WHAT IS DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT AND WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT?

With so many ways to define it, we can understand why digital engagement feels like such an ambiguous term. However, at its core, each definition shares one thing in common: digital and customer engagement is all about interactions between the customer and your brand.

The interactions you qualify as an engagement will be just as unique as your business. Now that you have a basic understanding of digital engagement, the next step is to know why it’s so important.

Why Is Customer Engagement So Crucial?

The main reason you should care about customer engagement is because more often than not, engaged customers are your best customers. When they're satisfied and happy, they can turn into loyal advocates of your brand. Winner.

Acquisition strategies alone won’t be enough to grow your business sustainably. You’ll need to find effective ways to engage with your customers between purchases to strengthen their emotional connection to your brand. This not only helps you retain the customers you already have but also grows your business.

A customer engagement study found that companies who improve engagement increase cross-sell by 22%, drive up-sell revenue from 13% to 51% and also increase order sizes from 5% to 85%.

With these stats in mind, it’s clear to see there’s a direct correlation between how engaged your customers are and how profitable your business is. So the first question you should ask is, “how engaged are my existing customers?”.

How to Calculate Customer Engagement

You can’t improve customer engagement if you don’t know how to measure it. There are several ways you can calculate it which is why we’re giving you a head start by highlighting the most important metrics you should begin with.

Social media platforms have their own set of analytical tools available. Here, you can view data about interactions such as comments, likes, shares, clicks and follows. Analysing these numbers can help you discover what your followers are interested in and what kind of messaging connects with them the best. This helps you tailor your voice when responding to future posts or interactions.
Website analytics tools can help you discover more about customer engagement through your company’s website. Metrics like time on site, customer paths, bounce rate and exit pages can reveal how visitors are using your website and how engaged they are over a specific amount of time. Comparing this data to previous periods will show you if your customers are becoming more engaged. It might also mean including more relevant call to actions (CTAs) or reviewing your keywords.
Email messaging platforms give invaluable information through data and metrics like open rates and click-through rates (CTR). This data can be used similarly for social media numbers, helping you to improve messaging, callouts, subject lines and headlines.

Ultimately, one of the best ways to measure customer engagement is by ‘listening’ to what customers have to say. This can be done through surveys, chatbot and live chat logs, reviews or social media comments.

Digital Engagement Buzzwords Glossary

The internet is full of articles promising to help you drive “omnichannel customer engagement” or squeeze more “meaningful customer engagement” out of your brand experience.

To help demystify the vocabulary around digital engagement, we’ve created a helpful glossary for you to refer to and make your journey towards more meaningful customer engagement a little bit smoother.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): A technology which allows machines to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. This could be recognising human speech, interpreting the meaning of words and applying context to each interaction.

Chatbot: A conversational tool powered by AI that can have an automated conversation with a customer, 24 hours of the day in any digital channel. It has the capability to utilise the learnings from past conversations to continuously improve the engagement with customers. Smart little robots.

Customer Engagement: The emotional connection between a customer and a brand. Highly-engaged customers buy more, promote more and demonstrate more loyalty. Providing a high-quality customer experience is an important component in your overall engagement strategy.

Digital Engagement: Engaging with customers seamlessly using virtual assistants through multiple digital channels such as web, apps, messaging and IoT (Internet of Things) devices.

Engagement Rate: A metric that measures the amount of engagement a piece of created content is receiving from an audience. This is important to keep an eye on because higher consumer engagement is typically a sign of great, relevant content.

Multi-channel: This is the implementation of a single strategy across multiple channels or platforms, making it easy for customers to complete desired conversions on whatever medium they're most comfortable with.

Omnichannel: A cross-channel content strategy brands use to improve their user experience. Its goal is to create a cohesive customer experience, no matter how or where a customer reaches out.

The rewards for investing time and energy in improving engagement is undoubtedly worthwhile. Why not invest your budget in a way that’s useful too?

Use Our Campaign Budget Calculator to Increase Digital Engagement Effectively

Results are the lifeblood of any marketer's campaign, whether they're the results you wanted or not. They help optimise the next campaign to be even more successful. Whilst results are important, so are budgets. You want to get the most bang for your buck - so go ahead and use our handy little budget calculator.

It'll help you solidify your future branding budgets and ensure you spend your money in the right place. It’s easy to use and gives you clear figures to take away. Click the link below to check it out.

Topics: Brand Engagement