It is now known that customer engagement is a hugely important element in the success of a business. This is why companies like Webio, who enable businesses to capture and increase customer engagement, are now so popular. Customer engagement is something that is seen across three distinctive elements of business, and it is important to understand that, so that you can appropriately measure how successful you are being. Let’s take a look at the three areas of customer engagement, as well as at some ways to measure this.

Advertising

According to the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) engagement is best described as getting a prospect interested in a new idea by introducing them to the context. In other words, it describes how various viewers, readers, or other customers interact with a newly presented advertisement. There are different schools of thought about this. The old fashioned idea was a stepped approach:

1. Catch the attention of the customer.
2. Stimulate the desire interest of the customer.
3. Drive the customer to make a purchase.

Today, however, things have changed. Now, the focus is on combining the message of the advertisement with symbols, associations, and metaphors.

Within advertising, a customer is considered to be engaged when they interact with the specific advertisement. This means they have purchased the product, decided to purchase the product, or recommended the product to others.

Website Analytics

Customer engagement is also very important in website analytics. This is one of the newest forms of customer reengagement. It describes how customers interact with the website of a brand. The goal of websites is to attract traffic, and to turn traffic into customers (conversion). However, there are different forms of conversions within website analytics, including:

1. Making an online sale.
2. Gathering new email addresses for the newsletter.
3. Encouraging people to sign up for a free trial.

There are numerous metrics used to define engagement. A popular one is to calculate how long someone stays on the website, but also how many pages are viewed on average per visitor, or how many comments an individual makes on social media platforms.

Marketing

Finally, there is customer engagement in marketing. This describes the level of engagement with a specific brand. Very often, marketing customer engagement speaks of things like customer loyalty, and customer satisfaction. This is because the focus is strongly on how attached an individual is on the long term to a certain company. The result of high engagement is usually seen in an increase in customer advocacy and word of mouth advertisement and referrals. A lot of companies focus strongly on changing their customer engagement strategy with a focus on marketing. This is because a lot of research has demonstrated that there is a direct link between marketing customer engagement and elements such as share of wallet, ROI, stock price, and profit levels.

In an idea world, customer engagement is about all three things. Being aware of this makes it more likely that you will also be able to truly increase the number of customers who feel engaged with your brand.