Understanding Customer Engagement

Customer engagement is a priority for most companies today. But because no two customers travel the same purchase journey, there is no single definition—or action plan—for driving customer engagement. Yet companies successfully making sense of customer engagement tend to approach it from a similar framework.

• The most successful companies that understand and measure customer engagement have several things in common. First, they identify customer engagement goals at the business level, then at the campaign level. Once those goals are set, most then map each of the metrics required to measure that goal for each respective touchpoint and phase of the purchase journey.
• That framework is then used to measure customer engagement. However, even companies with the right metrics and goals can fail if they don’t have the following: an advanced attribution practice; a data-driven, customer-centric strategy; and a rethinking of the sales funnel as a loop, not a linear journey.
• Why approach customer engagement in this manner? Companies that do see better audience segmentation, personalization and greater insight into the metrics that truly matter for driving company-level objectives such as lifetime value (LTV) and loyalty.

WHAT’S IN THIS REPORT? This report contains a framework for making sense of customer engagement metrics at one’s organization. It shares requirements for putting that framework to use and gives examples of companies successfully navigating customer engagement efforts.

KEY STAT: Increasing engagement was a top objective for more than half of the marketing professionals in North America looking to enhance the customer experience, according to a January 2018 poll conducted by the Data & Marketing Association (DMA) and Winterberry Group.