I have written about advertising and the importance of advertising to become accountable since the inception of Integrati Marketing. Marketing accountability is really core to marketing effectiveness today and will in the near future be considered a ‘hygiene factor’.

This is not because I believe that advertising does not work, it means that we know that mass media advertising has become less effective in the 15 years I have worked in Marketing and now as an Integrated Marketing practitioner.

Back in 2006 McKinsey and Co published a report that provided a clear measure that advertising via mass media was not only losing audience numbers but even more worryingly there was little engagement which means reduced effectiveness.

In fact they predicted by 2010 that TV Advertising would be 1/3 less effective than it was in 1990.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer Engagement (CE) is not a unique term invented with the creation of the Internet. The notion of customer engagement was present in retail and customer service businesses marketing prior to the Internet and web metrics.

Our take on Customer engagement is the connection of both on and offline marketing information which lets us understand how into our content they are.

A definition presented by Eric Peterson’s work on Customer Engagement provides what is an excellent working definition:

Engagement is an estimate of the degree and depth of visitor interaction against clearly defined set of goals.

The key points here are that an agreed way to measure the engagement exists and that the visitor interactions can be many and varied with our marketing communications.

So what?

OK, so we have a clear understanding of what Customer Engagement is how does that help my business and support our objectives and marketing practices.

Customer Engagement is important.

Customer Engagement measures when agreed by your team and in your business enable you to define targets and measure the effectiveness of your marketing communications (digital marketing and Offline Marketing) or rather conversations with your Clients, Customers and Followers.

There are many options available to measure engagement, but one of the best channels is your website.

Tracking engagement measures such as; bounces, time on page, number of visits, bookmarking, tweets, Likes, are all different levels of engagement.

With Google Analytics or other web analytics services you can set up simple dashboards that enable reporting of your website and tracked advertising links to campaign pages or your sites content pages.

This is important as you may want to answer questions like; “Which keyword in my Search Engine Marketing provides the best conversion and longer term engagement”.

Looking at Ghuniem’s degrees of engagement we can look at a framework that can be created in Google Analytics to measure web site and advertising in the stages of the Degrees of Engagement.

So, with this criteria we can now look at Google Analytics for instance and build out segmentation that allows us to monitor customer engagement with Ghuniem’s criteria from the Customer degrees of Engagement continuum.

We can do this via the Google Analytics Advanced Segmentation section.

If you would like help understanding your web site and customer engagement metrics then feel free to contact us to talk to you about your business. We’d love to talk Marketing with you!

Guest post: Adam Ramshaw at Genroe: Net Promoter Score – how to do it?

Net Promoter Scoring was introduced to the world in a December 2003 Harvard Business review research article.  This article, “The One Number You Need to Grow“, reported on research that had been performed by Frederick Reichheld from Bain Consulting in concert with a company called Satmetrix.

For the last 50 years companies have been trying to find a survey question that measured customer loyalty in order to better understand how and what drives customer loyalty.  Until recently “customer satisfaction” had been used as a proxy for this information.  Reichheld and Satmetrix set out to find if customer satisfaction was the best question once and for all.

It turned out that customer satisfaction was not the best question and the result was Net Promoter Score.  By analysing the results from the question “On a scale 0-10, how likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?”, they obtained a metric that was well correlated with customer loyalty.

Actually performing Net Promoter scoring is reasonably straight forward.  Survey your customers, ask the “Would recommend” question and then apply the scoring formula. However, what many organisations have found is that uncovering the score is important but not enough.

To be successful in using Net Promoter Score, organisations must put together an internal response processes to use the information and make changes in the business.  Only then will customer loyalty increase.

Net promoter scoring can be used in both business to business and business to consumer companies.

For more information on Net Promoter Score and how/why it works download our free Introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

If you are thinking about implementing Net Promoter Score (NPS) in your organisation give us a call. We can help you to implement an effective Net Promoter Score customer needs survey program for your business.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.

Guest post from Adam Ramshaw at Genroe

Thank you Adam for your guest post on our blog. As always, the team at genroe have delivered highly insightful and ‘on the money’ insight for a single question which has created many-many years of Marketing debate.

I think this is a great introduction to Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Your can learn more about Genroe at their website and Blog.

Let’s talk! live, here and now on your own site with Zopim.

We’re trialing!

We have just started our trial of Zopim after being referred to Zopim by a highly respected Partner of ours Genroe, thank you Adam!

