When you put together a campaign, you’ll have some business objectives in mind. These can often be quite general, like raise awareness or boost sales. Or they can be more specific, like increasing traction among a certain demographic.
Whatever the business goals, one of the most reliable ways of measuring the success of the campaign is to deploy one or more customer engagement metrics. We’ll go through some of the most effective ones to consider, so your measuring efforts measure up.
Customer engagement: what do we mean?
Think of a conversation. To be meaningful and rewarding, it needs to be two-way. This way, both parties are getting something out of it and hopefully productivity results.
This is what we’re after with customer engagement. It’s a reciprocal process: the business offers something of interest, and the customer latches on. Dialog results, culminating in a sale and an ongoing relationship.
Free to use image from Unsplash
Now consider a lecture. All too easily, a largely one-way situation like this can lose one or two (or maybe more) students in the room. If the person delivering the speech isn’t careful, the audience can lose interest and their minds can start to wander. This is what happens when a business fails to take on board the importance of customer engagement.
So, what does customer engagement look like in practice?
Here are two thoughts. Firstly, a business that offers a product that addresses a particular need and makes an effort to deliver that product to the kind of customer that tends to have that need, then you’ll attract some engagement.
Secondly, once you have that engagement, you can prolong and develop it by offering excellent customer service. This can be during the sales process, as well as in the follow-up, in terms of delivering fulfillment and customer success. If you demonstrate great and consistent customer service, you’ll keep that engagement going.
Customer engagement metrics for your business
There are numerous key customer engagement metrics out there. Too many to employ all at once. So, let’s highlight some of the most effective.
Your team can collect and analyze these metrics in numerous ways, depending on what you’re measuring. Some of the best sources include your CRM, social media, and customer surveys. But it’s also worth investing in additional tools like white label marketing software. These third-party tools personalize your brand identity and services and will significantly reduce the time you spend aggregating engagement metrics.
1. The Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Free to use image from Pixabay
This is one of the most popular metrics. It delves into how trusted your business and/or products are. It reveals how likely a customer is to recommend them to others.
How does it work? There are a number of varieties, but here’s the simplest. Two questions are asked:
-
- What rating would the customer give the product or business? This is usually on a scale from 1 to 10, so is very straightforward and empirical.
- Why did the customer give this rating? This is an open-ended question so asks for a qualitative response.
The first question gives you a score out of 10, which you can split into three categories:
-
-
- Promoters: Customers who give a rating of 9 or 10.
- Detractors: Customers who give a rating between 1 and 6.
- Passive: Customers who give a rating of 7 and 8.
-
An NPS is arrived at by eliminating the passive ratings and subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
The second question gives perhaps deeper insights. It provides some very valuable customer feedback for the business to use in a bid to secure more engagement going forward.
Say, for instance, that the customer gives a 9 out of 10 because they’re generally very happy with a business’ service, and they reflect this in the answer to the second question.
However, let’s say they also mention that it would have been 10 out of 10 if only the customer service was available through a toll free number. With this kind of feedback, a business gets a heads-up on how to transform from very good into exemplary.
2. Churn
Inevitably, a business will experience a drop in sales as some customers move on to other things, replaced by a new bunch of customers who fall into your target market. This is only natural.
However, a savvy business won’t welcome an unnecessarily high customer churn rate. It makes economic sense to have a good customer retention rate rather than spend money attracting new ones.
So, keeping an eye on churn is a very sensible way to assess business performance.
How is it arrived at? Take the number of customers lost over a given period. Then, for that same period, add the number of customers you started with, and the number of new customers you attracted during that time. Divide the former figure by the latter total, and multiply by 100 to get a percentage of customers being churned.
For example:
Created by writer using Canva
By calculating your churn rate, you can assess the number of engaged customers and those showing a lack of engagement. It’s clearly not a good idea to attract customers who then leave you straight away.
It’s much better to give them a great customer experience, keep them on board, and carry on selling to them, so you get a decent customer lifetime value. A churn rate metric will allow you to monitor this.
3. Customer satisfaction score (CSat)
We’ve looked at the rate at which customers can drift away. A CSat metric will help explain why this might happen.
