Measuring Customer Engagement
While building a solid customer engagement strategy is key, many companies overlook the cornerstone of customer engagement: measurement. Without solid data, organizations may end up making decisions based on anecdotal evidence of engagement coming only from customers who proactively provide feedback to the brand. Additionally, it's easy for brands to have a rosy view of customer engagement when they don’t actively measure key metrics that indicate actual customer engagement.
Measuring engagement poses numerous challenges, says Eddie Rice, Content Marketing Manager for Spirion, largely because people don't want to be tracked on a website. He expects to see an uptick in people exercising their "right to be forgotten" via the CCPA, GDPR, and similar privacy statutes.
"With a customer's permission (through opt-ins and permission-based marketing), you can evaluate their engagement based on reading times, content downloads, and direct conversations through chatbots and live conversations with sales reps. Ultimately, you need a strong back-end system that can measure these interactions and sync them to the ultimate sales that are made," says Rice.
How to Measure Customer Engagement
Because customer engagement impacts profitability and revenue, brands can opt to measure engagement success in several ways, including the customer engagement index calculation and cost-benefit analysis.
- Customer Engagement Index Calculation: Brands determine engagement by measuring the frequency in which customers interact with the brand. Common KPIs include the number of comments on a post, subscribers, clicks on a call to action, or shares.
- Cost-Benefit Analysis: By looking at the impact that different types of costs have on revenue, a cost-benefit analysis can yield concrete results to develop reasonable conclusions around the feasibility and advisability of a decision or situation.
KPIs for Customer Engagement
While KPIs are the foundation of a successful customer engagement strategy, they are not all equally useful. Companies face challenges in measuring because a single, accurate customer engagement metric does not exist. Therefore, brands must select the KPIs that are most effective for the specific customer journey and holistically review the measurements.
Consider measuring the following KPIs for customer engagement:
- Retention and Churn: The best sign of customer engagement is high retention and low churn rates, which indicate you are keeping your current customers. Although you should not look at a single metric alone, this metric is a strong indicator of engagement.
- Customer Referrals: Because the highest level of customer engagement are referrals to friends and family, this metric should be a key number to track and actively increase. By having a program where customers earn a bonus for referrals, you can track, reward, and encourage referrals.
- Purchase Order Value: Engaged customers buy more, so tracking this metric shows over time when your brand's engagement decreases or increases based on customer engagement strategies.
- Purchase Frequency: A customer who purchases once a month is significantly more engaged than someone who buys a product once per year. By understanding the average purchase frequency, as well as the frequency for customers with different levels of engagement (such as loyalty members and subscribers), you can determine which customer engagement strategies are most effective.
- Guest Checkout Rates without an Account: Customers who check out without an account are not highly engaged, especially when they are repeat customers. By tracking these customers and actively reaching out to them, you can both increase engagement and measure the number of customers who are not overly engaged.
- Repeat Purchase Rate: A one-time customer indicates dissatisfaction with either the product or experience, so this is a key metric to measure and track. Customers who have a low repeat purchase rate also indicate warm leads that may be converted to engaged and repeat customers with additional offers and interactions.
- Subscriptions: When someone chooses to receive your content regularly, it shows that they want to continue their relationship with the brand. An increasing number of subscribers to your email list is a positive sign of engagement.
While the following are not critical KPIs for customer engagement, consider tracking them to supplement the KPIs listed above:
- Frequency of Visits: Customers who have a relationship with a brand regularly visit the website to check for products, content, and purchases. A high average-frequency rate indicates very engaged and involved customers.
- Depth of Visit: When a customer visits a website, looks at one page, and quickly leaves, their actions indicate low engagement. By looking at the average visit time and number of pages visited, you can gauge the average depth of visits.
- Click-Through Rate: Every time someone clicks a link from social media or an email to visit your page, they indicate that the content they were viewing created enough interest for them to take additional actions.
- Customer Reviews: Because people must have a high level of engagement and satisfaction to leave a positive review, a high number of good reviews indicates that customers are not only engaged, but moving toward advocacy.
- Social Media Followers: Similar to subscribers, followers can indicate engagement with the brand. However, the number of followers should only be considered alongside other engagement metrics.
- Email Opens and Click-Through Rates: When a subscriber does not open your email, their inaction indicates low engagement. In contrast, high open and click-through rates show that your subscribers are actively engaged.
Customer Engagement Examples
You have read about Starbucks and LEGO brands earlier in this article. Here are three additional companies — Marketo, SAP Ariba, and CAVU Aerospace — that have worked hard to create first-class customer experiences through active engagement.
