Measuring Customer Engagement

July 30, 2014

Congratulations! Your print and multi-marketing campaigns have been highly successful and you have won lots of new customers. Now what? The next step is to keep those customers engaged so that you retain them over the long term. But how do you monitor their level of engagement so you know whether you are doing a good job?

First, it’s important to understand that there are seemingly endless ways to measure customer engagement. They include:

• Direct mail responses
• Website content downloads
• Business reply card returns
• Phone calls
• Email opens and clicks
• Loyalty program sign-ups E Website page views
• Social media interaction (tweets, likes, follows)
• Purchases

There are, of course, many more. Here are 3 Best Practices as you track and measure the effectiveness of your customer engagement efforts.

Centralize Your Data.

Your customer is interacting with you at multiple levels and across multiple channels. The more channels you can track, the more comprehensive your picture of their engagement will be. For example, if you are only measuring email opens and click-throughs, while certain customers are interacting with you primarily by catalog and phone, you’re going to get an inaccurate picture. Don’t forget to include key pieces of the puzzle such as data from PURL campaigns and customer satisfaction surveys

Track Everything

All of your interactions should be measurable.

• For direct mail, use measures such as coupons, redemption codes, QR Codes, and unique 800 numbers.
• For email, track open rates, click-throughs, and social media shares.
• On your website, trackemail sign-ups, registrations, page visits, and contentdownloads.
• In your loyalty program, track sign-ups and redemptions.

To the greatest extent possible, track purchases, as well.

Assign a Value

Assign a point value to every customer “touch” and action they take. This will create an engagement score for each customer. The higher the score, the more engaged they are with your company.

Low engagement scores should trigger additional investigation and interaction on your part. Where are these customers falling off the grid? What steps can you take to get customers more fully engaged?

There are many ways to go about customer engagement and determine success. For each company, the approach will be unique based on its product mix and customer base. It might take a little trial and error, but in the end, you will maximize the loyalty of the customers you worked so hard to win.

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