Brand experiences are powerful investments in brand growth. These new marketing techniques use emotional connections to turn attendees and visitors into evangelists, shifting them from new consumers into passionate promoters.

These experiences are brand conversion marketing, converting so-so, one-time customers into long-time buyers. Our research shows that experiences can improve your consumer’s lifetime value anywhere between 20% and 50%, meaning the investment is well worth it. 

But what is brand conversion marketing? And how do you calculate a brand conversion rate as a major metric in your marketing campaigns and reporting? 

What is Brand Conversion Marketing?

Brand conversion marketing is a specific initiative driven by one goal: creating consumers with an improved perception of your brand. This can be anything from site visitors on web pages to engagement campaigns at your local mall. The tactics run the gambit, but we’ll focus on event brand conversion marketing. 

NPS Limitations and the Rise of Brand Conversion Rates

On-site staff at field marketing events, branded attractions, and activations see first-hand how effective events are for brand conversions. However, according to Grammarly, over 75% of CMOs are not confident in their team’s ability to understand the value and impact of brand experiences from a metric level.

We’ve seen brands use attendance, time spent on-site, or even Net Promoter Score (NPS) to ‘measure’ how effective events are for leadership. Ultimately these are static metrics that don’t tell the complete picture of the event's impact on a brand conversion level. 

Net Promoter Score (NPS®) is a well-known 0-10 metric that has been championed by Customer Experience platforms everywhere that ask the question, “How likely are you to recommend brand X to a friend.” It’s a valuable metric to help to identify promoters and potential issues, but as a single reference point, it falls short for experiences.

Its most significant limitations are that it needs to capture the change in brand perception over time and isolate the impact of the experience. Many brands don’t ask for NPS before and after their event, meaning valuable growth goes unnoticed. 

For example a consumer that rates a brand an 8/10 after a brand experience might have entered the experience as a 2/10. But without asking for that 2/10 before the event, that piece of the puzzle isn’t even a blip on a marketer’s radar.

If NPS is a measure of how big a fan someone is of your brand, Brand Conversion helps measure the degree of transformation by looking at the change in consumers’ brand perception. 

Simply put, by measuring before and after the event, it’s easy to see the percentage of detractors and passives increased their perception (NPS) of the brand after an experience. 

Brands are leveraging it at the aggregate level and more granularly with target demographics and experience types. Brand Conversion across regions, experiences, or even campaigns can be a guiding light to justify experiential investment growth and identify improvement opportunities.

How to Calculate Brand Conversion Rate

To measure the impact of your event on Brand Conversion, you need to capture NPS responses both before (or during)and after a consumer attends an experience. These pre- and post-experience scores give you visibility into how your event changed consumer perspective. Are people falling in love with your brand? Are people more likely to rate you positively after they attend an experience, or is it around the same? When you know your brand conversion rate, you get big picture information about how your events have the power to change hearts and minds.

Brand Conversion = Number detractors & passives / The number of detractors & passives who became promoters

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What are Some Examples of a Brand Conversion Marketing Strategy?

Regarding brand conversion marketing, it can be confusing to understand how to get customers to convert to ambassadors, especially in events. What does it even look like in practice? We pulled some of our favorite examples of brands who achieved a higher conversion rate for their brand perception with their strategies to inspire you.

Absolut’s 80% Brand Conversion Rate 

Absolut Rent Brännvin, or “Absolutely Pure Vodka,” was initially produced in southern Sweden 1879. Today, Absolut has grown to be one of the largest spirits brands in the world and is sold in 126 countries. 

As the brand grew, so did the Absolut marketing team’s aspirations for brand experiences. They originally wanted to create a small brand home that could act as a self-sufficient revenue stream and a museum dedicated to its history. But after visiting Pernod-Ricard’s legendary brand home experiences, they realized they could dream much bigger.

Using AnyRoad, the Absolut team can now look at a combination of guest bookings, revenue, and visitor satisfaction for a holistic picture of the way brand experiences impact their business. They use the insights to develop new experiences and determine their success metrics. 

For example, the team recently discovered that smaller guest groups generate more revenue per guest, and focusing on tour size influences higher guest satisfaction!

This data-driven approach has paid off for the Absolut Home business and team. Since 2018 they’ve:

• Increased average revenue per guest by 36%
• Achieved a best practice visitor NPS of 75
• Consistently created new brand champions with a brand conversion score of 85%
• Received recognition from TripAdvisor as the #1 Thing to Do in Åhus

Read the full story here!

JustEgg’s 90% Tasting Conversion Metrics

JUST Egg, a plant-based egg made by Eat Just, learned through market research that the biggest barrier to getting consumers to try their product was hesitation about whether a plant-based egg could taste as good or better than one from a chicken. Yet, 90% of consumers who taste the product go on to buy it.

