Every merchant shares a similar mission: to drive customer engagement.

Why is customer engagement such an important mission? Engaged customers are more loyal, profitable, and refer more customers like them which positively impacts your bottom line. They’ll spend more money with your business over time, and stay with you during good times and bad, according to Gallup research.

You want engaged customers – lots of them.

But, how do you measure customer engagement? Better yet, how do you measure engagement in a way that connects to revenue?

When you need something measured, you probably turn to your campaign metrics. If you send an email, for example, you’d look at your open and click rates and see how subscribers interacted with your message.

But, here’s the problem, clicks and opens don’t measure engagement let alone the revenue driven from it.

Traditional metrics just don’t give you the data you need. However, you can measure engagement and see how much money an engagement tactic, like an email marketing campaign, brought into your business. You just need the right tool.

In this post, we’ll explain why measuring customer engagement can be a challenge, the difference between engagement metrics and vanity metrics, and give you a solution to access engagement metrics that prove your ROI.

Why measuring customer engagement can be a challenge

Customer engagement is defined as the emotional connection a customer has with a brand. How do you measure that? That’s part of the struggle. It’s not like measuring a cup of sugar. And, there are other problems, like:

Customer engagement data in multiple places

Merchants often use multiple tools to reach customers and each one has their own analytics. Your email service provider has a dashboard of analytics, the POS system has its own – the list goes on and on. All of the data is scattered between different apps and dashboards.

Data is siloed

Depending on the size of your marketing team, data might not be accessible to everyone. The marketing manager might not have access to push notification metrics, for example. No one gets a 360-degree view of a customer’s journey. Each person worries about their own metrics, without seeing the big picture.

Data can’t be connected to revenue

Measuring customer engagement can be tough, but when you want to see how your customer engagement strategies are impacting your bottom line – in actual dollars – it’s next to impossible. Most merchants don’t have the tools in place to access this kind of actionable data.

Customer engagement metrics vs. Vanity metrics

If customer engagement is so hard to quantify, it makes you wonder, what are marketers tracking when they talk about engagement?

Marketers use the metrics they have available to “judge how engaged customers are.” They’re not actually measuring engagement, they’re measuring customer activity and calling it engagement.

For instance, a marketer likely relies on a number of emails, social posts, and blog content to promote their product. Once distributed, marketers check the metrics to see how customers responded.

They look at metrics like opens, clicks, reach, and time on page, but these are vanity metrics. They’re only part of the picture. Here’s why these “engagement metrics” don’t really measure engagement at all:

• Opens

An open rate shows you (obviously) how many people opened your email. But, so what? If they opened it, did they read the content, look at the pictures, or just close it immediately? You have no way of knowing how engaged a subscriber was with your email.

• Clicks

Some people believe clicks measure engagement. After all, subscribers must be interested if they clicked a link, right? Maybe. But, if they only clicked a link and left without buying a product or redeeming an offer, the customer can’t be too engaged.

• Reach

Reach tells you how many people saw your content. Sounds good, right? If people saw it, they must have engaged with it. Not necessarily. They could have looked at the content for a split second.

• Time on page

Surely the time spent on a page must show engagement. If a customer spends six minutes on a product page, for example, they must love your site. Sorry to burst the bubble again, but it’s not always the case.

The solution to measuring customer engagement

What’s stopping customer engagement from being measured easily? Research suggests it’s a lack of tools. To measure engagement, forty-two percent of merchants say they need a system that’s twofold: It must capture real-time data and provide the ability to send relevant messages. This tool should also measure real engagement with metrics that relate to revenue.

The solution is an automated customer engagement platform. The solution is Thanx.

Thanx captures robust customer data, automatically segments your customers into groups, gives you the ability to send marketing campaigns like push notifications and emails, and – here’s the best part – delivers customer engagement data that proves your ROI.

“My favorite feature about Thanx is how easy it is. Thanx brings data to life. I love the automated campaigns because I’m empowered at the click of a button to do a campaign in real-time. Sometimes we find out about initiatives last minute, so I’m able to deploy immediately, and see actionable results.” – Joanna Luter, Brand Strategist, Brandtailers for The Rock

With Thanx, you get:

• All of your customer engagement metrics in one place

As customers make purchases at your location, data is collected. Using reward connect technology, Thanx is able to provide personalized metrics for every customer. You’ll know who your best customers are, what they’re buying, and when. You’ll get a 360-degree view of every customer.

• The ability to send relevant messages

Using Thanx, you can segment your lunch customers and send them a promotion for a BOGO appetizer, and send a two-for-one drink special to the happy hour crowd.

Merchants can send a push notification or an email, all from one easy-to-use platform.

• Access to revenue-producing engagement metrics

Thanx gives you metrics that show your ROI on engagement campaigns. When you send an email, for example, you’ll see the revenue brought in as a result of that specific campaign.

You can see additional metrics too, like how many customers redeemed a promotion you sent and how much money was brought in as a result. You’ll also see average customer spend, visit frequency, and share of wallet for each customer.

Wrap up

The idea behind Thanx is to help merchants use data to engage customers and boost profits. You save time and generate revenue. It’s a win-win. Plus,  you get real engagement metrics, all in one place. It’s that simple.