Like NPS, it involves a scale that we ask the customer to mark their experiences and attitudes upon. What we’re concentrating on here is user experiences and whether they measure up to customer expectations. For instance, it might work like so: ‘On a scale of 1 to 5, please rate your satisfaction with the business phone service you’ve recently purchased’.
The calculation of the score then goes like this. Add together the number of 4s and 5s you’ve received. Divide this total by the overall number of CSat responses you’ve received. Then multiply the result by 100.
This user satisfaction figure will give you a window into your customers’ overall satisfaction levels with your business and product. This will be an important factor in assessing engagement and, therefore, the likelihood of becoming loyal customers.
Just like with NPS, there can be a follow-up question asking for the reasons behind the given score. Again, this can provide fascinating and valuable insights into customer sentiment and can point the way to sensible improvements that you might wish to deploy. This is the way to deeper understanding and ever more satisfied customers.
4. Conversion rate
Free to use image from Pexels
This one really cuts to the chase. If your marketing campaign is all about securing more sales from a given activity, it makes sense to look at the number of sales that result. Pretty straightforward, right? Well, yes, although there are one or two nuances to consider.
So, let’s say you’ve paired your product with an ICP.
What is an ICP? It is an ideal customer profile or an outline of the customer you’re really aiming at.
Based on this, you launch an email campaign that targets a few different ICPs with the aim of raising awareness about your product and, ultimately, sales. You can then track results by monitoring any resulting growth in sales.
To determine your conversion rate, you divide the number of people who convert (in this case, the number of sales connected to the campaign) by the number of people you reached (in this case, the number of emails delivered) and then times that by 100 to give you a percentage.
Now, to make these results truly useful for the future, you’ll want to take a more granular approach. By comparing the conversion rates of your different ideal customer profiles you’ll be able to determine which of these is engaging with your brand the most and where improvements or optimizations need to be made.
Combining this metric with others, such as CTR, will help to paint a picture of how effective your marketing efforts were, whether you’re targeting the right customer profile, and how you can refine your strategy in the future.
5. Bounce rate
Let’s conclude with a key metric: the bounce rate measure.
When you attract visitors to your site, whether you’re selling the most delectable donuts or the best value voip phone systems, you want them to stick around. You want them to make a purchase, or at least learn about your products and have them in mind in the future.
What you don’t want to see in customer behavior is a large percentage of visitors leaving immediately after landing on your site. If this happens, you have a problem.
Maybe your initial approach is working, but your site is unappealing and unclear. Or maybe it’s a case of many accidental clicks and clumsy thumbs, so you need to adjust your targeting. Either way, to diagnose the problem, first, you need a clear insight. This is where bounce rate is invaluable.
How do we arrive at it? For a given period of time, take the number of site visitors who took one look and then left. Then divide this amount by the overall number of site visitors. Multiply the result by 100.
What’s a good figure? It varies from industry to industry, so to gain a good understanding look at your industry averages and, if possible, how your competitors are faring.
Image souced from orbitmedia.com
Engage and prosper
No matter what area of sales you’re in, you have to have a customer engagement strategy. Nobody’s going to be very interested in buying from you if you appear not to be interested in them. So, campaigns have to launch with engagement in mind, to effect a competitive edge and attract and attract and retain customer loyalty.
But crucial to such a campaign’s success is an awareness of just how successful it is at doing this. Otherwise, you’re in danger of stumbling around in the dark. Customer engagement metrics give you the illumination you need to make informed decisions, improve your campaigns, and drive success. So, lights on and let’s take a look around.
Frequently asked questions
Why are customer engagement metrics important for measuring campaign success?
Customer engagement metrics are important because they provide a clear picture of how customers are interacting with your brand. By analyzing these metrics, you can make data-driven decisions that enhance the customer experience and, ultimately, drive growth.
What are some other key customer engagement metrics to track?
Here, we’ve covered the most important metrics to track to ensure success but you can also consider:
- Click-Through Rate (CTR)
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Average session duration
- Social media engagement
- Email open rate
Originally published Aug 14, 2024, updated Aug 15, 2024
