Scent systems are powerful tools when businesses use them to their strategic advantage. These systems boost your branding through fragrance marketing, giving that extra differentiator in your marketing strategy. So, how can you accurately evaluate your fragrance marketing performance to ensure it’s effectively impacting consumers?
Measuring fragrance marketing performance is a four-step process. With the right commercial scent technology, your team can determine how your fragrance affects customers—and where to make improvements.
Step 1: Pinpoint Your Objective
Using fragrance as part of your marketing plan can be a powerful tool as scents evoke customers’ emotions, feelings, and memories.
Certain fragrances even have predictable results. For example, a light and airy scent puts customers at ease, while a citrus scent makes them feel energetic.
Pinpoint your fragrance marketing objective before doing anything else. Your team needs to be able to strive for a clear overarching goal. Common fragrance marketing objectives include:
- To calm customers
- To interest customers
- To stimulate customers’ appetites
Your brand may already have an objective for how fragrance should intertwine with your marketing strategy. In that case, reexamine it and ensure it holds up to your overall vision for the brand.
Step 2: Determine Your Success Metrics
Metrics make it easy for your team to determine whether or not you’ve hit your ultimate objective. Success metrics must be quantitative, not qualitative — this way, your team can accurately track improvements and observe performance.
Popular fragrance marketing performance metrics include:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): survey results with generalized customer feedback
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): survey results with specific customer feedback on store scent or experience
- Social media post sentiment: customer social posts regarding store experience
For example, if your objective is to make customers feel calm, your team might send customers CSAT surveys asking them to rate the feeling of serenity in your stores from 1-10.
Step 3: Identify Fragrance Components that Impact Metrics
Typically fragrance components can be controlled through your scent delivery system, making them easily adjustable for your team.
You should be able to track and control critical fragrance aspects with your commercial scent technology, including:
- Uptime, or the consistency of fragrance delivery
- Coverage, or the amount of store/square feet reached by your system
- Air turnover speed, or how often your store’s air is replenished
- Scent intensity, or how powerful the scent is being delivered in the space
Identifying these controllable fragrance aspects is the key to measuring your fragrance marketing performance. Once you measure your customers’ initial scent satisfaction levels, you’ll know what you can tweak to make improvements.
Step 4: Measure and Improve Fragrance Marketing Performance
Next, begin gathering data for the success metrics you’ve identified. For instance, if you want to measure NPS data, send an NPS survey. If you want to measure social media post sentiment, begin recording the sentiment of customer social media posts within a certain date range. Review this data. Recognize areas for improvement, then adjust the controllable fragrance aspects you’ve identified.
For example, your team may decide to:
- Increase uptime if your CSAT survey reveals that only half of customers smelled your fragrance during store visits
Fragrance consistency and performance are essential to the effectiveness of scent marketing. To allow experiential branding to be precise and monitored, smart scent systems like ScentBridge’s solution give businesses full control over their ambient fragrances, guaranteeing 100% uptime, performance, consistency, and precise scent levels across all areas within their facilities.
- Boost scent intensity if customers are not detecting fragrance in certain areas.
The management of IoT fragrance diffusion systems, like ScentBridge’s solution, allows organizations to have full control and precision over their fragrance marketing. Using a smartphone or other mobile devices, businesses can manage and monitor scent levels across specific areas of their facilities, ensuring accurate delivery of fragrance impressions everywhere.
Finally, your team should make the changes accordingly, measure your success metrics, and see whether they improved. This kind of continuous process improvement (CPI) can propel your brand to scent success.
The Path to Better Fragrance Marketing Performance
Measuring fragrance marketing performance is a simple process that can be cohesively structured with other marketing tactics. With help from the right scent system, your brand can use this process to create an atmospheric in-store experience that customers flock to.
This article was originally published on January 21, 2021; it has since been updated and republished on May 17, 2023.