Truesight contributes to report around key customer engagement metrics for success.
June 28, 2018
When eMarketer, a leading digital-focused industry analyst and research firm, decided to develop and publish a new report on understanding customer engagement and metrics, they asked Truesight Consulting (now named Marketscience) to contribute its perspective. During an hour-long interview and several follow-up exchanges in the weeks that followed, Truesight co-founding partners David Dixon and Sebastian Shapiro, along with strategic partner, Dr. Peter Cain, founder & CEO of UK-based Marketscience Consulting, provided insights based on their more than 20 years of experience in advanced marketing analytics and econometrics working with blue-chip clients in sectors from consumer goods to B2B enterprise software, retail, telecom, energy, media and entertainment, and financial services. Its contributions helped inform the eMarketer study titled, “Understanding Customer Engagement - How to Map and Make Sense of the Metrics that Matter,” which went live in late May www.emarketer.com. The report proposes a framework for making sense of customer engagement metrics and suggests requirements for putting that framework to use. Some top take-aways include:
- Increasing engagement is a top objective for more than half of the marketing professionals in North America looking to enhance the customer experience.
- The most successful companies that understand and measure customer engagement have several traits in common, such as: o they identify customer engagement goals at the business level and then at the campaign level o they map each of the metrics required to measure those goals for each respective touchpoint and phase in the customer journey o they use that framework to measure customer engagement
- The report aptly points out, however, that even companies with the right metrics and goals frequently fail if they don’t have: o an advanced attribution practice o a data-driven, customer-centric strategy, and o a reconsidered sales funnel that functions as a loop, rather than a linear journey
- Organizations that approach customer engagement in this way achieve better audience segmentation, personalization, and greater insight into the metrics that matter for driving company-level objectives, such as lifetime value (LTV) and customer loyalty.
Truesight is on-the-record in the sections, “Putting The Framework To Work - An Advanced Attribution Approach,” and “Segmentation.” The report asserts companies lacking advanced, holistic attribution practices will not be successful in understanding or driving customer engagement. It posits that holistic attribution requires companies to factor in all company touchpoints and consumer connections - not just those related to marketing efforts. The report goes on to say “such programs require a blend of top-down marketing mix models and bottom-up path analysis or digital attribution models. Without both, marketers’ ability to tie together aggregate metrics with impression level ones is limited. Those models must also tie back to company revenues. Even if sales or other revenue-specific KPIs are not the primary focus of one’s customer engagement strategy, it is usually an input in the broader company success model.”
Truesight co-founder, Sebastian Shapiro, notes in the report that this type of problem is fairly common in companies, especially those shifting from benchmarking their success on shorter-term, marketing-specific metrics toward more longer-term, company-level KPIs. “Some of the longer-term metrics like brand awareness or affinity have been harder to put a dollar sign in front of,” Shapiro said. “So, you’re seeing some companies getting sucked into decisions and measurement methods that are short-term in nature.” The study states that companies segment audiences on a variety of attributes. But for the most advanced organizations, standard sorting criteria such as demographics and geographical locations serve only as a starting point. Shapiro continued, “You have to start slicing and dicing your prospective or current customer base into some buckets that mean something from a business strategy standpoint in terms of their different behaviors and expected financial outcomes. That’s how you’re going to drive more customer engagement, because you’ll know which types of customers will respond to which programs.”