How to Increase Your Customer Engagement Metrics

Most business leaders know that to have a successful business - having great customer engagement is super important.  But, in reality - customer engagement isn’t a single metric.

Before we layout how to improve your customer engagement metrics we have to define what it is. At the very simplest level - to be engaged means to be greatly interested or involved in an activity.

So - which activities are most impactful for our customers to be involved with?

No doubt, you begin by thinking about metrics where you can track interest. Customer activities like opening or clicking emails, following you on social media, and visiting your website are quick and easy ways to trend engagement.

Yet, engagement goes far beyond these activities - to your core KPI metrics.  You can also gauge how involved a customer is by how big their basket is each time, how many orders they have placed with you, and how often they are telling their friends about you.

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The secret to improve all of these metrics:

At the end of the day, engaged customers are those who see you as trying to understand and solve their problem(s). Okay, so what motivates your customer? Let’s take a look at the problem they are trying to solve by using your service and receiving your product.

1) Nurturing & Reinforcement

​They’ve already signed up to give your product a chance - how are you nurturing that experience and setting your customer up for success? You need to reinforce both how your service solves their problem AND help them use your service in the best possible way. In other words, keep them actively engaging in a relationship with you and seeing you as a true solution.

2) Brand Persona

​How do you fit in their little world? Who are you to them? This is one of the key ways to make your brand feel more human. In a primarily digital situation, customers still want to feel like they are interacting with people on the other end of the terminal.  By knowing exactly how you want to come across to your customers, you can make sure that each interaction is consistent. Your brand persona is a set of personal human-like attributes - ie. friendly, humorous, formal, quirky assigned to a certain role. Is your brand a friend, a coach, a caregiver, a comedian? This helps set you up to use a particular tone and imagery that will appeal to your target customer and inspire interaction.

3) Personalization - no, not just {{firstname}}

Why should they care about the activities you want them to be involved in? With each communication you send or action you ask customers to take - you should evaluate it from the customer’s perspective “WIIFM” (what’s in it for me). Customers won’t engage with activities they don’t see as valuable to them. If your ‘ask’ is only pushing a company objective, they will see through it and become less engaged each time they receive something that doesn’t take into consideration their interests.  Whether it offers them a deal, highlights a new product, educational content, answers a question or helps them use the service better - this content has to be something that customers find value in and is relevant to them.  By segmenting your customer lists and only sending relevant asks and activities - your customers will naturally find you more appealing than someone who ‘blasts’ everything to everyone.

Beyond Relevance & Meeting a Need

While the key steps to improve customer engagement come from evaluating each ‘customer ask’ from the 3 areas listed above some additional ways to improve your relationship with your customers are:

• Preference Centers: Allow customers to set some preferences about the type or how often they want to receive communications from you.
• Transactional: Optimize your transactional communications - what additional value can you add to these message - how can you make them feel more like you’ve thought about what your customer needs at that point?
• Community Management: Make community management a priority - how you respond to customer needs in a public setting - whether on social media or review formats will speak volumes to your “business character” the more engaging and responsive you appear the more you come across as a brand customers want to engage with.  They will be looking for your other communications on various channels.
• Website UX: Evaluate your website user experience. Try to put yourself in your customer’s shoes with a fresh blank slate - is it hard to use or understand? Come back to the key problem they are trying to solve - does it do that? Don’t forget to evaluate from various devices and browsers.

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Why wait? Evaluate some of the recent ‘asks’ you’ve sent to customers or jump into your website user experience.  Can you spot some customer turn-offs that might be making your customers less engaged? What small tweaks can you make right away.  Do you have the time and ability to pull out your customer lists and look for ways to use segmentation? Do it!

If not, it might be worth your while to bring in a customer engagement expert.

Stay tuned for our next blog: "Your Business Needs Outside Help When..."

For an evaluation of your current customer experience/retention strategies and where to focus, fill in our Communications Insights & Action Plan request. There are often two or three quick wins you can implement right away to start seeing your engagement metrics trend upwards. Let’s get started finding some revenue opportunities for you.