How to Achieve and Measure the ROI of Consumer Engagement

Carrying out a truly effective, results-driven strategy to engage and understand customers is much easier said than done. To streamline this process, businesses should consider incorporating social into the very makeup of their sites and mobile apps.

By creating multiple touch points for customers to bring their social network identities and social graphs into your business’s web properties via social plugins, businesses can start collecting user identities and measuring engagement by looking at referral traffic, conversion numbers, and value. To help you streamline your marketing performance measurement efforts, we’ll go over how customer engagement is achieved, nurtured, and measured.

Nurturing Engagement with Conversations

When it comes to nurturing engagement, it’s crucial for businesses to connect with consumers in dynamic, social ways. As a start, we recommend investing in social login, which lets your users log in to your site using their existing social network identities. Social login not only encourages on-site registrations and logins by making the process easy and quick for users, it also provides a streamlined, secure way for your business to capture valuable, actionable data contained within your customers’ social profiles.

To drive our point home, we examined thousands of websites with social login and discovered that socially logged in users view 66.7 percent more pages and spend 56 percent more time on average interacting with the site.

In order to get the most from your social login implementation, we recommend that businesses use social login concurrently with other social tools such as social plugins and gamification.

Social plugins such as Ratings & Reviews, Comments and Reactions, Activity Feeds, and more, work together to encourage more on-site and in-app engagement for increased user loyalty.

Use Case: Dallas Morning News

News publisher Dallas Morning News saw an opportunity to better understand and engage its reader base on its online news site, Dallasnews.com.

Specifically, it implemented social login, allowing its user base to register and log in for the site quickly and easily using their existing social network profiles before leaving a comment.

This process of logging in with an existing social profile before commenting adds a layer of authenticity to the site experience, converting what would otherwise be anonymous users into known customers.

To facilitate discussions on its site content, Dallas Morning News implemented a commenting system that connects users’ social identities with their comments. In other words, social login allows Dallasnews.com to automatically associate socially logged in commenters’ social profile data, including their names and profile photos, with their commenting activity.

After making it easier for users to authenticate their social identities on Dallasnews.com and making the commenting process less anonymous, Dallas Morning News saw its commenting activity rise by over 92% after just the first four months of implementing social login and comments, with over half of subscribers logging in socially to leave comments. What’s more, Social Login automatically filters out spam bots, increasing the quality of comments and improving the overall user experience on Dallasnews.com.

How to Measure Customer Engagement

Measuring user engagement calls for a look at referral traffic and conversion numbers and value. Broken down, these metrics include:

Increase in SEO traffic

As we discussed earlier, user-generated content helps boost SEO. How much has SEO traffic increased since implementing social plugins?

Increase in social referral traffic

Social plugins such as Share buttons help boost traffic from social networks. What is the increase in social referral traffic?

Visit to conversion

Referral traffic is valuable but often times difficult tot measure in monetary terms. When it comes to real returns, you want to look at conversions. How many of your site visits lead to actual conversions?

Value of conversions

Conversions should lead to direct revenue, such as a customer completing a purchase on your site or clicking on an ad. What is the value of each conversion?

After a thorough examination of the above metrics, you can use the following formula to calculate the ROI of customer engagement:

 

[(Increase in SEO traffic + Increase in social referral traffic) * Visit to conversion] * Value of conversion

 

Real Returns for Customer Engagement

The key to transitioning from simply discussing ROI to actually measuring it lies in your business’s ability to responsibly collect and take action on your social data while continuing to encourage user engagement and loyalty.

About The Author: 

 

Emma Tzeng (@emmatzeng) runs content strategy and production at Gigya. When she isn’t blogging, she can be found hiking the hills of San Francisco, eating an inordinate amount of ice cream, or documenting her travels. She can be reached at emma@gigya.com.