Most businesses today have many different touchpoints with their customers. Product activity, engaging with emails, SMS and pop-ups, speaking to chatbots or support, and the list goes on.
A customer engagement score is a single metric that gives your business a method of evaluating customer engagement on an individual and overall level. This single metric can unlock a world of opportunity across the entire customer journey — from lead scoring, to reducing churn, and identifying upsell or cross-sell opportunities.
In this blog, we’ll explain how customer engagement scores are calculated in Ortto, why they’re so powerful, and five ways you can use them to reach your goals.
How is a customer engagement score calculated?
A customer engagement score should take numerous types of engagement across different platforms into account. If these engagement events exist in silos — product analytics sitting in one platform, email interaction in another, and website activity in another — landing on a single score can be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
In a platform like Ortto, where your data is unified and you have a single view of the customer, calculating an engagement score is far simpler. To start tracking your customer engagement, follow these steps:
1. Identify activities that indicate engagement
Start by identifying a long list of activities that indicate engagement for your business. For example, a productivity app’s list might look something like this
Opened email
Clicked email
User session
Created a project or task
Completed a project or task
Invited a team member
If you’re an Ortto customer, many of these activities, like opened email or clicked email, will be tracked automatically. Others, like Create a project or task, will need to be configured as custom activities if they are not already. You can find out how to set up custom activities in this blog.
2. Assign activity weights
Some engagements may have more weight than others. For example, an opened email is not as strong an indication of engagement as a clicked email. Engagement activities that indicate the user is getting value from your product, like inviting a team member, should be scored highest.
In Ortto, each activity can be assigned a number up to 500, with 500 holding the most weight. Take a look at the example below — you can see ‘Added team member’ holds the most engagement value, while ‘Opened email’ holds the least. Default activities (like ‘Opened emails’ will be provided with a default weight value, but you can easily modify this by using the slider controls.
3. Identify your engagement period
An engagement period refers to the period of time in which these engagements need to happen to count towards the score. For example, if your engagement period is set to 30 days, but the last time a customer opened an email was 45 days ago, it would not count towards their engagement score.
In Ortto, the engagement period will be set as 30 days by default. But if the activities you’ve identified happen less frequently (like inviting a team member in the example above), you will want to customize this.
Once these three variables are set, Ortto’s algorithm will take the number of engagement activities occurrences in the engagement period and the weight of each engagement activity to assign a customer engagement score of up to five stars where five stars represents the highest level of engagement, and one star represents the lowest level of engagement.
Five ways to utilize customer engagement scores
Engagement scores are a powerful mechanism for creating benchmarks around customer engagement and tracking towards your goals, but the benefits go far beyond reporting. Since a customer engagement score takes multiple activities into account, it gives you a more accurate understanding of your customer’s relationship with your product and brand.
In Ortto, you can easily use engagement scores in combination with journeys, playbooks, and audiences to help your business grow. Start with these five
1. Automate churn reduction journeys and playbooks
Churn reduction is a critical component of growth. In fact, improving retention has a 2-4x greater impact on growth than acquisition. When it comes to churn, prevention really is better than a cure and the earlier you can identify a customer is likely to churn, the more likely it is you will be able to get them back on track and prevent them from churning in the first place.
In Ortto, the customer engagement score will become your best ally in reducing churn. Not only does the score itself help you identify when engagement is slipping, but it can be used as a filtering device to create audiences around specific churn phases, and put them into automated churn reduction playbooks and journeys.
For example, you could enter people into a journey when their engagement score drops to less than two during their first 30 days of becoming a customer. You can then set up a series of actions and messages for this audience like:
Send a slack or email notification to customer support so they can reach out directly
Automate a series of emails including:
Checklist for onboarding
Answer FAQs about the onboarding process
Share help documents and blogs around onboarding
Send an SMS to check in
Tag them as ‘Slipping customers’. You can then use this tag to show them a pop-up widget asking for feedback.
You can create similar journeys with different content for other phases of churn including mid-stage churn or long-term churn. If you have a large customer base and an overwhelmed support team, you can use additional filters in Ortto to segment out your most valuable customers (e.g. high MRR) who are more likely to churn. That way, you can focus support’s efforts on the big fish, and use automated journeys or playbooks to re-engage the rest.
2. Score leads
If you have a free trial of your product, or a freemium tier, the customer engagement score can be an incredibly powerful means of lead scoring.
