Customer engagement is always a top marketing goal, but not all customer engagement is created equally. There’s a difference between reading a blog post, and taking the time to comment on it or share it on social media. Fortunately, there are a number of tools available to help you track customer engagement, getting a better sense for the overall picture and active engagement, too.
- Google Analytics
Google Analytics gives you a wealth of information, including what pages people are spending time on, and how long they’re staying on the content. The longer someone spends on your page, the better, right? You can also use Google Analytics to track the number of downloads on a file, so you can see who’s taking action.
But, because there’s a difference between someone just leaving your page open in their browser (passive engagement) and active reading through the content, you’ll want to turn to other tools to help you compare the active and passive engagement.
- Heatmaps
Heatmaps allow you see where users are spending most of their time on a page. Not only can this help you see where the activity is, it can also help you in web usability testing. Some heatmap tools are more advanced than others – Ptengine offers a free basic solution with built-in analytics, whereas Clicktale, for instance, is a premium solution with additional features such as scroll reach, link analytics, and even session replays that allow you to see exactly what users do while browsing your site.
- Your CRM
Your CRM keeps track of all customer interactions, so you can easily see who your most active and engaged customers are. At the same time, you can see who your least engaged and least active customers are. This allows you to dig deep into issues on a customer-by-customer basis so you can thank them for their loyalty, or reach out to find out why they’ve stopped doing business with you. You can use the information to adjust marketing campaigns for each segment accordingly.
- Your Blog’s Comment Section
It’s a basic measure of customer engagement, but looking at the comment section of your blog posts can help you get an idea of what’s resonating with your readers. The posts that have more comments are getting more engagement, but see if you can identify patterns. Are the posts on a certain topic getting more engagement? Is the day of the week or the time of the post that seems to effect engagement? Test various scenarios to see what you can do to increase blog commenting as a measure of engagement.
And if people are taking time to comment on your blog posts, be kind enough to reply, even if it’s just to acknowledge the comment. This lets your visitors know you pay attention, and you care, which can also encourage other readers who’ve remained silent to start commenting. If people don’t think you’re listening, what motivation do they have to speak?
- Social Analytics
Each social media network has its own analytics platform, which allows you to see how well you’re performing in terms of comments, likes, shares, and more. Social visibility will affect your engagement rates – if people aren’t seeing your posts, they’re not going to engage. But, engagement affects visibility, at least where Facebook is concerned, so it’s a bit of a catch-22. Vary your post types and timing. Post multiple times per day. Avoid being self-promotional all the time by following the 80/20 rule.
- Email Marketing
Your email marketing platform will have built-in analytics to help you see who’s opening your emails, who is clicking through the links in the emails, who’s deleting the emails, and who is unsubscribing. Opens are an indication of engagement, and clickthroughs are better.
Like with the blog and social posts, watch for patterns in topics, subject lines, date and time the message was sent, to see what works well with your audience to get the highest levels of engagement.
The tools you use to track customer engagement may vary from day to day, as each source provides a bit of insight into the bigger picture. Engagement may peak around a certain marketing campaign or season, depending on your industry, and with the data from various tracking tools, you’ll be able to make adjustments to your strategy to increase the quality and quantity of engagement.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
