Businesses of all types and sizes are turning to SMS marketing to get more feet through the door. Sending a quick, friendly text message to your guest is a great way to spread the word about sales, introduce new products, and offer discount codes for referrals. But once you send a text, then what? How do you know if a guest did anything with your text, made a purchase, or even opened the message? That’s where conversion tracking comes into play.
Conversion tracking lets you see how guests responded to your texts and how their actions contributed to your ROI. For this reason, conversion tracking is crucial for understanding the impact of your marketing efforts and the revenue generated from them.
What is Conversion Tracking?
Conversion tracking is the process of monitoring the number and type of conversions (or desired actions completed) a guest made. For example, if you send an SMS blast out to your customer base with a link to reserve a table at your restaurant, the desired action is clicking the link. Ideally, you would want guests to not just click the link but also go through the process of booking a table after clicking the link. If a guest clicked the link and booked a table, you could consider that action two types of conversions: one for clicking the link and one for booking a table.
Why is SMS Conversion Tracking Valuable?
It’s valuable to track conversions when sending out SMS messages for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it lets you see the revenue you generate from every action a guest takes. Many business owners don’t know the dollar value of their marketing efforts because they can’t see if their campaigns are working. Enter conversion tracking! By placing a dollar amount for every action or “conversion” a guest makes you can track your ROI and see which guests are your top conversions.
Secondly, SMS conversion tracking lets you see the success (and downfalls) of your marketing efforts. If you have a successful SMS message campaign that generated a lot of revenue, great! You can repeat that type of campaign the next time and aim for getting the same level of success. If a campaign fails to live up to your marketing goals, you can go back and see where guests got stuck in the sales pipeline, failed to click, or even opted out of your messaging services. Every bit of information you can gather from your audience’s actions helps you create better, more personalized SMS campaigns that increase conversions. This process of improving your conversion rate, or the number of times someone completes a desired action, is called conversion rate optimization. To improve your conversion rate and increase your SMS marketing value, here are several questions you can ask with each campaign:
- What is working?
- What is not working?
- How can I improve ROI?
- How can I personalize my messaging to reach my target audience?
- What incentives would motivate my audience to convert?
How Conversion Tracking Works
If a guest opts into SMS marketing with you, you can send out text messages directly to them and track their actions as they engage with your texts. For example, with Check This Out, if you send a text message with a discount code for referring your services to a friend, you can track if a guest opened the text message, clicked on the link to refer a friend, and even which of their friends responded to the link they shared. Here are several key performance indicators (KPIs) you can track with Check This Out’s conversion tracking tools:
- Open Rate – This shows the percentage of guests who received your text and opened it.
- Click-Through Rate – This KPI shows how many of your guests not only received your text message but clicked on the link in your message.
- Discount Redemptions – If you send out a discount to your guests if they refer a friend, you can track how many guests redeemed that discount.
- Discounts Expired without Redemption – If a guest referred a friend and received a discount, you can track and see if they redeemed their discount or not.
- Type of Referral – You can see if a referral comes from an SMS campaign opt-in or an invite from a friend.
Track Conversions with Check This Out
If you’re ready to see the value SMS marketing can bring your business, give Check This Out a try today. Our referral marketing software includes conversion tracking tools so you can monitor your audience’s behavior and your ROI. Businesses who partner with Check This Out generate 17.5x return in gross sales for every $1 spent, and they can easily manage their campaigns via their phone. It’s a simple, cost-efficient way to generate new and returning guests, all at the press of a button! To get started, try a demo of Check This Out today.