SaaS companies with a product-led sales function can set up custom activities for any product-qualifying actions, and weight these highly in their customer engagement score algorithm. In the example above, the custom activities included in the engagement score calculation include actions like Completed signup wizard, Added project, and — the highest of all — Added team member.
Once this is set up, identifying highly-qualified leads is simply a matter of filtering for free trial or freemium users with an engagement score of 4 or 5 stars. You can take this one step further and use additional filters like industry or company size to identify high-value leads and route these directly to your sales team.
Using the Ortto engagement score will speed up the lead scoring process significantly. With a sophisticated algorithm that takes multiple customer activities into account, including custom activities that are unique to your business, you will benefit from more accurate lead scoring, without manual work.
3. Identify up-sell opportunities
We all want our customers to expand, but reaching out with upsell opportunities at the wrong time can be detrimental to the relationship. A high engagement score is often a strong indicator that your customer may be ready to expand. Perhaps they’ve onboarded new team members and have more capacity to use advanced features of your product, or they’ve recently discovered a new use case for your product that has increased their usage.
Your upsell opportunities will be largely dependent on the pricing tiers you’ve established for your product. No matter how you’ve set this up, your engagement score criteria in Ortto can help you quickly and easily identify customers who are more likely to respond to an upsell opportunity.
For example, if your pricing tiers are around usage or seats, you can track customers who are about to reach their usage thresholds and have a 4-5 star engagement score. This will give your sales team a clear view of which customers might be about to expand. They can add filters on this audience, like industry or company size, to prioritize outreach and nudge them towards a customized, enterprise-level plan.
If your pricing tiers are based around feature access and you’re about to launch a new feature or product that is only available at a certain tier, you can use the engagement score as a filter to identify an audience who is highly engaged and regularly use adjacent features.
You can then reach out to this audience, offering exclusive early access to a free trial of your new feature. As a result, you’ll show your highly-engaged customers some love, get feedback on the new feature, and take a truly product-led approach to nudge them towards an upsell.
4. Use engagement scores for advocacy
Customer endorsements are worth their weight in gold. Whether reviews on G2, Capterra, or elsewhere, case studies on your website, or quotes social media, strong customer reviews provide all sorts of opportunities for growth.
In Ortto, you can use engagement scores to generate more reviews and build a short list of customers to reach out to for case study opportunities. It's a simple way to automate what can otherwise be a tedious manual process.
Here’s how it works.
Set the entry criteria for your journey to be 'Engagement score 4 stars or above'
Set a condition in your journey to tag all individuals as 'Potential advocate'
Add emails incentivizing these engaged customers to leave a review on sites like G2 or Capterra, or to respond via email with a testimonial
When you're ready to begin case study outreach, you can refer to your 'Potential advocate' tag for a shortlist of engaged customers
By targeting people who have a high engagement score, you will be more likely to generate specific, detailed positive reviews.
5. Build an audience for targeting lookalikes
Targeting lookalikes on Facebook, Google and Twitter is a great way to increase the number of quality leads you have while reducing wastage in your ad spend. With engagement scoring doing the hard work of identifying your most-engaged users, you can quickly and easily build an audience in Ortto that can be synced with your Facebook, Google and Twitter accounts. The ad platforms will take this information and use their own algorithms to build an audience of lookalikes that you can target with ads.
For example, let’s say you’re about to launch your product in Mexico. You have some powerful Facebook and Instagram ads ready to go, and you just need to figure out your targeting.
You could use Ortto to:
Build an audience segment of customers with a 5-star engagement score
Sync this audience with your ad platforms
Go to your Meta ad account, select lookalike audience, and select the ‘5-star engagement’ audience that appears. Your synced audiences will appear with the text ‘Synced with Ortto audience’ so you can identify where they’ve come from
Choose Mexico as your target country and select your audience size by dragging the level. A 1% audience size range will target lookalikes who are very similar to your audience. Increasing the audience size will make the matching details less precise, but may be necessary if your customer is quite niche.
Sit back and wait as Meta builds your lookalike audience, set up your creative, and start your campaign
There are plenty of other ways to use engagement scores to build audiences for lookalike targeting. Check out our 5 lookalike audiences worth testing blog for more inspiration.
If you are using lead generation ad formats, all your leads will be automatically routed to your Ortto CDP so you can start nurturing them right away
Final word
Customer engagement scores give you a simple, efficient way to accurately measure the engagement of individual customers or organizations. When used in combination with audience filters, journeys, and playbooks, they can provide growth opportunities for your business.
Get started tracking your customer’s engagement in Ortto today by signing in or signing up.
