For years, a 20 percent conversion rate was considered a solid result in in-store sampling. Christchurch-founded Orbit Marketing said that number should embarrass the industry, and clients happy with it are leaving thousands of dollars on the table.
If you’re a brand manager signing off on in-store sampling campaigns, there’s a question worth sitting with: what conversion rate are you actually getting, and what should you be getting?
Across New Zealand’s experiential marketing industry, a 20 percent conversion rate has long been treated as a respectable result. Agencies report it confidently. Brand managers accept it. Budgets get renewed on the back of it. Basically, if one in five people who try your product end up buying it, then everyone is happy.
But a growing body of campaign data suggests that the benchmark is way too low. Orbit Marketing, a nationwide experiential agency, now in its fifth year of operation, is making a case that the gap between industry-standard results and what’s actually achievable is far wider than most brand managers realise.
“As an agency, we can’t guarantee high foot traffic in store, but when all factors are aligned, anything below a 40 percent conversion rate is nothing to brag about,” said Olivia Brown, CEO and Co-Founder of Orbit Marketing.
“That’s not a controversial opinion. That’s just what the data shows when you build your operations around selling, not sampling.”
The numbers are hard to argue with. Orbit consistently records conversion rates between 60 percent and 80 percent across categories nationwide, routinely doubling and tripling the results that have been accepted as industry standard.
A recent campaign for Bird & Barrow recorded an 82 percent conversion rate, with brand ambassadors averaging 97 units sold per four-hour shift. The agency’s top five stores moved between 170 and 244 units per session, figures Orbit said are typical of its campaigns but rare across the broader industry.
The agency has recorded compounding revenue growth year-on-year, a trajectory it attributes directly to the gap between its results and what brands have been getting elsewhere.
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