What constituent engagement means for your business
When we hosted our first Engagement Party years ago, we had no idea “engagement” would turn into such a buzzword. We just wanted to get like-minded people together for a good time, complete with champagne and cake as a joking nod to the double meaning of engagement.
Fast-forward to 2015 and engagement is big business. But what can focusing on constituent engagement actually mean for your company? If you’re tasked with “increasing engagement,” be warned that there are dozens of ways to crack this nut, and it is easy to get bogged down by tracking hundreds of numbers that don’t ultimately impact the big picture of your business. While no one set of metrics works for every company (because your goals should inform what you measure), here are some of the metrics we recommend focusing on.
Email: measure clicks, not just opens
For years, marketers measured the size of their email opt-in list as well as number of emails opened and number of links in emails clicked. Today, it is pretty much universally agreed that opens are not an accurate reflection of engagement, for reasons outlined here by Pardot. Clickthrough rate (CTR), on the other hand, is a helpful metric, because it shows how much traffic you’re bringing to your website because of emails.
- How to leverage this: if you notice your CTR is going down for several months in a row, you could try a few things to bring it back up. First, your list may be too large and may contain many people who don’t actually care about your content anymore. Consider sending out a “confirm subscription” type email to focus on those who care. Second, you could experiment with number and type of links per email: you may want to consider bolder and fewer call-to-action links, to concentrate your audience’s attention in one place.
Social: measure traffic and customers generated, not just followers
This one is admittedly tricky without marketing automation software, but even Google Analytics can provide some insight into what sources (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter) are leading to web traffic each month. With marketing automation tools like HubSpot, you can track customers back to their original source on social media.
- How to leverage this: if your social channels are generating a lot of traffic one month, go back and look at the calls to action you included and consider doing more of whatever worked. It could be an outlier situation like posting a job post (which always generates lots of interest), but it could also be a marketing offer that just happened to strike at the right time. Nonprofits: check out Classy’s tips for how to boost engagement even further on Facebook.
Website: measure conversion rate, not just views
At Idealist Consulting, we made a big effort a few years ago to tag every new lead that come into our CRM with a lead source (this can be facilitated through web-to-lead or more complex form tools that include a hidden lead source). Now several years later, we can show without a shadow of doubt that leads generated through our website are one of the highest converting sources for us. This is the metric that will let you make the case for future website enhancements and is the answer to “why should we invest in marketing automation software/landing pages/donation pages instead of direct mail?” The reason digital marketing is on the rise is that it is measureable. Conversions matter.
- How to leverage this: if you notice web conversions are stagnant or going down, consider adjusting your engagement strategy after these leads have engaged with you. Are you sending a follow-up email or calling immediately? Are you making sure they get added to relevant campaigns?
Salesforce Communities: measure individual account activity, not just users
Salesforce Communities has seen tremendous growth over the past year, with over 20,000 users on the Salesforce.org Power of Us Hub and an increasing awareness that many organizations need something beyond Facebook to facilitate engagement. Measuring Communities engagement is still an area of exploration for many consultants (and even Salesforce themselves), but increasingly we are seeing value in tracking engagement back to an individual or account level so that you can have a clear view of who your most active community members are, and make sure to include them on new feature beta tests and feedback forums.
- How to leverage this: before you can move the needle, you need to set up basic tracking between Salesforce and Communities. This Hub thread has great tips on several levels: how Salesforce.org themselves tracks engagement at the account level (requires Apex and Visualforce skills) and how you can create a simple report on the contact level showing number of logins as a low-tech starting point.
Bonus tips for nonprofits
Greenpeace put together a great resource on how to measure impact and move from vanity measures (followers, likes, etc) to impact measures (donation generation, social campaign attribution) and the value of that shift. Check it out here.
Closing thoughts
Ultimately engagement metrics matter because they’re not about the sheer size of your audience, but those who care. Use engagement metrics to focus your attention on the gold among your
Do you feel like you don’t have the right tools in place to measure and take action on engagement metrics? Check out our latest whitepaper on Marketing Automation for Nonprofits to learn how marketing automation can help put this together.
