Micro Conversions: Tracking Smaller Behaviors Can Bolster Your Brand Funnel
Blog Post
The small actions that consumers take during the process of building engagement with your brand are critical parts of your relationship with them. Much like a person-to-person relationship is built upon hundreds or thousands of smiles, handshakes, small talk, and more serious conversations, brand-to-consumer relationships are built on hundreds or thousands of tiny interactions that add up to a much larger experience.
Overview
In business, we often measure customer relationships in a crude way. For any given consumer, we measure whether or not they have bought from us, how many times they’ve purchased from us, and - sometimes - whether they are satisfied and willing to recommend us to a friend.
These metrics are effective ways to get an idea of what our relationship with customers is like. But there’s a limitation in measuring customer relationships in this way… Relationships are a lot more complicated.
Boiling customer relationships down to buckets like non-buyers, one-time buyers, repeat buyers, and loyal customers is similar to categorizing your personal and professional relationships as people I’ve never talked to, people I’ve talked to once, people I talk to a lot, and people I’d like to talk to more. Relationships are simply more complicated than our common high-level funnel metrics can capture.
Don’t get us wrong - the traditional brand funnel is a great way to start measuring dynamics between your brand and the consumers you want to attract. Tracking “the big steps” of your funnel is important because it captures the largest hurdles that must be overcome in order for consumers to become customers of your brand. But we also have an opportunity to capture a much finer grain of information by tracking “the small steps” that consumers take to interact with your brand.
By “small steps,” we are referring to all of the small interactions, activities, and engagements that people might undertake in their relationship with your brand. These might include visiting a store, logging into their account, opening an app, or any other small action that brings a customer into contact with your products, your people, or your brand.
The Finer Points
The small actions that consumers take during the process of building engagement with your brand are critical parts of your relationship with them. Much like a person-to-person relationship is built upon hundreds or thousands of smiles, handshakes, small talk, and more serious conversations, brand-to-consumer relationships are built on hundreds or thousands of tiny interactions that add up to a much larger experience.
We call these smaller actions “micro conversion events.” If a consumer who makes a purchase is “converting” to being a customer, then a consumer who visits your website is “converting” to a higher level of engagement with your brand. These micro conversion events can take many forms, all of which are important ways that consumers invite your brand into their daily lives and routines.
Examples of micro conversion events include:
Downloading an app
Opening an email
Liking, sharing, or commenting on a post
Talking about your brand during a conversation
Walking into a store or branch
Using your product
Wearing your brand’s swag
Visiting a website
Many brands fail to recognize the importance of these small interactions on consumers in the market, often because the individual impact of a single event can seem so small as to be insignificant in the broader scheme of things. After all, if a brand’s growth goals require it to acquire and retain thousands - or even millions - of customers in a single year, it doesn’t seem like tiny actions such as opening an app are really going to move the needle. But the millions of new customers that your brand acquires are actually a product of a myriad of more smaller interactions.
Imagine if you could estimate how many micro conversion events occurred in a given week - how many thousands or millions of website visits, store visits, email opens, post views, product usages, and verbal mentions of your brand came from consumers in the market. Now imagine that you could track those events over time. You could see them add up, and you could see the total number growing or shrinking from one week to the next.
With that information, you could actually predict the outcomes of higher-level variables like purchases, new customer conversions, and repeat buyers. This is because the larger events are products of the smaller ones. Small customer interactions lead to big customer decisions. Little engagements add up over time to large changes in your brand’s market position, perceptions, and competitive strengths.
Doing the Measuring
Some of the micro conversion events that we described above can be objectively measured with relative ease. Google Analytics can tell you how many people visited your website; Facebook and Instagram can tell you how many people liked your posts and followed your profiles; your email provider can probably tell you how many people signed up for, opened and clicked on your emails; and digital traffic counters can tell you how many guests passed through your stores in a given period of time. Other metrics - such as whether someone has mentioned your brand in conversion - are difficult or impossible to capture outside of a survey.
No matter how it’s captured, all of this data can be powerful when digested within the context of what it means for critical business outcomes, such as new buyer conversions, repeat purchases, and subscriber retention. And the most important context to understand is the relationship between each of the micro conversion events and a consumer’s personal relationship with your brand.