Marketo: Marketo, a leader in marketing engagement and automation software, created Marketo University, an education program for customers. The education team initially relied on manual processes and decentralized platforms to manage course data. As the company grew and customer enrollment, attendance, and payment data expanded, the need to improve customer service through automation became clear. Smartsheet became their single solution for managing the expansive disparate data. Smartsheet dashboards allow education team members to access data instantly, speeding up processes that directly impact customers such as payments and enrollment changes.
SAP Ariba: SAP Ariba helps customers digitally transform their procurement operations. They understand the need to create a delightful and effective customer experience. Large SAP Ariba customers require accurate data to get their suppliers on board. Smartsheet forms and real-time dashboards allow for data validation and early issue diagnosis that improve the overall procurement processes, resulting in better customer engagement.
CAVU Aerospace: CAVU Aerospace, an aircraft disassembly and recycling service provider ran into a complexity when dismantling commercial airline planes. The manual efforts to salvage intact aircraft parts so that third-party customers can recoup their investments of up to $12 million was time-consuming and unreliable. The customers were unable to access real-time aircraft part information to resell the parts quickly.
CAVU developed a proprietary API and form through Smartsheet for customers to view real-time inventory. This solution not only doubled the number of planes CAVU can dismantle, but improved their relationship with customers.
How to Increase Customer Engagement
Following a customer engagement strategy and applying revenue-related metrics is the perfect way to increase customer engagement. Understand customer profiles, follow the customer journey, humanize your brand, and deliver consistent communications and useful content, gathering feedback along the way.
The Role of Marketing in Customer Engagement
Intelligent and strategic marketing is the foundation for excellent customer engagement. The responsibility for developing the foundation of engagement does not mean that the marketing team is solely responsible for each element of engagement. If that were the case, marketing would be involved in every interaction with a customer, which is impossible.
Still, marketing shapes the customer engagement strategy, including developing customer personas, messaging, content, and marketing programs. The marketing team, along with company leadership, must arm the entire company with the resources necessary to engage with customers consistently across all channels.
Traditional Marketing vs. Customer Engagement Marketing
Most forward-thinking organizations have realized that building a better relationship with customers is the key to success. In the past, the company governed how, when, and where their product or service was purchased.
Today, because of digital technology, brands are a part of their customers' lives in a way that was not previously possible. And the roles have reversed: The customer now decides when, where, and how they purchase a product. Additionally, customers self-educate and research their way through the sales cycle, and they build relationships with the brands that provide the resources and content they seek.
Traditional marketing uses well-known media, such as email, print, broadcast, billboards, and direct mail. The limitation of conventional marketing is that there is no interaction or engagement between the customer and the media.
Engagement marketing focuses on understanding individual customers, their buying habits, and everything else you can gather, then marketing through media that enable personalized interactions. Engagement marketing is not an instant revenue-generating activity; rather, engagement requires you to build an audience based on nurtured relationships using interactions that are personalized and relevant.
Steve Jobs famously stated, "Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves." This statement is the key to marketing in a time when customers expect (and look for) engaging brands.
Because brands can interact with their customers more casually and frequently, customers now develop relationships with brands that go beyond transactional. The value of a customer who feels genuinely engaged with a brand is significant – in terms of their lifetime purchasing potential, referrals, and advocacy reach. Brands can significantly increase both their revenue and retention by creating a customer engagement strategy that's focused on relevant KPIs.
Customers can have this deep relationship and engagement with only a limited number of brands, and not with competing brands. Because many companies are increasingly focusing on customer engagement, brands that neglect this strategy are likely to find themselves losing both customers and revenue. An engaged customer is not merely another customer — engaged customers have the power to help transform and grow your business.
Customer Engagement Technologies
Analytics solutions that aid in understanding your customers, marketing solutions for personalized nurture programs, instant messaging, social networks, and artificial intelligence are just a few of the tools that will help you break through the competitive noise with improved customer engagement.
Elizabeth Griffith, Web Marketing Manager, Spirion, says, "When it comes to your organization's website, customer engagement is about becoming a student of the customer's behavior. Become an expert in your customer's wants, needs, and questions by studying data with tools like Google Analytics, heat mapping, and SEO platforms.
“In turn, let them study you. Provide content that answers their questions without form restrictions — proving both thought leadership and building your domain authority. Remove your ego and lofty marketing language, and replace it with simple, data-backed facts. And when you need that lead or conversion that requires handing over personal information, promise a carrot that is of real value and make that experience as easy as possible. By that touch, you have proven value, and they trust you," says Griffith.
Look for these features in technologies that impact customer engagement:
- Campaign Personalization: Customize campaigns based on interaction history and industry, so they are relevant to the customer.
- Data Analysis: The ability to capture, aggregate, and analyze customer data from multiple sources such as website forms, transactions, loyalty programs, surveys, and sales tools.
