Today’s marketers know that customer loyalty can be hard-won and easily lost. Yet, it still holds the key to business growth and survival. eMarketer’s Lauren Fisher spoke with Laurence Blanchard, group strategy director at 360i, and Chris Chobanian, the agency's senior director of digital analytics, about how metrics describing engagement can also be telling indicators of customer loyalty, and what that means for marketers' larger goals. The two were interviewed as part of eMarketer’s May report, "Understanding Customer Engagement: How to Map and Make Sense of the Metrics that Matter."

We look at metrics against exposure, engagement and effectiveness. You could also call these the outputs, the outtakes and the outcomes. Exposure can be reach and frequency, or the traditional media metrics of scale and volume. Engagement, or outtakes, is how that impression might resonate with a particular target audience—it’s the interaction with that media, such as a click on an ad. And effectiveness is the behavior change or the purchase of products.