How marketers are measuring customer engagement these days

The holy grail for marketers

Marketers have a constant desire to better understand consumers. By doing so, they can ultimately deliver more engaging experiences. Engaging experiences are the holy grail for marketers, because the more engaged consumers are, the more likely they will complete the marketer’s desired outcome.

This means the right analytics can strengthen customer engagement. Data-driven marketing offers industry leaders the opportunity to increase their market growth, while shaping the customer experience. Most experts agree that data-driven marketing is critical in the current competitive global economy.

Clicks, conversions and metrics

According to research conducted in Q4 of 2015, revenue metrics are being used by executives to quantify the success of customer efforts. The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council investigated how marketing executives in North America quantify customer engagement success. The primary type of metric used by more than a third of respondents to measure consumer engagement were revenue metrics such as customer lifetime value, revenues per customer and overall revenue increases.

Furthermore, 30% of respondents cited campaign metrics as their primary type of metric. These include clicks, conversions, shares, traffic and web analytics. Other metrics cited by fewer executives were sales enablement metrics, service metrics and finance metrics to measure overall customer engagement success.

Bar is low for customer service

While customer service is important, it wasn’t found to be the most popular way to gauge successful engagement.

Many consumers feel that good service makes them feel more positive about brands. In fact, an August 2015 survey by Ovum and Opinium Research LLP, found nine out of 10 internet users worldwide saying as such. Additionally, 81% of those respondents said they’re satisfied as long as their question is answered. Such attitudes toward customer service set the bar pretty low for companies and indicate it may not be as useful a metric for engagement. There are still ways for companies to stand out.

The takeaway

All marketers should evaluate their strategy. If you’re not currently using any of the above metrics to evaluate the success of your marketing strategy, you should start today. Regardless of the metric, the most successful marketers continually utilize analytics in their engagement strategies.

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