As a business owner, you don’t want to run a company based on guesswork.
You want solid numbers and data on which you can base your business decisions and ensure profitability.
To be able to run a data-driven company, you will need to specify suitable customer engagement metrics that help determine if your departments are performing well.
What are these customer engagement metrics and how do they benefit your organization?
In this post, we will go through over fifteen such customer engagement metrics and share the reasons why you should measure customer engagement metrics in the first place.
Let’s jump right into the content, shall we?
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What are customer engagement metrics?
Customer engagement metrics, as the name suggests, are metrics that help businesses determine the level of customer engagement they are receiving in return for their marketing and advertising campaigns.
In other words, customer engagement metrics show how much customers are interacting with your brand, and also if the engagement is leading to revenue increase or business development.
Why measuring customer engagement metrics is important?
Now that you know what customer engagement metrics stand for, it’s time we discuss their advantages. Here are the key benefits of tracking customer engagement metrics —
1. Insight into customer behavior
Businesses that track customer behavior are always ahead of their competition.
You can track click-through rates, page visit frequency, and other insights to figure out how customers interact with your products and services.
This will help you make strategic business decisions and boost customer experience across the brand.
2. Performance measurement
How are your departments performing, especially marketing and sales? This question can be answered if you are tracking the customer engagement metrics.
You will get to know how well your marketing campaign and content strategies perform and even get help from data to assess the effectiveness of the existing campaigns and strategies.
3. Enhanced customer experience
Customers are everything. In many of our previous posts, we have given that having a customer-centric approach to business and marketing helps gain a competitive advantage.
With customer engagement metrics, you can easily identify patterns and preferences to learn more about customers.
The analysis will bring you closer to your target audience and carve business strategies that cater to their pain points.
4. Customer retention and customer loyalty
Retention is always cheaper than acquisition. So, save money and start tracking customer engagement metrics.
The more you know about your customers, the easier it will be to retain them and provide them with better services and products.
The engagement metrics help identify the at-risk customers and anticipate churn.
5. Optimized marketing strategies
Your marketing campaigns will work only if you design the marketing strategies with the end customer in mind.
You get to refine your marketing strategies by optimizing the channels, messages, and content in order to achieve the highest engagement.
6. Data-driven decision-making
In today’s competitive world, a brand that has reliable data wins almost every market battle. This is because reliable data helps develop reliable marketing and business decisions.
If you want to improve your ability to make correct decisions related to marketing and business, you need to start tracking customer engagement metrics.
Essential customer engagement metrics to track
Here are some of the most important customer engagement metrics your business should be tracking for sustainable success. Let’s discuss them in detail —
1. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)
Customer satisfaction score as the name suggests provides information about the level of satisfaction a customer has with using your service or product.
In this, you will get to know the correct measurement through a customer feedback or customer experience survey.
The question asked in the feedback survey is simple too. You will ask how satisfied customers are with your products and services. The responses you will receive will be measured on a scale of 0 to 5.
When calculating CSAT, all you need to do is divide the combined number of responses received by the total number of survey responses. Then multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage score.
2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net promoter score or NPS is an excellent customer engagement metric you can track to learn how much a customer enjoys using your products and services.
Like CSAT, the NPS score is calculated by sending out NPS surveys.
What question do you ask in the Net Promoter Score survey? Well, you will ask if the customer is willing to recommend your products and services to their friends and family members.
The responses to the survey question are collected on a scale of 0 to 10. In this, people responding 0-6 are called detractors, ones responding 7-8 are called passives, and 9-10 are called promoters.
3. Customer Effort Score (CES)
Customer effort score is another excellent customer engagement metric to track as it provides access to customer behavior. With a customer effort score, you can measure how much effort it takes for customers to interact with your company.
Derivative sense from customer effort score is quite simple. If customers have to put in a lot of effort, the customer experience will be low and it will adversely impact your customer engagement scores.
Low effort results in higher customer satisfaction and even higher customer engagement. CES surveys are sent at key touchpoints of the customer journey in order to check for potential obstacles in the journey.
4. First week engagement
The first week when a user interacts with your brand is crucial. It is this week that the user will search about your brand and your competitor.
As they go through researching about you, they will come across major touchpoints in the customer journey, which you can track.
Tracking the first-week engagement metric will let you know precisely where users interact with or abandon your service or product in the first week itself.
A bad onboarding experience will keep users from making a purchase and will make them bounce to competitors in the first week. Unlike the ones we discussed earlier, this customer engagement metric does not require surveys.
5. Customer Churn rate
Churn is your enemy. As a business owner, you should do everything in your capacity to reduce customer churn in your organization.
What is churn? It refers to customers who have stopped using your service or product in a given period.
To determine churn, you will have to calculate the churn rate.
Collecting customer feedback using the above-mentioned methods and coupling the data with the churn rate will help you understand why customers are deciding to stop doing business with you.
With the collected data, you can determine how to train and coach your agents.
6. User activity engagement
This is one thing we all dig into when searching for how successful a particular online platform is. The higher the user activity, the more successful the platform. This customer engagement metric can be divided into daily active users and monthly active users.
These refer to the number of unique users of a product or service in a day and the number of unique users of a product or service in a month respectively.
The trends you will come across when tracking DAU and MAU will show how customers like to engage with your offerings. These trends can be used to develop highly focused marketing strategies in order to boost customer retention and engagement.
