How an eCommerce Loyalty Platform Cut Time-to-Purchase by 66%

KPIs / Success Metrics

• 66% drop in time from app install to first purchase
• 500% increase in revenue driven by push notifications, with 50–80% revenue uplift across email and content cards
• 4,500 hours saved per year in campaign production, with 97.5% faster delivery and 360% more merchant brands visible to members in every email

Intro

A leading Australia-based eCommerce loyalty platform connects two million members with over 2,000 merchant partners across retail, travel, groceries, and finance. The platform’s differentiator is its ability to deliver a personalized cashback experience based on member behaviour, rather than the one-size-fits-all communications common to the category.

The Head of Customer Engagement (CRM & Lifecycle) is responsible for marketing performance, campaign strategy, and engagement outcomes across email, push, app, and web. As the business shifted to an app-first strategy, the team faced pressure to retain existing members, lift engagement, and recover acquisition costs faster.

TL;DR

• The team’s flagship lifecycle program reached two million members with no personalization, surfaced no more than 17 of 2,000 merchant offers in any given send, and lost visibility into purchase behaviour the moment a member clicked through.
• Engagement was declining, manual campaign production consumed roughly 90 hours of team time every week, and the platform could not measure or activate audiences based on real downstream behaviour.
• The Head of Customer Engagement (CRM & Lifecycle) brought together AppsFlyer’s Deep Linking Suite and Audience Segmentation with Braze’s customer engagement platform to power personalized, app-first lifecycle journeys at scale, cutting time-to-first-purchase by two-thirds and reclaiming over 4,500 hours of production time a year.

The hidden cost of one-size-fits-all lifecycle marketing

The platform’s flagship “Trending Offers” email went to all two million members with no personalization. At most, 17 of the 2,000 available merchants appeared in any send. Every member, regardless of life stage, recent purchases, or category interest, received the same content.

Behind the scenes, marketing, email, and content teams were spending roughly 90 hours every week manually collating cashback deals and assembling sends. Engagement was declining across email, push, and the app. Customer acquisition cost was high, the time from install to first purchase was slow, and the business was not seeing a return on its marketing investment.

Compounding the problem, downstream visibility broke at the “Shop Now” click. The team could not consistently see whether members went on to purchase, which left a gap in audience segmentation and made it difficult to power lifecycle campaigns based on real behavioural signals. As the Head of Customer Engagement put it, every member was getting “mystery meat” content that did not match what they actually wanted to buy.

The team needed three things working together: deep links that delivered the right in-app destination at scale, accurate measurement of post-click behaviour to power audience segmentation, and a customer engagement platform that could orchestrate personalized journeys without the manual overhead.

What actually needed fixing: three layers working as one system

The AppsFlyer and Braze customer success teams worked closely with the platform’s marketing and engineering teams on joint architecture design, integration setup, and ongoing optimization as the personalization program scaled.

The Head of Customer Engagement chose to bring AppsFlyer and Braze together because the combination directly addressed every gap holding the lifecycle program back: routing members to the right in-app experience at scale, unlocking behavioural data to sharpen  segmentation, and orchestrating personalized, automated journeys without manual campaign assembly.

The first foundational layer was deep linking. AppsFlyer’s Deep Linking Suite, powered by OneLink technology, became the connective tissue between every outbound message and the in-app experience. The team built a catalogue of more than 1,500 deep links covering every merchant on the platform, with each link automatically resolving to the right destination based on the member’s device and context. 

Crucially, these deep links did not sit in isolation. They synchronised directly into Braze’s catalogues, so that whenever Braze assembled a personalized email or push for a member, the correct AppsFlyer-generated deep link was inserted automatically alongside the merchant’s logo, offer, and creative. The two products acted as one system: AppsFlyer ensuring intent carried from message to in-app destination, Braze ensuring the message itself was personalized and on-brand.

The second layer was orchestration at scale. With the deep linking foundation in place, the team built a single Braze canvas template using Connected Content API calls, content blocks, and Liquid logic to dynamically assemble a unique email for each recipient, pulling live merchant offers and applying the personalization model’s recommendations on the fly. 

The reason this could scale across the full 1,500-merchant catalogue without manual work was because every offer Braze inserted already had its AppsFlyer deep link resolved and ready. Decision splits inside the Braze canvas drove experimentation across personalization models and subject lines, and the same templates powered push, email, and content cards from a single source of truth.

The third layer closed the loop on data. AppsFlyer Audiences, part of the Measurement Suite, gave the team the ability to build segments based on real in-app behaviour, with purchase events flowing back into AppsFlyer to power segmentation around behaviours like “purchased in the travel category in the last 30 days” or “active app user but no purchase yet.” 

Those audiences were then activated through Braze, which used them to trigger the next relevant journey across email, push, and content cards. AppsFlyer defined who should hear from the brand and when, Braze decided what they would see and how.

Together, the joint stack delivered the full picture the team had been working toward. AppsFlyer made sure intent carried and audiences were grounded in real behaviour. Braze turned those signals into orchestrated, automated, on-brand journeys at scale. Every layer reinforced the next.

What “working as one system” actually delivered

The combined impact was significant and measurable, both commercially and operationally.

The time from app install to first purchase fell to one-third of its previous duration, a step-change in time-to-value that directly lifted the return on every marketing dollar spent on acquisition. The platform reached profitability on most transactions, a position it had not been in just a few years earlier.

Personalization, enabled by accurate deep linking, behavioural segmentation, and dynamic content orchestration working together, drove no less than a 500% lift in push revenue and a 50–80% revenue lift across email and content cards. 

Members were receiving fewer, more relevant communications and engaging at materially higher rates, with unique email click-through rates up 7.64%. The team expanded from four or five lifecycle journeys to seventeen, with behavioural triggers like recent purchases in travel automatically surfacing adjacent offers.

Operationally, the change was just as significant. Manual campaign production dropped from around 20 hours per send to about 30 minutes, reclaiming over 4,500 hours of team time a year and delivering campaigns 97.5% faster. Six team members were freed for higher-value work, and the number of merchant brands visible to members in every email grew by 360%.

“What we learned is that you cannot bolt personalisation onto a broken foundation. Deep linking, audience data, and orchestration have to work as one system. Once they did, every metric we cared about moved.”

Head of Customer Engagement (CRM & Lifecycle), leading Australia-based e-commerce loyalty platform

“Data and attribution are always the hard part. Get those right, and lifecycle execution becomes the easy part. That’s the unlock for the next level of marketing performance.”

Head of Customer Engagement (CRM & Lifecycle), leading Australia-based e-commerce loyalty platform