Exploring Apple’s App Clips for Activation

Originally published at aip.media from when I worked for Anything is Possible

Last week we in the Tech team were buoyed by a client meeting and their desire to reduce friction from their customer journeys. The client absolutely understood the importance of mobile and having a great customer experience, however they also understood that creating a dedicated app for their brand would be no small undertaking.

In order to demonstrate our Possibilist mindset, and rock solid belief that value can be delivered quickly we set about to understand what else may be possible. We wanted to show case a low friction mobile experience that would help address one of their challenges for member acquisition.

Our creative and broadcast teams have worked with this client on a re-brand recently and delivered a number of effective TV ads for brand awareness.   The team had also read an interesting report from Sky which showed a surprising uplift in awareness where a TV advert contained a QR code, vs adverts that don’t.   This got us to thinking about gateways to a mobile experience without an app download.

Enter the Apple AppClip. This is a technology that Apple introduced with iOS14 and allows for an app level experience without having to download an app from the app store.

AppClip’s can be invoked by QR codes, NFC tags or Apple’s new App clips code. When scanned by an Apple device a card is displayed on the users device showcasing the experience and allowing the user to open the app with a single tap. Because the experiences are actual apps they have access to the full suite of Apple experiences such as Apple sign-in and Apple Pay, each of which help reduce friction for Apple users on mobile.

Kicking off a one week sprint the team developed a fully functional proof of concept experience to show the client how the technology works and more importantly how the customer experience would feel. The sprint produced a fully functioning AppClip experience, integrated with Apple Pay for payment and the clients membership CRM.

We created an OOH creative with a code designed to be scanned at a live event. Scanning the code launches the AppClip experience and lets potential customers understand their membership offering and with a single tap signup and pay via Apple Pay. The solution requires just 2 taps from the user which takes them from initial discovery via the printed code, all the way through to signup and payment.

We think AppClips are an under explored feature of iOS and one worthy of more of our attention.

If you would like to see what a week of our Tech teams time could deliver for your organisation, please do get in touch.