Conversational marketing is a powerful messaging strategy. Interactive messaging content appears to boost responses and leads appear to enjoy chatting one-on-one. But how do you know the strategy is working for sure? You need to track conversational marketing key performance indicators (KPIs).
What Is Conversational Marketing?
Conversational marketing is a new messaging strategy that focuses on marketing through genuine, person-to-person conversations. It focuses on creating messaging content that encourages leads and customers to interact with your brand, and indirectly marketing to them through casual conversations when they reach out. Its ultimate goal is to help form lasting customer relationships.
Why Track and Measure Conversational Marketing KPIs?
Digital KPIs are a useful enterprise compass. They help you gauge how your audience is interacting with your brand across channels.
Conversational marketing KPIs help you measure the success of your messaging marketing content. Each KPI helps you pinpoint where your strategy is succeeding—and where you need to make some adjustments.
Once you track your conversational marketing KPIs for a month or so, you have a baseline that you can use to measure future performance. Then, you can compare your conversational marketing KPIs against conversational sales and conversational support KPIs. You can even compare conversational marketing KPIs against other marketing channel KPIs, so you can direct your marketing budget toward the most effective channels.
Top Five Conversational Marketing KPIs
Conversational marketing should be conducted from an omnichannel messaging platform, which helps you send, receive, and organize lead and customer texts. Your platform should automatically track important messaging metrics and show them to you in simple, easy-to-read reports. For conversational marketing, pay particularly close attention to these five metrics:
Outbound Message Volume
Your outbound message volume tells you how many outbound messages you’re sending. Keep this number steady from month to month, especially if your other conversational marketing KPIs are performing well. This is a great metric for making sure you’re not sending too much outbound content. If your other metrics, like response rates, are suffering, you may want to adjust your outbound message volume.
Lead/Customer Response Rate
Calculate your lead/customer response rate by dividing your inbound message volume by your outbound message volume. Lead/customer response rate lets you know how well your outbound messages are performing. If they’re doing their job correctly, you’ll have a high response rate. If they aren’t appealing to leads—or you’re sending too many—your response rate will be low. In that case, consider tweaking your content to be more lead-centric, and even reducing the number of outbound texts you send.
Unsubscribed Contacts
Leads and customers should enjoy your conversational marketing content. They should find it useful for making the most of their purchases, and they should find that it enhances their experience with your brand. If this is not the case, they will unsubscribe. Check your unsubscription volume to make sure you’re sending content leads like. If this number is high, adjust either the content or the frequency with which you send it.
Total List Volume
It’s important to connect with small, targeted lists of leads and customers. That being said, you don’t want to contact the same list over and over. Review total list volume—the number of messages being sent to each list—to identify your most used lists. If certain lists are contacted far more frequently than others, spread the love to other lists.
Average Response Time
Conversational marketing is all about chats that resemble in-person chats. It’s critical that you respond quickly to leads and customers who interact with your SMS marketing content. Your average response time should be appropriately short. Average response time is a metric that you should continually strive to improve.
Interested in learning more about messaging KPIs? Check out our blog.
