How Can You Measure Customer Engagement?

In our last two blog articles, we discussed the significance of customer engagement and the different types of customer engagement strategies you can implement to improve it. And with this article, we finalise the journey we set out to explore customer engagement. As vague a term as it seems, we made it clear that customer engagement is key to success for an eCommerce business. But how will you know whether your strategies are working well? It’s time to see how you can measure customer engagement to assess your current strategy and improve customer engagement further. 

Key Takeaways

• Measuring customer engagement tells you whether your visitors are taking the desired actions on your website, and if their actions are compatible with your goals.
• Activity time, visit frequency and core user actions are important indicators of customer engagement.
• If your activity time is high while core action use is low, there might be some usability problems that need to be addressed and fixed.
• You should pay attention to what your customers say about your business. Social media is a great medium to both establish customer relationships and improve customer satisfaction.

Why Should You Measure Customer Engagement?

To influence your customer’s actions – whether that means making a purchase, reading a blog post, joining a newsletter, or anything else – you need to invest in customer engagement strategies and then monitor their success.

Besides its contribution to revenue and retention, your customer engagement tells you a lot about the relationship between you and the customer. It helps you anticipate any long and short-term plans regarding customer satisfaction. Measuring customer engagement means setting up specific metrics that will tell you whether visitors are taking the desired actions on your website through their journey and if their actions are compatible with your goals.  

3 Metrics to Use When Measuring Customer Engagement

Activity Time

You may think that activity time equals “session duration”. But there is an important difference between these two metrics. While the latter is a measurement Google Analytics provides, which shows how long a visitor stays on one of your web pages, activity time indicates how long they interact with the said page.

Thus, activity time doesn’t count if someone clicks on your site, gets distracted for an hour, and then leaves. An impressive session duration could even mean that users are literally walking away or opening another tab – not actually interacting with your website.

If your customer engagement efforts have paid off, people should be spending more time on your page, but more importantly, they should also be interacting with it more. So, it is important to pay attention to activity time and consider it while evaluating your customer engagement strategies. 

Visit Frequency

If a customer is engaged or retained, it means that they keep coming to your website and will most likely keep doing it. However, when assessing this metric, you need to consider your various buyer personas.

For example, if your buyer persona should be returning to your website daily, then you want an extremely high visit frequency. On the other hand, you may sell a product that will last customers for a year. Therefore, you apparently shouldn’t see them returning several times during that 12-month period.

Core User Actions

Core actions are the essential actions of your product or website. Every product or service has different core actions its visitors are expected to take. For example, the core action of YouTube is uploading and watching videos; for Twitter, it is tweeting. For an eCommerce store, a core action is viewing products, adding them to the cart, and checking out, etc. 

When users consistently take those core actions, it’s viewed as a positive indication of adoption. If you notice that the activity-time metric is high, but your core action use is low, it probably means that your users don’t know how to carry out those actions, so there’s a usability problem you have to address on your eCommerce site.

Do they have trouble finding what they are looking for? Is there a problem with the check-out process? Is it too complicated and overwhelming to carry out? In any case, you need to find ways to motivate the user to take the core actions of your website in light of your findings. 

There may also be new features on the website, though. When users begin exploring those, it shows that adoption is growing further. These users are now clearly enjoying the experience your site provides.

However, suppose you’re not seeing any core actions being taken. In that case, you should know that your customer engagement is suffering, and, as a result, you’re unable to earn the desired actions your company needs to turn profits.

The Top 10 Tactics to Measure Customer Engagement in 2023

Whatever your strategy was in 2022, in 2023, set new business goals and start working on them accordingly. Here’s a list of indicators that will give you in-depth insight into the situation of your customer engagement. 

1. Social Media Listening

In our previous blog article, we talked about the many ways you can benefit from social media. One of them is connecting with your customers. It is critical for establishing a good relationship with your customers and receiving feedback from them in order to enhance customer engagement.

2. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

You’ve probably come across or maybe answered a Net Promoter Score survey. It is a form of asking customers about the likelihood of them recommending your product to others. Since it is directly asked to customers, it provides reliable results regarding customer engagement. And you get your NPS, the likelihood of customers recommending your products to others, through these surveys. 

3. Customer Effort Score (CES)

The Customer Effort Score shows the amount of effort that customers have to put into getting a problem solved or getting in contact with you. If your customers have a hard time getting what they want through their customer journey, then they most likely won’t be that eager to maintain their relationship with your business. The easiness of an experience, nonetheless, indicates the level of satisfaction and even loyalty of your customers.

4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

CLV is the expected sum of all revenues a customer will generate for a business. Being of significant connection with customer engagement, it is an excellent indicator of success in business and gives an in-depth insight into your business. It is one of the most important metrics for a business, and if you turn a blind eye to it, you are missing so many opportunities and might even face loss.

For everything you need to know about CLV and how to calculate it, read our blog here.

5. First Call Resolution (FCR)

Another metric highly associated with customer satisfaction is FCR. It shows the rate of customer inquiries that could be solved the first time a customer resorted to your help. So that they don’t have to come back to you about the same problem. Seeing that you are eager to be of service and resolve their problems, and further, capable of doing that, they will leave satisfied, have their needs met, and be prone to come back. 

6. Average Handle Time (AHT)

Getting a problem solved the first time is great and tells a lot about a business. But what about the amount of time it takes to resolve a customer problem? If not immediately, you should respond and deal with the issue in a reasonable time. 

7. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

The Customer Satisfaction Score is a metric that measures customer happiness with a product, service, or their interaction with a business. It can be measured by a survey where customers are asked if they are satisfied with their experience, e.g., a finalised purchase or customer service. If the feedback is negative, you can ask follow-up questions to understand and solve the problem more efficiently. 

8. Engagement Rate

Engagement rate is not about impressions or views, but rather about the number of comments, likes and shares, in a word, engagement, your content gets. It gives you information about the active users and how active your customer engagement is. 

9. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave the website immediately after they enter, before visiting other pages on the website. It is, in fact, the enemy of customer engagement.

10. Virality

Viral marketing strategy has always been effective in many aspects. It is useful for customer engagement as well. Something being viral means it becomes popular by word of mouth. It’s great for customer engagement as much as it is for promoting a product. By nature, viral content urges users to react, which evokes emotions and thus creates memorable experiences that users would associate with the brand behind the video. 

Key to Customer Engagement: Personalisation

Knowing the customer engagement metrics we just discussed is valuable. Tracking them will make a big difference, too. 

However, you could spend a lot of time and money on trying to improve your results and still not move those metrics as much as you had hoped. The secret ingredient to optimise customer engagement is personalisation. In short, it is a form of customer engagement that modifies your website in real-time.

Providing personalised shopping experience for each customer would improve customer engagement because they wouldn’t have to spend their time searching for what they want and run the risk of leaving because they couldn’t find what they wanted.

Make personalised recommendations to show that you know and care about what they want or need even before they realise they do. That way they’ll have a much quicker way to be a retained customer and repeat their purchases, and even be a promoter of your business. 

Wrapping Up

In our blog series about customer engagement, we have touched upon so many things surrounding the matter. Starting with the significance of customer engagement, we talked about different types of strategies and finally how to measure customer engagement.