- Diverse Communications: Meeting customers where they like to communicate (text, email, social media, and chatbots) is essential.
- Filters and Segmentation: Categorize and group customers based on industry, interests, or other details with the ability to monitor and measure trends.
- Integrations: Customer engagement relies on gathering and sharing information across different teams throughout the customer journey. The tool should integrate with other business solutions that contain customer information to ensure customers have a seamless, personal engagement across all channels in an omni-channel experience.
- Marketing Automation: Set up workflow rules so that when a customer meets certain criteria, an action is triggered, such as an email offer, invitation, coupon, or content suggestion.
https://www.smartsheet.com/
Part 1: Types of Customer Engagement
Merlene Leano
While it is not an unfamiliar buzzword in the business industry, customer engagement is often overlooked by most businesses. Most businesses have the mindset that customer engagement solely revolves around transactions.
That is no longer the case at present. Engagement is not just limited to a mere television ad or a sales pitch. Rather, there are several inherent characteristics involved in this practice that you must know to make your customer involvement strategies work.
The first part of our four-part blog series will explore the four types of customer engagement that you can maximize to help improve your current customer-centric approaches.
Let’s break them down one by one!
1. Interactive Engagement
Interactive engagement involves the combinations of different communication channels to foster an interactive conversation with your customers. The use of traditional customer engagement methods combined with advanced channels like mobile and social media allows you to create a two-way communication atmosphere where clients can proactively discuss their experiences and difficulties with your brand. In response, you gain customer insights and feedback that will prove valuable in producing user-focused products and services. Before you know it, you’re able to expertly anticipate your next marketing move.
2. Emotion-Driven Engagement
One of the few mistakes that businesses tend to commit is being aggressively competitive. Sometimes they focus on launching different products to counter competitors.
Don’t misunderstand this, aggressiveness in this highly competitive landscape is an expedient approach towards becoming successful. Unfortunately, when not done right, it completely overlooks the importance of customer emotion in the process.
Little do they know, emotion has been proven to be instrumental in creating stronger engagements. Since you are operating to cater to a crowd with emotionally motivated purchasing decisions, it is only practical to deliver products and services that coincide with their personal preferences. Customers that bear an emotional-level connection to your brand are more likely to stay loyal and spread the word about how great your brand is.
Several studies show that the majority of customer purchases are based on emotions, which is why colors, designs, messaging, and other subjectively stimulating factors must be considered at all times when creating your business logo, promoting your services, or disseminating information about your brand.
3. Logical Engagement
In today’s time, customers’ buying decisions are highly influenced by the knowledge base they gain from the internet even without requiring them to be present physically in the store. And with the internet gradually reshaping the usual sales process as we know it, it becomes easier for customers to gain such knowledge just by reading comments on social media or merely skimming through their newsfeed.
Businesses must see to it that they maximize the power of the internet to provide concise and insightful information about their products and services. There needs to be in-depth details about best-sellers among the company’s array of products because this will likely entice prospects to subscribe or make a purchase. Layout a comprehensive FAQs page on websites and other online channels to serve as a self-service guide for buyers or first-time visitors on your pages.
Embedding a conversational communication tool into your website is also a plus. It helps create more personalized communication with your customers and dramatically attracts more leads to visit your website.
4. Contextual Engagement
Over the years, technology has become increasingly useful in gaining an in-depth understanding of different consumer behaviors. Gathering sufficient customer insights results in more effective end-user retention, considering that marketing strategies are more accurate and carefully tailored to reflect customer needs.
By using diverse channels to reach your customers, it becomes easier for you to connect with them in real-time. Consequently, your pre-engagement and after-sales services are enhanced at an impressive rate. Specifically, you can communicate with your past customers by sending them monthly updates about your new products along with free, exclusive content and special offers. Examples of these content include newsletters, eBooks, or even limited-offer discount vouchers based on their recent purchases.
The customer engagement tactics proposed in this blog are best combined with interactive and logical approaches. Don’t forget to add a hint of emotional touch because the sentimental component goes a long way when it comes to delivering impeccable branding that captures genuine customer interest. Stay tuned for the next installment of The Ultimate Guide to Successful Customer Engagement!
Part 2: How to Boost Customer Engagement?
Admit it—sometimes, no matter how hard you try to produce the best content, it seems insufficient to win the interests of your target audiences. It is almost as if you are being left behind.
Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with your content. Maybe what it is, is that you’re falling short on using effective brand engagement strategies to connect with your customers.
Yes, the term customer engagement may sound like an easy feat the first time people hear it, but in belittling the weight of its influence, they overlook the real essence of capturing audience interest. Businesses undermining customer engagement are those that tend to fail to survive or prevail.