Well it is early days yet but the dashboard and the information which Zopim provides is very insightful to say the least. Even better as we run the WordPress CMS we were able to use the Zopim plugin which we hope integrates in a more optimised manner than adding in the Java snippets.

Well we will see how it travels, if your reading this and want to chat, feel free to try it out we’re always happy to talk Marketing with you and be part of our trial!

About Zopim

Zopim Live Chat is a web-based application that lets businesses monitor and engage website visitors in real time. Designed with small medium businesses in mind, it is easy to use, affordable and powerful.

Screen shots

Zopim was the first to introduce live chat widgets that’s built right into your website. This gives your customers a more seamless and pleasant chatting experience while surfing your site. No more annoying pop-up chat windows!

Log in to Zopim’s web-based dashboard to get a wealth of information about your visitors in real-time. With an intuitive interface and features, you’ll become an expert in customer service within minutes.

Key Benefits

1. Unparalleled Freedom: Users have a choice of replying via a web browser, favorite IM client (Gtalk, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM or MSN), or their mobile phone.
2. Seamless User Experience: The user interface is designed to be pleasing and intuitive for online businesses as well as their visitors. Chats are also blazing fast so chats sent are received almost instantaneously. Chat widget designs are versatile.
3. Powerful Features:
   • Get access to real-time analytics and information about your visitors.
   • Use our Intelligent Trigger System to automatically engage high-value visitors.
   • Get suggestions to frequently asked questions.
   • And many more powerful features that makes customer engagement a breeze

Languages

Zopim has been translated to more than 20 languages by their avid users. Chances are your native language is already supported, otherwise volunteer to translate and do yourself and the community a favor.

Plugins

Do you use a CMS or web publishing platform to maintain your website? Zopim’s plugins allow you to deploy and customize the chat widget. The following plugins are currently available:

• WordPress
• Shopify

Like to learn more?

You can register for Zopim here and trial the service like we are here

We have been watching a company for a few months now which has been developing a new Analytics product that is set to take on Google Analytics.

The guys are called KISSMetrics and they have their solution available in private beta, so as yet it is not publicly available. The word is that it is very powerful and quite a leap forward compared to Google Analytics – sounds good! You can have a look at the beta site here.

Well KISSMetrics have also recently released a new website Customer Satisfaction measurement tool (KISSinsights) which is in open free beta. We are currently trialling this on the site, it is set to only pop-up once and just asks, “Would you miss this site if it were not available?” Of course we hope most uses would miss us if we were not but the test will help us decide if we should invest in the product or not.

But the key thing for us at Integrati marketing is getting insight from our customers and prospects about what they like and don’t like. This is a fundamental part of our marketing and proposition when we work with our clients.

If you have a site and are experiencing great traffic but high Bounce Rates/Low Page Reads (people don’t stay long) then maybe asking your customers what they are interested in will help you write more relevant content which will build more loyal users and no doubt increase leads and sales the longer they are on your site.

Either way the only way to find out if your sites customers are getting satisfaction with your site is to measure it so give it a go! Try the free beta of KISSMetrics here.

Great marketing today relies on a simple idea, which is great customer data. When we run direct marketing activities, it requires having up-to-date customer information and their interests or current purchase history do our messages are relevant and timely.

Business today has many different ‘pots of customer data’ in their business. In fact, it is all around their business is a wealth of customer information. The problem can be that this data is in all sorts of different formats, from business cards, emails, letters, faxes, to spreadsheets and many more.

And this leads to the question we get a lot from our customers, “We have a great business but we do not have a database for our marketing. Where will we get our data from?” All businesses have databases of customer information, every single one! They just have not loaded it to a central store.

Customers are often baffled when we let them know they do actually have customer databases. They just have not digitised them so their data can be used readily for their marketing and sales activities.

The problem is that these businesses like these, as yet have not actively gathered up this data from the different databases like, business cards, customer invoices, emails, websites etc, and stored this information in a central repository. So, all business do have databases, it is just not all have created a central database which they can store, update and manage customer data on.

Once we have worked through with our customer how to start identifying customer information the process of uploading data starts. This can be as simple as starting a spreadsheet or an access database to using an online database such as; Salesforce.com or highrisehq.com which are hosted in the ‘Cloud’.

Once the process of collecting information in the business has started the sooner the benefits will accrue from the use of the data. Does your business have its data in order?