With the proliferation of new and emerging channels, marketers continue to struggle to determine where to invest their limited marketing dollars to achieve their acquisition objectives in the most effective way.
As new customers are acquired, companies will track hundreds of metrics, the results will be analyzed, and the model will be revised in an attempt to make better media purchases during the next campaign. And so it goes for the cost of customer acquisition.
But what about the cost of engaging with your customers across the entire lifecycle? What would it mean to you, your customers, and your organization if you knew which lever to pull, at which time, across which channel, and at which stage of the customer lifecycle, to maximize your return on investment?
It's time to relinquish traditional marketing and customer service metrics for performance metrics that are provocative, compelling, and defensible. But without customer data, business rules, and decision-making tools, connecting the dots will be impossible.
So before embarking on a successful return on customer engagement strategy, organizations must implement the following five key components to ensure a more relevant, timely, and accurate measurement of customer engagement—and, ultimately, future business performance.
1. Central Repository of Data
Savvy marketers must have the ability to organize and prioritize every piece of customer interaction data as they look for behavioral clues and actionable insights across every customer interaction. On the front end, that should include known transactional, demographic, and behavioral data about each customer, as well as information regarding their channel preferences, product purchases, and response history to offers.
Companies should also capture customer feedback from satisfaction surveys, quality assurance scores, and key performance indicator results. By capturing the right data all in one place, marketing leaders will have a better understanding of their customers while uncovering valuable insight to help inform the right customer engagement strategy.
In order to measure the return on customer engagement, marketers must establish a system or central depository for collecting and analying social engagement data. Conversocial calls it the Social Engagement Hub. The Social Engagement Hub is comprised of the people, processes and tools mobilized for customer engagement through social channels.
Social Engagement Hub (Click Image To Enlarge)
2. Customer Lifecycle
Historically, Marketing's focus on the customer lifecycle has been limited to awareness and acquisition, resulting in the organization's focus on the management of campaign execution instead of real-time customer engagement. Furthermore, the customer's view of the decision-making lifecycle is rarely in alignment with the organization's.
The key to building customer relationships that last a lifetime is to align lifecycle perspectives between the organization and the customer by mapping out each stage of the customer journey, including pre-acquisition, acquisition, support, retention, and growth.
The Six Customer Lifecycle Stages (Click Image To Enlarge)
3. Multiple Touchpoints
Today, consumers have more power than ever to positively or negatively influence brands, whether by phone, social media, or other online channels. Organizations should determine which consumer touchpoints are the most important to them and their customers, starting with an in-depth analysis of brand objectives and consumer preferences.
In siloed organizations, that can be a tricky endeavor, because customer-care organizations are typically focused on lowering the cost to serve, whereas marketing teams are focused on creating value. An agreement needs to be reached on the ideal customer experience across every stage of the lifecycle before making decisions on which channels to support. Once marketers know which communication channels are worth the investment and which ones aren't, their decisions on resources will become much easier.
Customer Touch Points (Click Image To Enlarge)
4. Customer Lifetime Value
Are your customers worth keeping? Eventually, there is a tipping point at which the value of the customer and the cost of the service no longer equate. To determine that tipping point, marketers should calculate the following:
- The total revenue generated in customer purchases
- The total cost to acquire and support the customer
- The total revenue generated as a result of customer referrals
Understanding customer lifetime value can yield powerful intelligence for developing effective customer programs and delivering a framework and rationale for differentiated customer treatments and interactions over time. In addition, it's a valuable tool to provide justification regarding where to maximize, optimize, or limit marketing and customer service spend.
Lifetime Value of the Customer (Clik Image To Enlarge)
5. Real-Time Analytics
Customers provide behavioral clues and actionable insights about themselves in every decision the make leading to a purchase or response. The problem, however, is that many marketers continue to treat all customers uniformly, regardless of whether the consumer is high-value, low-value, or likely to churn.
Real-time analytics is more that just a spreadsheet. Using customer data captured from all sources can deliver actionable data sets that drive cost savings, greater value, and higher levels of customer engagement. By analyzing what's happening today and making changes to affect that result tomorrow, marketers can now take a greater role in delivering on objectives.
Perhaps the most difficult to obtain, this component is the linchpin to achieving real success.