As the unwritten rule of business management and growth goes, ‘The more efficient your efforts to get people to commit to your brand, the more they become satisfied with your products and services.’ Fostering an interactive and emotionally engaging connection with customers increases the likelihood of them staying loyal to your brand.
We know customer engagement may sound a little bit tedious, but the moment you perfect it, the more likely it will pay off in the end. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! This article will tackle everything you need to know on how to increase customer engagement using different customer engagement ideas and strategies.
Now that you know the “whats” of customer engagement, it is time to know the “hows” of it. Let’s have a look at five effective customer engagement strategies that you can use now!
1. Produce Content Relevant to Target Customers
Before you get started devising content aimed at your intended audience, the first step you need to take is to put yourself in the shoes of your customers. Collecting information on their needs should be at the top of your list as a solution provider because it helps you highlight their pain points.
Finding ways to assist your customers whenever they ask for it should be your core focus when you create branding content. It can be in the form of blogs, how-to videos, webinars, written guides, and other source materials that they can use as references. The point is you’re sharing something valuable that will help meet their demands, solve their challenges, and push them to perform well (in their jobs, for instance).
Deliver content exclusively tailored to accommodate dynamic customer pain points along with their pressing difficulties. Maintain a space for communication with your audience. Merging the two practices is the secret to nurturing and fortifying the foundations of your customer relationship for long-term success.
2. Nail Your Social Media Engagements
The impact of social media is enormous. Use it well and it will anchor your business no matter how big the waves of changes in your industry may be.
Social media is a great place to market your services without creating much of a hassle for your customers. Most people are on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, so it is more accessible to the public and it is also more appealing to the majority of internet users today. Maximizing social media introduces your identity as a reputable brand and makes your customers feel at ease.
Analyze how to be more socially visible if you want to change how your prospects perceive your brand. Showcase your brand’s identity by sharing relatable, unique, funny, and meaningful posts to pique the sophisticated interests of modern audiences. Go beyond promotional content. Think beyond your boundaries to transform a mere promotional post into more enticing, personalized content.
3. Be Responsive
Responsiveness is key to establishing customer relations that go beyond monetary transactions or the exchange of goods and subscriptions. Being interactive bridges the gap between you and your potential customers. Use different communication platforms to initiate continuous discussions and rapport with them.
Facebook, one of today’s social media giants, allows businesses to use the comment section to answer user queries aptly and instantly. The feature strengthens online credibility but improves your customer relationship at the same time.
While it is true that starting long discussion threads on your pages takes time, that shouldn’t leave you discouraged. Why not try adding a follow-up question to your post to create an opportunity for your customers to share their thoughts, suggestions, and feedback. At the same time, you are inviting your supporters to communicate with fellow supporters and share their DIY tips, struggles, and relatable information concerning your brand.
4. Build Your Own Community
Don’t feel like limiting B2C interactions on your page’s comment section? Take it a notch higher by creating a digital community for your supporters. It is a great way to keep in touch with your patrons.
The community serves as a space where they get to build genuine connections and fortify your standing and credibility amid a tough and competitive industry.
Make sure you are consistently present in your forums and groups for that strong and lasting impact on your followers and members. As always, be responsive. Allot a time to assist them whenever they ask questions that fellow members cannot answer.
Use the data you gathered from customers to determine which topics would resonate well with them. Stray from posting purely business-related content as it will leave a bad aftertaste in all your pages and communities. Mix it up with quizzes, polls, and fresh content such as articles about the latest events, a meme, or any other content as long as it can keep your members engaged.
Moreover, post future products, milestones, upcoming webinars, and other related content.
With the feedback and insights you gathered from your community members, Creating a community for your supporters allows you to know which part of your business needs improving or reassessing. The more you initiate open communication with them, the higher the value you associate with both your new and avid supporters. The closed groups you share with your followers lets you be one with their standpoints, beliefs, and ultimately, create more organic engagement.
5. Maximize Omnichannel Approach
It is important to have a website that lets customers reach you faster.
You can also use it to tap into different communication channels such as media, messaging apps, email marketing, live chat, and all other forms of communication channels to boost traffic and keep visitors deeply interested in what you have to offer!
Maximizing omnichannel availability not only provides customer convenience; it also gives you tons of opportunities to strengthen the ties between your business and your patrons.
As exaggerated as it may sound, the benefits you get with impeccable customer engagement are endless. All you have to do is map your next strategy thoughtfully. When done properly, you inspire more individuals to spread the word about your brand. Eventually, more business opportunities follow through. It’s a domino effect.
Customers switching to other brands is inevitable, so don’t fret too much when it happens. You can always open newer ways to encourage them to come back. Using the right strategies, earning their trust for the second time becomes more feasible and manageable.
There’s more to learn about how to be successful with your customer engagement strategies.
Merlene Leano