When a customer recalls seeing your ad, are they more likely to think of your brand as an authority in your space? After someone visits your branch three times within a one month period, are they more likely to feel that your company is willing and able to meet their needs better than competitors? Do users who open your emails have a higher willingness to consider buying from you in the future?
One of the greatest benefits of measuring micro conversion events is your ability to understand their impact on the broader brand funnel and customer-perceived market landscape. In order to draw these connections, it's often helpful to include questions about micro conversion events in your brand tracker survey.
We recommend making a list of 4-10 micro conversion events that are relevant and important in your business and then asking survey respondents whether each of them has occurred in a recent period.
The table below gives an example of what this exercise might look like for a brand.
How you phrase each question might change based on the time frames and frequencies that are specific to your industry. We would also recommend using survey logic to start with simple Yes/No questions then capture the number of times a particular event type occurred in a follow-up question.
No matter how you go about capturing the data, the result will be that you have individual-level data on each of the micro conversion events, which can then be paired with several other elements of your brand tracker data to create a very detailed picture of your customer relationship.
Why Use a Survey?
A question we often get asked on this topic is why brands should bother capturing micro conversion event data in a survey when so much of this data is available through existing digital tools. In reality, Langston recommends that you do both. Leverage digital tools to get as much data as you can on all of the customer interactions that occur for your brand. Changes in traffic, impressions, opens, clicks, etc should all correlate with changes in your business over time. Identifying those correlations is a powerful way to get Executives’ attention focused on customer behavior, and that is a big win for everyone.
However, the specific act of tracking micro conversion events in a survey environment has several advantages:
Competitor Data: While your own tools and accounts can capture a lot of micro conversion event data on your own website, profiles, and stores, they often cannot provide the same level of detail about your competitors’ experience. If you have read any of Langston’s advice about brand tracking, you know that we see the act of capturing data on competitors as a critical piece of any brand’s market and consumer intelligence efforts. If you’re capturing survey data on competitors as part of your brand tracker, then you can also capture data on their micro conversion events. Measuring how customer interactions are evolving for both you and your competitors’ brands creates the greatest possible understanding of the consumers in your market along with the most critical threats and opportunities that you face.
Impacts to Perception: One of the great benefits of survey-based research is the ability to capture and quantify consumer perceptions that can be subjective and personal. By gathering micro conversion event data in the same survey that asks consumers about their perceptions, ideas, and attitudes about your brand, you’ll be able to connect the dots between all those elements. Sometimes interactions impact perceptions - sometimes it’s the other way around - but in any case, the relationship between what consumers do and what consumers think is both real and important to your business.
Impacts to Intent: Even the traditional brand funnel measures aspects of what consumers will do in the future - by asking customers whether they would consider purchasing from a brand in the future, we get a glimpse into what their behavior might be in the future. Some brands elect to ask even more specific questions about future intent, such whether a respondent plans to purchase from each brand in the next 30 days, or whether they intend to renew or cancel their membership. As with the perceptions data described in the last point, our understanding of future purchase intent is much more complete when we pair it with information about that same respondent’s micro conversion events. Tying the tiny interactions together with a person’s expectations for their future major decisions creates a whole new type of leverage in customer and market intelligence.
Concluding Words
A number of changes are reshaping the dynamics of consumer-brand relationships, including the rise of social media; a desire to buy from more authentic, trustworthy, socially-conscious brands; and falling barriers to entry, which enables the emergence of startups in even the most unexpected industries. As these dynamics evolve, so too should the ways we measure brand equity and brand engagement. Complementing proven frameworks (like the brand funnel) with approaches that fit how consumers behave in the 2020s (like capturing micro conversion events) will ensure that your research methodologies reflect today’s world while positioning you to maintain a competitive advantage in your space.
We are passionate about this topic and would love to answer any questions you might have. Click below to schedule a complimentary 30 minute call with an expert from Langston.
DISCLAIMER: We base our research, recommendations, and forecasts on techniques, information and sources we believe to be reliable. We cannot guarantee future accuracy and results. The Langston Co. will not be liable for any loss or damage caused by a reader's reliance on our research.