Social Media Management Ecosystem (Click Image To Enlarge)
Conclusion
Having the right tools, strategies, and resources in place is only the first step. Organizations must still change the way they think, spend, and act—including looking beyond quarterly results—to fully realize the benefits of a return on customer engagement. Leaders must come to fundamentally believe that data relates to behavior, that customers want to be treated differently, that brands can learn how customers want to be treated, and that at a visceral level that treatment will yield results.
At times, the pursuit of a return on customer engagement may feel more like the search for a mythical creature, but don't get discouraged. The end goal isn't about achieving perfection or completely optimizing your marketing spend. Rather, it's about knowing which levers to pull at which points in time across customer segments, lifecycle stages, and communication channels that will have the most impact on your organization.
Leading this charge will not be easy. Obstacles abound. But the quest will be rewarded with demonstrated performance metrics that are not only provocative and compelling but also defensible.
COMMENTARY: Carrying out a truly effective, results-driven strategy to engage and understand customers is much easier said than done. To streamline this process, businesses should consider incorporating social into the very makeup of their sites and mobile apps.
By creating multiple touch points for customers to bring their social network identities and social graphs into your business’s web properties via social plugins, businesses can start collecting user identities and measuring engagement by looking at referral traffic, conversion numbers, and value. To help you streamline your marketing performance measurement efforts, we’ll go over how customer engagement is achieved, nurtured, and measured.
Nurturing Engagement with Conversations
When it comes to nurturing engagement, it’s crucial for businesses to connect with consumers in dynamic, social ways. As a start, we recommend investing in social login, which lets your users log in to your site using their existing social network identities. Social login not only encourages on-site registrations and logins by making the process easy and quick for users, it also provides a streamlined, secure way for your business to capture valuable, actionable data contained within your customers’ social profiles.
To drive our point home, we examined thousands of websites with social login and discovered that socially logged in users view 66.7 percent more pages and spend 56 percent more time on average interacting withthe site.
In order to get the most from your social login implementation, we recommend that businesses use social login concurrently with other social tools such as social plugins and gamification.
Social plugins such as Ratings & Reviews, Comments and Reactions, Activity Feeds, and more, work together to encourage more on-site and in-app engagement for increased user loyalty.
Use Case: Dallas Morning News
News publisher Dallas Morning News saw an opportunity to better understand and engage its reader base on its online news site, Dallasnews.com.
Specifically, it implemented social login, allowing its user base to register and log in for the site quickly and easily using their existing social network profiles before leaving a comment.
This process of logging in with an existing social profile before commenting adds a layer of authenticity tothe site experience, converting what would otherwise be anonymous users into known customers.
To facilitate discussions on its site content, Dallas Morning News implemented a commenting system that connects users’ social identities with their comments. In other words, social login allows Dallasnews.com to automatically associate socially logged in commenters’ social profile data, including their names and profile photos, with their commenting activity.
After making it easier for users to authenticate their social identities on Dallasnews.com and making the commenting process less anonymous, Dallas Morning News saw its commenting activity rise by over 92% after just the first four months of implementing social login and comments, with over half of subscribers logging in socially to leave comments. What’s more, Social Login automatically filters out spam bots, increasing the quality of comments and improving the overall user experience on Dallasnews.com.
How to Measure Customer Engagement
Measuring user engagement calls for a look at referral traffic and conversion numbers and value. Broken down, these metrics include:
- Increase in SEO traffic - As we discussed earlier, user-generated content helps boost SEO. How much has SEO traffic increased since implementing social plugins?
- Increase in social referral traffic - Social plugins such as Share buttons help boost traffic from social networks. What is the increase in social referral traffic?
- Visit to conversion - Referral traffic is valuable but often times difficult tot measure in monetary terms. When it comes to real returns, you want to look at conversions. How many of your site visits lead to actual conversions?
- Value of conversions - Conversions should lead to direct revenue, such as a customer completing a purchase on your site or clicking on an ad. What is the value of each conversion?
After a thorough examination of the above metrics, you can use the following formula to calculate the ROI of customer engagement:
Courtesy of an article dated May 28, 2014 appearing in MarketingProfs, an article appearing in Conversocial, an article date August 12, 2012 appearing in Life Health Pro, an article appearing in Creative Intellects, and an article dated May 1, 2014 appearing in Social Media Data
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