re fielding customer questions via email and social media or working directly with customers during onboarding. For example, one business shares branded mobile deep links pointing to explainer videos on YouTube to help customers troubleshoot issues with their products.
9 – Digital & social media marketing
Bitly is used widely by teams that run marketing campaigns across multiple digital channels, including social media.
Bitly’s Campaigns feature is extremely valuable to these marketers. It allows customers to easily compare channel performance in real-time without having to jump from platform to platform. Digital and social media marketers also take advantage of branded links to track social engagement, and to gauge which combinations of content and channels work best.
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Powerful metrics behind every click
No matter the use case, Bitly gives teams critical data on every click. This includes total number of clicks, referrer information, city-level data and country-level data.
With this rich link-level data, businesses can take a close look at what content and communications engages their audience, and, ultimately, optimize every customer touchpoint.