Measuring customer engagement metrics can help you build an army of super-engaged customers. They’re the ones who shout about you to their friends, like all of your social media posts and use your product daily. To enjoy this kind of loyalty though, you need to understand and focus on customer engagement.
In this guide, we’ll discuss customer engagement in more detail. Plus, share some of our key customer engagement metrics and a simple and fun tool to build and maintain lifelong customer relationships.
Customer engagement refers to the interactions and relationships between a company and its customers to foster brand loyalty and awareness. It’s everything that makes up that relationship — from a like on an Instagram post to recommending a friend to sign up.
Consider it as a business activity that helps you find better ways to make the relationship between your brand and customers stronger. When you successfully become their go-to brand or service provider, you'll see lower customer churn and more satisfied customers.
Now that we’re on board with why it’s so essential to track customer engagement, let’s take a look at exactly what to measure. Here are some of the best user engagement metrics to know, use, and monitor over the next year.
Net promoter score is one of the effective ways to track customer happiness and satisfaction. It’s simple — you ask customers whether they’d recommend you to a friend, coworker, or someone in their network. They then give you a score on a scale of 1-10.
To calculate your NPS score, simply minus your ‘detractors’ from your ‘promoters’.
Your net promoter score is a quick and easy way to measure customer sentiment over time, but you can also take a closer look at the details. If you’re scoring lower than usual, examine why — you might be able to make an easy change to bring your score back up.
The customer satisfaction score is a lot like NPS, except it directly asks the customer how happy they’re with something. Use this to determine how well a chat went with your support team, or how easy your online shopping experience is.
Most CSAT questions ask customers to score you between 1-5, with 1-2 being negative, 3 being neutral, and 4-5 being positive. To find your CSAT score, divide your ‘positive’ scores by the total number of scores.
Experiment with your CSAT survey to see what works best with your audience. They might prefer giving you a number score — or you could switch to smiley faces, or even emojis if it’s a good fit for your audience and brand voice. Just make sure the options are clear to customers so there’s no confusion.
Your customer lifetime value indicates how much revenue you’re likely to see per customer over the period of time they stay with you. It’s a great way to help you work out how much you can afford to spend on acquiring new customers, and what you may miss out on if your customers leave.
To know your customer lifetime value, you first need to know your lifetime value. Multiply the average revenue (value of sale x number of transactions) by the retention time period. Once you have your lifetime value, multiply it by your profit margin to find your customer lifetime value.
Calculating your CLV isn’t always easy — there are tons of different metrics and data points that feed into it. For instance, you need to understand how often your customers typically buy from you, what they spend, and how long they stay with you. You also need a feel for how much everything costs, from the product or service to the money spent on marketing and advertising.
You want your users to be highly engaged when they first join you and measuring first-week engagement can be a valuable way to understand overall customer satisfaction. If a customer isn’t engaged now, they’re unlikely to pick up the pace later on.
To understand first-week engagement, choose a handful of key milestones during your onboarding and initial process to measure. This could be whether someone completes a tutorial, opens every email in a welcome series, or successfully uses the product or service for its intended use.
If your first-week engagement is poor, evaluate why that might be. Walk through your onboarding process and look for opportunities to improve it. Check your email series or in-app notifications, and make sure they’re helpful but not overwhelming. Ask your support team if there are any specific questions new users ask.
Each of these will help you understand what’s working and what isn’t, helping you improve your first-week engagement over time.
Signing people up for your service or SaaS product is great, but if they’re not using it they won’t stick around for long. Monitor your daily and monthly active users to understand whether people are active or not — and take measures to improve stickiness.
Your DAU score is the number of people that access your product or service on any given day. Your MAU score is the same, just over the period of a month. Track both metrics religiously to identify trends over the months, quarters, and years.
A low number of active users implies there’s a reason people don’t want to use your service, especially if there's also a low number of pages viewed per session. That might be poor user experience, that they’ve found an alternative they prefer elsewhere, or simply that they’ve forgotten you exist.
Three very different problems, but you can solve them with some tweaks to your product or marketing strategy.
You can learn a lot about how your customers interact with your SaaS product or ecommerce store by monitoring website engagement. Lots of tiny details here can help you build a picture of how areas like user experience, accessibility, site speed, and backend processes perform.
Use analytics automation tools like Google Analytics to capture useful data like page views, average session duration, number of website visitors, bounce rate, and more. You can then monitor this and look for trends over time, or check in to see if your digital marketing or SEO campaigns are making the intended impact.
If you’re active on social media, make it a priority to track and measure your social media engagement.
