What are Quick Links?

Quick links are easy-to-click Standart URLs that allow customers to instantly reach and lunch your skill. You can place quick links on your company’s website, in an app, or through social media. Then, customers can access your skill immediately by asking Alexa. The users can launch your skill whenever they are near the device. They can either ask Alexa to send a notification for launching the skill later. 

Alexa skills and user acquisition

Marketing a sub-par product will not boost sales, just as promoting a low-quality skill will not be as uplifting. 

Ipervox did a full analysis of 30 000 latest Alexa skills published on the Amazon Alexa Store. From this analysis, we found out that only 37% of Alexa’s skills had reviews written about them. Of those reviews, less than 20% were positive. 

This means that either Alexa skills published have no reviews at all, or they have bad reviews. Despite working on a quality Alexa skill, you need to move the wheels and promote it. It ain’t going to do so itself. 

Amazon Alexa store is becoming more and more competitive each day and just putting your skill there is not enough to get user acquisition. 

4 ways to promote your Alexa skill

In order to help you in this competitive voice world, Ipervox has created a Voice App Masterclass. One of the chapters is designed to help the user promoting the Alexa skill. Below are some successful ways we want to share with you in this article: 

1. Effective skill and invocation name. We advise you to find an exact name, which is simple to remember and pronounce.

2. Use an icon that catches a user’s eye. Entering the voice world does not mean forgetting about designing. If you want to make a difference, you will need an icon that stands out from the others.

3. Write an attractive and valuable description. If a user stops on your skill when browsing the never-ending list of Amazon Alexa stores, write something cool to read about it. Invest time in a good and concentrated description that speaks only of what the skill does and its characteristics.

4. Share the skill through all possible ways– In September 2020 Amazon Alexa announced for the first time quick links. Through these easy URLs, you can share your Alexa skill via email, email signature, website, and promote it through social media channels. 

The efficiency of quick links

Amazon Alexa allows two types of quick links: one that launches an Alexa skill and one that leads to a custom task within an Alexa skill. These quick links act as the equivalent of when a customer says, “Alexa, open <skill name>” to an Alexa device. 

Their advantage is that they are very efficient when sharing your Alexa skills online. Rather than sharing the link to your Alexa skill detailed page on Amazon, you can now allow your users to immediately launch your skill and start their journey towards voice experience on their devices. 

Additionally, they allow analyzing better the traffic coming through different channels. To track the number of launches your skill receives from individual links in different online channels, you must use custom tasks and query string parameters, both combined together in your quick link URL. 

As an instance, if you are sharing your quick link through social media, including it on ADS or promoting it on your own website, you can gather data of which channel works better when it comes to the number of launched skills. 

Quick links structure and how they work

Before trying to understand how to generate quick links for your Alexa skill, you need to make sure that Amazon Alexa Store approves and publishes your skill. Through the Amazon Alexa account, you can then find your skill ID in the development console. 

All you need to do is finding the skill ID on your developer console and replacing it at the URL below. 

You can also test how quick links look by the free resources on Alexa labs for Task Buddy skill on GitHub

What are the benefits of using quick links? 

• Driving traffic from your ADS 

By including your Alexa skill quick link in your ADS, it will allow you to promote your skill with just a single click and make your audience get in touch with you faster than ever before.

• Driving traffic from your social media

Having the ability to open a skill directly from a link is an important leap forward in the ability to market. Instead of relying on the audience to remember what skills they see from your business on Twitter and Instagram, you can help them open your skills straight from the post. With just one click away they can launch the Alexa skill or set a notification to launch it later. 

• Measuring marketing campaigns

Through the usage of attribution tags, businesses or personal brands can measure the effectiveness of their Alexa skill marketing campaigns. The ability to launch directly the Alexa skill from the quick link is a smart solution also for skills under the utility category, which are better to be launched without using voice. An example of this can be Invoked Apps that are using quick links to launch their sleep sound skills. According to Invoked Apps founder “Quick Links for Alexa are a game-changing way for customers to launch skills and for skill builders to make better digital marketing decisions”

• Driving traffic from your website directly to your skill

If you are a personal brand that has your own Alexa skill, you can use your website traffic to promote it. Driving traffic from the website directly to Alexa skill can be a smart marketing strategy also for podcasts, blogs, or radio skills. It helps in reusing your existing audience as a new audience for the Alexa skill. 

• Simply engage online

Despite all the benefits mentioned above, quick links can be used as a simple, effective way to engage online with the audience. 

Can Ipervox help? 

Through the Ipervox Voice Platform, you can create an Alexa skill with no coding knowledge required. Our all in one platform will allow you to create your Alexa developer account, create your new Alexa skill, send it for review, and publish it on Amazon Alexa Store. Will it help you also in promoting your Alexa skill? 

Ipervox will automatically generate quick links for your Alexa skill throughout the steps of skill creation. These links can easily be copied and pasted on different social media or integrated anywhere else you see as suitable for your Alexa skill. 

Furthermore, you can easily track your Alexa skill progress by analyzing it. We offer you the possibility to understand and optimize the voice communication channel. Analytics is not just a process for measuring voice traffic. You can use it as a tool to improve the effectiveness of your voice strategy.