April 30, 2018
In order to engage people, the first step is understanding how they tick. In a competitive global economy, data-driven marketing is critical. Robust engagement strategies must be developed and the social data that is extracted from them should be what drives future business.
A recent study by Aberdeen Group found that companies with the strongest omni-channel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, compared to just 33% who had weak strategies. So, to boost engagement—which increases sales and customer retention—it’s essential to understand the metrics and analytics that power your audience.
To get the ball rolling requires consistent engagement marketing. Traditional methods call for direct campaigns, PPC ads, and email distribution. Engagement marketing is more about personalization and customization. This also paves the way for brand advocacy and effective influencer marketing.
Engagement marketing is about promoting a personal dialogue between you and your customers. The key elements to engaging your audience involve:
The transition from prospect to paid customer is met through engagement marketing. It’s much more than an emotional destination and truly drives business outcomes. Yet a recent study stated that only 20% of marketers view customer engagement to be a brand awareness tool. That same research also demonstrated that 63% of respondents viewed engagement as repeat purchases, renewals, and customer retention. A completely wrong concept for what “engagement” truly implies.
Engagement happens when consumers begin to realize the value of your product/service. Once that occurs, it’s time to start paying attention to the metrics. Measuring engagement is important because it’s akin to shining a light on a dark path. It guides your marketing efforts. The following are the top ten metrics you should be considering when looking to boost engagement:
These aren’t just vanity metrics. Measuring how many users are coming to your site (in timely increments) is important for understanding who is being engaged. It allows you to comprehend what drives consumers and deliver it in real-time. Comparing the daily user rate with the monthly rate can give you keen insight into the “stickiness” factor. It can demonstrate how much users are engaging with your product/service and expose any areas that may need improvement.
The session length, or amount of time someone spends on your site, is important for understanding engagement because people who are bored, won’t stay. Starting from the moment a visitor lands on your page until the second they click away; an invisible clock is watching how long they stay.
Users leaving quickly is a surefire sign your content lacks thought leadership and isn’t engaging enough. This is when you do an overhaul of your site or some split testing to reconfirm exactly what your audience wants and needs. Just remember, the time on the site can also be affected by user behavior. People may spend longer during the day, then at night. Look for peaks and valleys in your metrics to better understand these behavioral patterns.
Scroll depth is also a good metric to consider when reviewing session times. It measures how far down your page a user is scrolling. The more they scroll, the more you can assume you are doing something right with content.
Just as it implies, the bounce rate is the percentage of users that “bounce” from your site after only looking at one page. In other words, they are not motivated to further explore your brand. The design and performance of your site can greatly affect the bounce rate. In fact, it will even impact revenue. Pages that are 2 seconds slower have a 4.3% drop in per-user revenue. That’s why it is critical to understand your viewers and give them what they want immediately.
Engagement is truly defined by how deep people sort through your box. Are they just opening the lid or diving into the trunk? The same goes for your website. The more engaged people are, the more likely they will click around and visit several pages of your digital space. Highly engaged people always choose to view additional links.
If this metric is dipping and diving, you may want to go even further into visitor flows to see exactly what people are doing on your site. This is done with a technology known as heat mapping. It can allow you to visualize exactly where people are clicking and when to give a deeper analysis of user behavior.
Customer retention is crucial and return visits are a prime way of knowing who your repeat visitors will be (they generally turn into customers). When people return it means they are eager to learn about your brand. They may also be back to share your content, or even make another purchase.
Calculate and optimize this metric at the user level. You can use some split testing to experiment with offers and promotions to see exactly what keeps people coming back for more. An ideal return rate should respond accordingly to your revenue goals.
The golden goose of engagement metrics, a conversion rate is generally defined as the percentage of people you have converted with your content. It means you have convinced them to perform some action on the site. This can be anything from simply signing up to making a purchase. This metric is crucial because it demonstrates a culmination of all your content marketing efforts.
Conversion rates can fluctuate because they are affected by things like changes in content and various marketing campaigns. 2% is usually seen as a formidable rate so if you find your site performing lower, you may want to reconsider things like design and content.
Gauging this metric will give a business insight into what is not performing well in marketing campaigns. An abandonment rate should always be as close to zero as possible—but it’s bound to happen. People put things in their virtual cart and get distracted. Unlike regular shopping, online doesn’t require you to purchase immediately. You are not standing in a physical space; a brick and mortar store.
Abandonment rate simply looks at the percentage of visitors that initiated some conversion activity but did not finish. This metric can also demonstrate the perceived difficulty of a task. If something is too hard to perform, you will lose user engagement.
Design features and user experience are often the reasons for a high abandonment rate. Currently, the internet average of eCommerce sites is 75%, which is still very high. Modern consumers are picky shoppers. Performance problems (like slow site speed) and unclear messaging can also attribute to people taking off before performing an action. If you want to analyze this metric further, look at time increments and compare them to the fluctuation in traffic to have a better sense of what is going on.
Studying the click-through-rate will give a business greater understanding into the depth of interaction on their site. How often are visitors “clicking through” what they are supposed to? Are they following the digital path you have laid out in a campaign?
First clicks may not say much about user behavior, but second and third ones certainly do. When people click on multiple article and pages on your site, it’s indicative of a high engagement rate. That person is interested in learning more about your brand. You should also pay attention to what people are lingering on. If they seem interested in your video content over anything else, you’ll know you need to produce more.
People are typically the most engaged and outspoken on social platforms. Every social media website is different with how they collect engagement metrics, but they are all easily accessible. Here are some common figures for popular sites:
If you’re using additional social platforms, the first step to boosting engagement is knowing where and how to collect the proper metrics. Each site has their own means of collecting the social data, and it’s typically free to access.
In a perfect world, revenue should never come into the picture. But business is business and you can’t keep people engaged if you run out of money. So, at some point, you must look at the revenue coming in to see if your engagement marketing is paying off. When improving your site, revenue must be taken into consideration. All metrics ultimately influence your bottom line.
It’s important to understand that these numbers are connected and can affect one another. A high abandonment rate can lead to lower conversions and a smaller return on investment. Slow load times can increase bounce rates, which can kill engagement. It’s all linked.
New England Biolabs is a company that is a shining example of how engagement marketing and studying the metrics really works. They increased time on their site by 74%, decreased bounce rate by 7.5%, and saw a 13% increase in page visits through a strategic marketing approach focused on improving the customer engagement experience. Simply by putting their consumers first, everything else fell into place like dominos.
Organizations are starting to catch onto the value of engagement quick. Studies show that 75% of CMOs and senior marketing executives expect to own end-to-end customer engagement for their companies as the steward of the customer journey in the next three to five years. That’s up from just a third today. This puts engagement marketing squarely at the center of future revenue generation. It also puts the focus back on the people. Exactly where it should be.
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