Each social media platform will have its own built-in metrics and data tracking. You can usually see follows, likes, comments, video views, shares, and other types of engagement. Use this information to help inform your social media strategy and marketing campaigns, so you’re delivering content and a community your target audience can’t help but engage with.
Measuring your DAU and MAU tell you how many people are using your product or service, but monitoring the use of features gives you an even deeper level of detail. For SaaS companies and ecommerce store owners, knowing exactly which aspects your customers use (or don’t) can help you better understand customers’ needs and refine operations.
Think about which user actions you want to track, then find a reliable way to do this. For example, you can monitor the number of people who use your new add-on, engage with your chatbot, or the amount of time people spend using your most popular feature or tool.
This information will tell you exactly what your customers are doing, enabling you to encourage engagement in more relevant ways.
Customers engage with you in ways beyond using your product. Think about all the other touchpoints your audience can interact with, and use these as a data source to monitor the conversion rate from action to the intended goal.
To find your conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the total number of interactions. This will give you an idea of how many people took the intended action, compared to those that didn’t.
A great area to start monitoring here is your email marketing or content marketing efforts. Track how many people download your lead magnet, sign up via your website pop-up, or click on your email campaigns. View this data over time as you tweak and perfect your marketing strategies.
Keep an eye on negative actions too — like unsubscribes or high bounce rates — as these can indicate other problems you could address.
Churn rate refers to how many customers leave your service over a period of time — usually a month.
Not every customer is with you for the long haul, but if too many leave without warning you could find yourselves in a tricky situation. To calculate your churn rate, divide the number of lost customers by the total number of customers at the beginning of the period. Take the end figure and multiply this by 100 and you’ll have your churn rate.
Engaged customers are more likely to stay with you longer, which means you get to spend less energy (and budget) on attracting new ones.
Reducing your churn rate should be your top priority to keep profitability and customer retention levels high. Introducing sales incentives for customers is another great way to increase customer loyalty, like sending Hoppier virtual cards to customers to celebrate customer milestones.
Here are a few reasons that make tracking customer engagement and satisfaction a priority in 2023:
The first benefit that comes with measuring customer engagement is knowing how customers feel about you and your product or service. Otherwise, there’s no way to know whether you’re reaching your target market or if your product is making the impact you hoped.
Use customer engagement metrics like Customer Effort Score (CES) and customer satisfaction scores to gauge customer behavior, and whether they’d recommend you to others. Look for interactions on social media, or what people are saying about you online.
These are all great ways to understand market sentiment and benchmark where you currently are.
Without data, you can’t fully understand what you’re doing well and where you could improve. By measuring customer engagement against key metrics, you can start to build a picture of your strengths and weaknesses, so you see where your opportunities lie.
Track the number of visitors and feature uses to identify trends and uncover data that could suggest a need for improvement in areas like user experience, onboarding, pricing, and site speed. With plenty of data from evaluating various touchpoints, you’ll soon be in a better place to go all in on your strengths and make a move toward fixing those weak points.
Once you’ve got enough data in your hands and know your strengths and weaknesses, you can make a strategic plan that’ll take you from great to amazing.
Look at your whole customer journey and measure actions taken, then set goals to define what customer success looks like — and then create a customer engagement strategy to achieve it. Weave these themes and ideas into your sales strategy and marketing strategy too, so the whole team is on board with improving your customer experience and getting more loyal customers.
Collecting customer feedback once doesn’t mean your drive to measure and understand customer engagement is over. Commit to regularly monitoring how your brand is performing using benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs).
Your customer engagement will change over time, and being able to understand what has an impact on it is crucial. One small change to your pricing structure or onboarding process could cause a spike or decline, so monitoring in real time and monthly is a must-do for savvy businesses to make informed decisions.
Keeping your customers engaged and happy is an ongoing effort. Whether there’s an exciting new competitor in town or your customers are looking for ways to save their budget, there’s always something on the horizon to challenge their loyalty.
If you’re looking for a fun way to keep your customers feeling appreciated and engaged, try Hoppier. Our virtual credit cards are easy to set up, customize, and distribute, so you can reward your customers or thank them for their loyalty in moments.
Getting started with Hoppier is simple. Here's how to go about it:
Hoppier makes it easy to create exciting, unique ways to engage with your customers and build deeper relationships with them. Whether you send virtual cards as part of a virtual event experience for your customers, or as a thank-you gift for being with you for several years, they’re a great way to make your customer feel special.
Once you know which customer engagement metrics to track, you’re well on your way to being able to strategically tackle any experience, success, or engagement challenges you might encounter. If you’re looking for more ways to lift your customer engagement scores, take a look at our guide on customer and employee engagement strategies. It’s filled with practical ideas to help you create the kind of experience that your customers will love.
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
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