‍

‍What Are Customer Engagement Metrics?

Customer engagement is the process of interacting with customers through various online and offline channels in order to strengthen your relationships with them. Fully engaged customers account for a 23 percent increase in terms of profitability, revenue, and relationship growth.  Customer engagement metrics help to measure the degree and depth of your relationships with customers and provide insight into just how engaged they are. Thus, utilizing customer engagement metrics can help you improve your customer experience while increasing your bottom line.

How to Choose Which Customer Engagement Metrics to Use?

Not all companies use the same metrics to improve their customer experience. In fact, it is important for you to use a combination of carefully curated metrics to ensure you are delivering measurable outcomes to your customers on a continuous basis. Outcomes should deliver value and give insight on the Voice of the Customer (VOC). To help you decide which KPIs are suitable for your business, first make sure they are:

• Understandable
• Repeatable
• Actionable

The ultimate goal for any measurement metric is to provide you with actionable insights to help your business grow its customer base, increase lifetime customer value and loyalty, and reduce costs by providing customers a more efficient and effective service. Selecting the right customer engagement metrics is all about capturing the data that will help you make more precise business decisions. Keep in mind that the purpose of measuring customer engagement is to positively affect customer relationships and create the best possible customer experience.

Email Metrics

Although email has been around for a while, it has proven to be one of the most popular ways for brands to communicate with their customers. In fact, email usage is predicted to grow from 2 to 3 percent each year from 2018-2023.

When dealing with email metrics, you will first want to track your open rates. Open rates let you know if your customers are opening and reading what you send. With billions of spam emails going around every day, it is becoming harder than ever to get noticed so make sure to keep emails as relevant and personalized as possible.

While the open rate metric might tell you if your readers found the email intriguing enough to open, it will not tell you if the readers were actually engaged by the content when they read it. In order to analyze this, you can start to look at how the readers interact with your emails. For example, emails tend to include calls-to-action. Because of this, click-through rates are an important consideration when measuring engagement. Furthermore, you can uncover where your engagement is lacking by keeping an eye out for unsubscribes. It might be helpful to consider including a brief survey asking for the reason behind their decision to unsubscribe. Once you get the information needed, you can make your emails more engaging in the future.

Website Metrics

Online Conversion Rate

A conversion rate records the percentage of users who have completed a desired action. Every company has actions that they encourage customers to complete. Thus, conversions will vary depending on your company and purpose.  For example, conversions could be:

• Content downloads
• Webinar bookings
• Purchases

When examining your conversion rate, the higher the better. As your conversion rate increases, so does the likelihood that your customers are engaged. This is because if they are actively interacting with you, then you are probably offering something that reflects their wants and needs.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who enter a site and then leave without performing any other actions. Although rates vary by industry, a good bounce rate is anywhere between 40 percent to 55 percent. Perhaps you have a high bounce rate. If so, you may want to improve your content’s readability and relevance or user experience. Ultimately, visitors who bounce are less engaged than those who dive deeper into your website so taking a look at bounce rate can help you figure out where your site is less engaging.

Return Visitors

One of the strongest metrics for measuring website engagement is the return visitor rate. The return visitor rate measures the total number of return visitors to your website rather than total unique visitors. Return rates vary by industry, but a good returning visitor rate is 30 percent. If customers are coming back to your website for more, then it is likely that they have found something of value to them. In fact, returning visitors have lower bounce rates, view more pages, and create longer session durations.

Customer Success Metrics

NPS

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is typically a customer loyalty and satisfaction measurement taken from the percentage of customers rating their likelihood to recommend a company’s product or service to a friend on a scale on 0-10. In order to understand your NPS, you will need to survey your customers. If they are likely to recommend you to others, then it is safe to say they are engaged.

CSAT

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) answers the question “How satisfied were you with your experience today?” Responses are usually gathered on a Likert scale (increments from Not at All to Extremely Satisfied) and contain very useful information. For example, a CSAT score can tell you how engaging a customer found an interaction with customer support to be. CSAT scores vary by industry, but scores between 75 percent and 85 percent are typically considered good.

Keep in Mind

In order to answer the question, “are your customers happy?”, you must first utilize a variety of customer engagement metrics to measure the level of engagement and satisfaction of your customers.  After analyzing your level of engagement with customers, you will be able to spot areas of weaknesses within your company. For example, let’s say you have a lot of incoming traffic to your website. Great, right?  Not necessarily. If you also have a high bounce rate, then that tells you that although you are gaining views, your customers are not highly engaged. After examining the outcomes and learning from the results, it is important to take strategic action to improve your customer experience.