Heading into 2022, field marketer Adrian Santos and his team planned 300 events nationwide, intending to double the number of eggs in mouths every quarter. From prior experience, Adrian knew that setting up a data-centric program would help him to prove the value of his field marketing investment to the company’s C-suite.

JUST Egg used AnyRoad’s platform, including an iOS app and QR code data-capture tools, to collect first-party data on-site through product giveaways, followed by an automated survey to attendees after the events. 

Through this method, they gained over 100 data points per activation, which means by the end of their 300-event strategy, they had over 30,000 data points from high-intent customers to use for their marketing, outreach, and planning.

They got more eggs in mouth through properly scaled field events, for a great example of conversion marketing done right.

Read more about Just Egg’s brand conversion marketing here! 

Fleetwood Paint’s 90% Conversion Rates

Fleetwood Paints is a leading paint manufacturer and distributor in the UK and Ireland, selling through 250 retail partners. Since 2010, Fleetwood Paints has partnered with celebrity brand ambassadors and interior designers for in-store consultations and online guidance via Instagram Live.

Fleetwood partnered with AnyRoad in 2021 to streamline the appointment process, scale their omnichannel presence, and glean more insights about their consumers to create a smoother follow-up process. These insights, in turn, were used to create more competitive and impactful experiences to increase sales and foot traffic into their retail partners’ stores.

Fleetwood Paints’ new online and in-person approach with AnyRoad had an immediate impact; their 30-minute booking process now takes less than two minutes and saved their marketing team 50 hours per month on average.

With the new analytics unlocked by AnyRoad, Fleetwood Paints learned that over 60% of their customers prefer consultation bookings in the morning. When Fleetwood adjusted their consultation schedules, they saw a 40% increase in online bookings.

‍They saw improvement after piloting their new programs, including putting QR codes directing consumers to book consultations in partner retail stores. 

‍Improvements include:

• A post-experience NPS of 100 (best in class compared to other brands)
• 90% conversion rate from online color consultations to in-store sales 
• 95% of guests reported an intention to spend
• 100% reported designer satisfaction when working with Fleetwood due to their ‘professional and easy-to-use platform.’

‍Get Fleetwood Paint’s full conversion marketing strategy here!

The Best Strategies for Brand Conversion Rate Optimization

There are a few ways to consider your strategy when it comes to increasing your conversion rate. Depending on your business type, like retail to CPG, you can take a different route regarding conversion tactics.

We’ve listed a few considerations below to find your ultimate conversion tactic.

Increasing the ATV of Paying Customers

The average transaction value (ATV) is a great metric when you’re happy with your existing traffic and perception. It measures the current average value of a single purchase for one customer. 

To increase ATV, look at your paying customers. If your ATV is low, consider looking at what the conversion path for your consumer is like. 

For example, if they’re coming in-store for purchase, tours, tastings, or attending classes at your locations, you want to be sure that the booking experience is smooth and add-ons are easy to add to their cart. The simpler it is to attend events or add extra items to the experience, the higher the perception. 

Hubspot’s data found that it’s easier to upsell than cross-sell, so keep that in mind as you design experiences! Maybe it would pay to have a VIP tour that’s smaller and more private but more expensive overall.

Moving Outside of Web Content

Social media and search engine optimization can be great tools for conversion marketing. However, when it comes to brand conversion, it’s a different story. Website visitors aren’t getting the same experience as those who attend live and in-person events, making memories that connect them forever to your brand. 

55% of marketing is digital, which makes it hard to cut through the noise. Moving outside of website content and social media marketing to pop-ups or activations is a great way to meet your consumers where they are and even introduce potential customers to your brand. 

Doubling Down on Consumer Feedback

Brand conversion marketing for events isn’t just about conversion rate optimization; it’s a listening exercise. If you’re finding that the perception of your brand isn’t improving, try gathering feedback from your current experiential attendees. 

Most of the time, consumers have much to say regarding improvements they’d like to see or problems they want you to fix. Using feedback as a guiding principle, you can improve your brand conversion marketing without throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks. 

You’ll have a guide handed to you! Here are 25 questions you can ask your visitors and attendees to get you started.

With the proper marketing channels, your brand conversion rates can soar.

Conversion goes deeper than marketing tactics and product pages. It’s about how your audience perceives your brand and how you can convert a detractor customer after they visit your experience. 

When you decide on a field or event marketing strategy, you’re using brand conversion marketing at its finest to go beyond advertising to the heart of your consumers and what they care about. 

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