7. Social media engagement
Social media plays a huge role in boosting customer engagement for a brand, especially on online channels. Social media engagement is critical in developing highly effective customer relationships.
With social media, you can stay connected with your target audience and generate more brand awareness.
But how are you going to track the social media engagement metrics since there are so many social media platforms out there?
We suggest you use social media analytics tools that can keep an eye on the number of likes, shares, posts, comments, and mentions you receive on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and more.
8. Customer lifetime value
Customer lifetime value is a very useful customer engagement metric as it shows exactly how much revenue a particular customer brings in over a period of time.
This is an engagement metric worth tracking because it focuses on existing customers as opposed to focusing on customer acquisition — a more expensive scenario.
Customer lifetime value or CLV shows that the more a customer stays with your business, the more money they will spend. So, how do you calculate customer lifetime value?
To figure out the CLV engagement metric, you will need to know the average monetary amount of a sale, the average number of transactions, the average customer retention period, the cost to make a product or service, operation costs, and advertising costs.
9. Average session duration
Session time or session duration is a customer engagement metric that shows if customers are interested in your products or services. Speaking of customer journey, a user will first come across your platform, app, or product.
Then the user will log in and use the platform.
As a brand owner, you want to know if the user is staying on the platform for a long time or a short time. Generally, the higher the session duration, the more customer engagement.
However, a lower session duration doesn’t necessarily mean lower customer engagement. If a user landing on your website finds the required information quickly, that shows your website extends excellent customer experience.
10. Page Visit Frequency
As a business owner who has an official business website and one who runs online advertising campaigns, you will have to see which user visits your website the most. This can be tracked if you monitor page visits.
You can calculate page visits with the help of cookies and figure out the average page visit frequency. The more a user visits your website, the higher will be customer engagement metrics.
This also means that the user is able to find solutions to its problems on your site.
11. Bounce rate
This is a critical customer engagement metric that helps you determine the number of prospects that didn’t respond to your proposal or advertising campaign.
Let’s say you were running an email campaign. When you send out the emails, there will be people who will receive the emails, then there will be ones who will open them, and then there will be some who will click through the links in the email.
The bounce rate shows the percentage of people who opened the email but did not click through and jumped out of the mail immediately. In terms of marketing, a bounce means that a prospect moved from you to a competitor.
12. Pageviews
Although most people (even from a marketing background) get confused with page views and page visits, we will make sure you get the required clarity.
Page views are essentially the amount of traffic you will receive on your website for a particular webpage.
While measuring page views, you will have to consider initial load, re-load, and revisits from the same user. Page views should be measured if you have a dedicated support portal, knowledge center, or community portal, or if you post self-help videos.
The higher the page views, the more will be your customer engagement.
13. Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
Are you calculating customer acquisition costs for your company? It is an important customer engagement metric as it shows a cumulative index of customer satisfaction. Customer acquisition cost shows the amount you spend to get a new customer.
This metric is crucial for marketing and sales teams as they will have to show the CAC to the business owners, investors, and other stakeholders.
How do you calculate customer acquisition costs? You will have to consider the cost of advertisements, trading costs, marketing and sales team costs, innovation costs, inventory costs, and costs related to technical, publishing, and promoting.
14. Conversion rate
What is a conversion? In terms of marketing and sales, a conversion means the successful completion of an action that turns a prospect into a customer.
With conversion rate, you can measure the percentage of customers that are involved in completing actions that are tied to your business. You can also talk about conversion in terms of a campaign.
The successful achievement of the campaign goal can be determined as conversion.
The more times the campaign goal is achieved, the more is the conversion rate. You can track conversion rates for campaigns like ebook downloads, newsletters registration, Facebook Ads clicks, and more.
15. Customer retention rate
We have talked extensively about strategies that you can use to retain customers in our previous posts. Why is customer retention important? Well, the most important thing to note is that it is cheaper than customer acquisition.
So, if your customer retention rate is high, you can ensure that your customer engagement is quite healthy.
Retention refers to customers’ decision to stick with a brand as they find value in the brand’s products, services, and offers.
The higher the customer retention rate, the higher will be customer loyalty, and higher will be customer engagement. This can give you a glimpse into your existing customer experience and satisfaction performance.
16. Ticket volume
Your customer support is critical to customer engagement. This is because your customers, especially the ones who are experiencing problems with your products or services, will connect with your support rep.
As your support rep gets burdened with more and more tickets, it will show that your customers are not satisfied with your products and services.
A high ticket count means that customer satisfaction is low and so is customer engagement. This is also a perfect opportunity for business owners to see which channels customers prefer when getting their issues resolved.
17. Click through rate
The last customer engagement metric worth focusing on is the click-through rate. Earlier, we gave you an example of an email campaign while explaining the bounce rate.
We mentioned the click-through rate there as we wanted to explain the very concept, i.e. when recipients click through the links in the email.
A higher click-through rate shows that more and more recipients were impacted by your email and were compelled to click the link and learn more about your products and services. Thus, it results in higher customer engagement.
Final thoughts!
If you are relatively new to the industry and trying to build your brand, you need to set a few things straight. First, you will have to throw guesswork out of the window and become tunnel-focused about using data and analytics.
Second, you will have to figure out the right customer engagement metrics that will help you develop better marketing and advertising strategies.
With a list of appropriate customer engagement metrics, you will be accruing the right data and insights that you can use for business success.
We hope this post on customer engagement metrics helped you. Stay tuned to read more informative posts on the blog.