As you seek to improve your conversion rates, you’ll realize that real-time marketing offers an excellent solution to improving lead gathering as well as conversion rates. One of the reasons conversions go up is because your audience starts seeing you as real. The more you engage in answering to events happening today and participating in real-time conversations, the more your audience will grow to trust you.
Like with most marketing there are KPIs (key performance indicators) that you need to track to ensure that your efforts are getting the results that you desire. All real-time marketing does is to add in the “when” to the “where” and “how” of marketing. “When” is now.
For example, if you promote work-at-home opportunities and the new jobs report comes out, what can you do to make yourself part of that conversation? You can use their hashtag on Twitter to market your business proposition based on the job reports. Your response might include an informative infographic, or a link to a page of testimonials of those who have used your program to earn money and end their need for a job.
By inserting yourself into the conversation revolving around current news events, you can get more buzz than you may have thought possible. The KPIs you track aren’t that different from the ones you track all the time, but you will want to track them in real time to ensure that your efforts from that action gets immediate response.
There are several KPIs that you need to track:
* Owned Audience – While no one really owns their audience as they’re free to leave whenever they want to, you’ll want to know how many people you’ve already connected to click through and perform any action based on a new event.
* Website Visitors – When you participate in the real-time event, does it affect your website visitors right now? You can use Google Analytics to view real-time activity on your website right now to see if your efforts make a difference.
* Total Leads – How many leads do you collect in the 24 hours after the event?
* Customers – Do you get new customers within 24 hours of the event?
* Recurring Revenue – How many of these new customers end up as repeat customers?
* On-Page Activity – Check your on-page activity during the event. Does it change? What happens?
* Social Media Activity – Once you start your real-time marketing effort, how many times is your message shared or responded to?
* Checkouts – Do people check out without issue? Are there abandoned carts?
* Conversion Rates – What is your lead to purchase conversion rate at the moment or for the 24 hours after the event?
By paying attention to these KPIs, you can understand whether or not your real-time marketing efforts are working. You’ll want to set up the ability to see these KPIs live during the event, and the 24 hours after the event.
You can use a lot of the information you gather to improve future real-time marketing events as well as to create better follow up. For example if you have a lot of shopping cart abandonment, you can remarket to those people a special way based on the fact that they clicked through your real-time marketing collateral.