What communication-related KPIs do you track for your sales team? With email, you likely care a lot about open rates. And you sort of have to when that precedes any other action. When you make calls all day, you obviously want to know how many people actually pick up. If you send short code texts, link clicks matter.
Conversational messaging comes with its own unique set of KPIs. At first you may not be sure what you even want to track if you haven’t specifically prioritized starting and continuing conversations. You’ve always wanted people to reply of course, but that doesn’t mean you’ve focused on ongoing text conversations to build relationships and close sales.
Just remember that with conversational messaging, everything leads back to responses. The more responses you get, the more conversations you have, the better relationships you build, and the more sales you close.
As you and your team figure out how to track your success with conversational messaging, look at these areas of performance.
Your Team’s Response Times
Leads quickly move on to finding new solutions when sales reps take too long to reach out. It explains why some form of response time tracking gets done with all lead nurturing and sales efforts.
With conversational messaging speed to lead proves even more important. Most people understand that they probably won’t receive instant email responses from you. But with texting that quick communication is kind of the whole point. If your team isn’t going to respond quickly, texting isn’t going to help much.
Make sure your team reaches out within minutes and watch out for other under-nurturing patterns. Don’t let your poor follow-up be the reason leads aren’t converting!
Response Rates to Your 1st and 2nd Messages
Responses obviously drive conversations. So if people aren’t responding, especially to your early messages, the faster you figure out why, the better.
Sometimes people don’t respond to an initial message because they aren’t sure if it’s from a real person. As long as they didn’t reply STOP, your second message has the potential to completely change things. Grab their attention with that message and keep conversations flowing.
If neither message is getting enough responses, back to the drawing board! Change up your language, timing, and/or content.
Success of Sending Photos and Videos
Are you getting more responses, or maybe better quality responses, when you use MMS? Thoughtful photos and videos make people pay attention!
Many Skipio clients send introductory videos or photos, once again confirming to their leads that they are indeed real people. Or when you want to convey information that’s too complicated to type out, a simple graphic could be the difference between a message that bombs and one that drives responses.
Try out various options for photo and video types to see what works best for your audience in the long run.
Emoji Usage
Not every message needs to include emojis. (Sometimes it’s downright inappropriate to use them, depending on the context of the message.) But you may quickly see a difference in responses when you send different types of emojis. Whether you get more responses overall or the same number but more “positive” answers, that matters.
This type of information may not be immediately clear, so do audits of your team’s messages. Paying attention to these small details further improves your nurturing. At the end of the day you probably can’t attribute emoji usage to higher sales. However, if it gets you more responses, that shouldn’t go unnoticed.
Positive Responses
You’ll quickly notice that certain messages get people more excited than others. Pay attention to which of your lead nurturing messages get the most “yes” responses. What is it about those messages that gets people engaged? Use what you learn to write other messages that will keep people interested in talking to you.
Maybe you ask a question in a certain way or send a message at a perfect time. Language, content, and timing all drive responses.
That being said, sometimes a message that previously generated tons of responses suddenly falls flat. When that happens, don’t be afraid to switch things up. Use what you learned about what made those original messages successful and craft new messages. Then share those new messages with your team so that they can benefit too.
Falloff Points (What Messages Never Get Responses)
If people always seem to stop responding at a certain point, analyze the messages you sent previously and find areas of improvement. For instance, if the first 3 messages in a drip campaign always get you eager responses and message 4 just tanks, that needs to change.
You may find that the messages themselves aren’t engaging. Weak language and irrelevant information commonly affect conversations. Or maybe you have the cadence wrong. Sometimes only changing when a message gets sent totally changes how people respond.
Your future with conversational messaging
Even before now, you knew that successful lead nurturing and selling aren’t about the number of messages you send or how many people you contact. Contacting 1,000 people using any method doesn’t matter if you aren’t taking the time to nurture those relationships.
That’s ultimately why conversational texting with Skipio works for sales. It relies on the back and forth between people, not just you pushing out information. So while these KPIs all on their own won’t make or break your sales cycle, combined they help you determine the best formula for continually getting responses.
