How good are you at engaging customers online?

Which of the following attributes of an engaged customer has your organisation benefited from most in the past 12 months?

The graph shows the real benefits from companies who have engaged their customers online in the past 12 months. From getting new business referrals to clients being more tolerant of mistakes, they are all positives to increasing how clients deal with us.

Why?

• Perhaps, customers who engage with businesses online and have been given the opportunity to voice and share their opinions feel more valued?
• Perhaps, people feel companies who care about them and what they have to say, are worth doing business with?
• Perhaps they feel by offering their experience of the particular product or service, this will be improved and they will benefit in the end.
• Creating the opportunity to discuss products and services, means that we are focusing on quality, delivery, best practise and taking the focus away from just price.

Dave Chaffey, Marketing Insights recommends 5 practical measurements of online customer engagement, in comparison with other brands. He suggests 5 categories of measures:

1. Reach. You can compare aggregate audience interactions on your own site against competitors using Google Trends or the Google Ad Planner. You can also review how many you reach offsite through blogs or social presence such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter communities.
   
2. Engagement with site. This is where the new Google Analytics capabilities help. You can set hurdle rates for % of visits > 10 seconds, 5 pages or simply use the bounce rate as a basic measure.
   
3. Activate to business goals. Activation is where you generate real business value such as a lead or a sale. Ultralase is a good example a site designed to maximise engagement to lead. All of the options on the left-hand side of the page such as call-me-backs and use of the forum can be setup as conversion goals in Google Analytics.

   Through setting up filters for social network presences you can see how customers originating from SNs generate sales and how engaged these audiences are.
   

4. Participating to add value for your brand. Conversion goals can also be set up to show how many visitors bookmark, rate or share content.

5. Loyalty. As my colleague Richard Sedley has emphasised, true engagement is about long-term loyalty, not a brief encounter with a web site on a first visit. Sedley defines engagement as “Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in a brand”.

   These repeated interactions are more difficult to measure in Google Analytics with other web analytics solutions such as Coremetrics offering more tools for analysis of Recency-Frequency and Monetary value through time for different customer segments.

   * If your company has already started measuring your customer engagement and would like to share a great measuring tool. Please let us know.

   * If you would like to share - how being able to comment on products, services, companies, brands makes you feel. Please let us know.

   * Coldicott Freelance Training helps companies to engage with their customers better, and we are always looking for more tips and advice to share with our customers. Please add your comments below...