Every business needs to know how to measure customer engagement.
Regardless of your industry or the size of your business, customer engagement will impact your bottom line. Any business with an online presence – even if it’s simply a Facebook Page – will need to know what it is and how to measure it.
As we’ve discussed elsewhere on the blog, customer engagement refers to how your users or customers interact with your brand, product, or service. Typically, engaged users are those who interact positively. Disengaged customers are those who don’t interact at all.
Why Customer Engagement Matters
Customer engagement is vital for the success of any company and the proof is in the numbers:
The definition of an engaged customer versus a disengaged customer will typically vary, depending on your business and your products.
Where Customers Engage with Your Brand
Some companies may feel that engagement doesn’t matter.
A company that produces physical products may not feel that engagement is a factor. However, in today’s digital world, every brand must interact with and engage customers to a certain extent.
Here are a few of the major places where customer engagement matters:
Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the most important marketing tools in any business’s toolbox. It is a primary component to any marketing funnel and represents one of the most important interfaces for customer engagement.
A major function of a content marketing program is to acquire customers by engaging them. Analysis of a campaign’s effectiveness will also increase insight into those customers needs, wants, and motivations.
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Apps
App developers are well aware that app monetization depends almost entirely on customer engagement.
Users who don’t engage with an app won’t increase profits. When apps fail to engage, users don’t click on adds, download in-app purchases, promote the app to their friends, and so on.
Ideal app engagement scenarios vary from app to app and vertical to vertical. However, whether your usage times average at 3 minutes or at 30, engagement is the most important metric for your bottom line.
Websites
As with apps, websites’ engagement scenarios depend on the function of the site, the vertical, its monetization model, and so on.
A content-rich website most likely earns income via advertising, affiliate marketing, and so on. These sites depend heavily on user engagement – users who aren’t on a site can’t click on the money-making hyperlinks. Positive customer engagement for these types of sites would be based on frequency and duration of site visits.
A simple landing page site, however, would probably correlate engagement and conversions quite closely. Return rates, however, would be much less important.
Social Media
Social media is one of the most important engagement interfaces between customers and businesses.
Even the smallest, most local businesses use social media to communicate to prospects, existing customers, and the media. Social media engagement is one indicator of customer engagement. The bigger the role that social media plays in your customer relations, the more pivotal its role in customer engagement.
How to Measure Customer Engagement
To measure customer engagement and user engagement, decide which interactions are critical to your business model. These interactions are then turned into key performance indicators (KPIs), or metrics.
A content-rich website, for instance, would focus on metrics such as the number of page views, the time spent on site, how often users return to a site, and so on. App developers would focus on the number of downloads, time spent in app, how many users abandon the app, and so on.
For a more detailed discussion of engagement metrics, click here for 15 of the most important user engagement metrics.
In addition to picking out which metrics matter most, you will need to find the right tools to do the job. In many cases, it’s a good idea to examine both issues simultaneously – you won’t always know which metrics are available until you explore available tools.
To measure customer engagement, you will need analytics software.
There are plenty of tools and platforms available for measuring engagement across channels. The key is choosing the most effective, efficient tools to do the job.
Every marketing tool worth its salt will include its own analytics toolbox. But you may want to investigate independent analytics platforms. These robust tools dive deep into data and add new layers of insight to other platforms.
In today’s world, customers spend more and more time interfacing and interacting online. Brands must be able to meet and engage with those customers. And, in order to maximize profits and customer retention rates, businesses will need to know how to measure customer engagement.
Why Every Business Needs to Know How to Measure Customer Engagement
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