Customer Engagement – The one metric that matters

Customer engagement is essential for digital businesses to track and measure how frequently customers engage with their brand. Read this blog to know the top KPIs to track.

Are you tracking the KPIs that matter? Customer engagement metrics that you must pay attention to.

Do you know what makes a good company great? It is the amount of attention and time they spend to understand their customers. Most digital businesses obsess over their conversion rates, average order value, and site traffic.

What happens to the picture when the lead becomes a customer? The answer to this question will help you improve customer retention rates and treat every customer as though they were the only one.

It is no secret that an engaged and active customer will keep the cash registers ringing. But trying to understand customers can be overwhelming. It can sometimes feel like boiling the ocean. Here are a few efficient ways to increase and measure customer engagement.

Do your customers like your social posts?

Highly engaged customers follow their favorite brands and engage with posts frequently. Beauty eCommerce brand Sephora is an example of how a robust social media presence can delight and retain customers. They have a clever omnichannel game and use social media to share beauty secrets with clients and inspire them to try a new look or chic style.  Furthermore, Sephora is also highly responsive to customer feedback on all its social media platforms.

One sure-fire way to engage customers is to consistently post content on what interests them and make the right noises to gain attention. Similarly, TOMS doesn’t market itself as a shoe brand but a social phenomenon through its messaging, and by doing so has become immensely popular. Sephora has become a household name in the cosmetics space with its on-point branding. Social advocacy improves brand image and recall and paves the way for meaningful brand-customer interactions.

Some good KPIs to look out for:

• Number of shares
• Number of likes/retweets
• Volume of traffic driven to the site through social channels

Pay attention to user-generated content

User-generated content (UGC) is the reviews, testimonials, and feedback customers share about your business. UGC is not only a strong trust signal but one of the best ways to understand what your customers want. A research report from Moz shows how search engines rank sites based on review quantity and review spread.

Among the best ways to increase UGC are: stay active on review sites such as Trust Pilot, encourage customers to provide feedback through interactive feedback forms and share customer testimonials across social media.

How do you measure the effectiveness of your UGC? Here are some primary KPIs to consider:

• Number of reviews received on review sites
• Positive and negative feedback received
• Percentage of customers who interact frequently

Email engagement matters

Every year self-appointed marketing media experts announce that email has lost its significance. They say that new technology has set in displacing all prior communication methods and that emails will go the way of MySpace. But still, year after year, emails end up being the best way to acquire, engage, and delight customers. Your email engagement metrics indicate how your customers view and engage with your brand and are a key indicator of overall customer engagement.

Here are three KPIs that reveal how engaged your email subscribers are:

• Email and newsletter subscription numbers
• Click through rates when you share links
• Open and reply rates

For customer relationships that go beyond the ‘Buy Now’ button

Customers love to be heard and businesses love talking to them. The sweet spot lies in how you pick the proper channels to engage with customers and how you measure customer engagement metrics from those channels. Click here to talk to our experts on “how to improve customer retention using Microsoft Dynamics 365?“