Properly Assessing Your Engagement Rate As A Startup

The challenge with life as a startup is that everything seems to require your attention. So much formative work needs to take place. Everything seems to be important, with a tremendous amount of time and money seemingly spent around every corner. Under circumstances such as these, it would make a lot of sense for some things such as understanding your engagement rates as getting shunted to the side.

However, when starting out, a concept like this needs to be monitored, not ignored. While there are other very important tasks at the outset, once your operations get going, knowing and understanding engagement rates will be pivotal for your success. This is because this metric can tell you a good bit about what you need to know moving forward, especially pertaining to the amount of work that is required to get customers to engage.

To be clear at the outset, the engagement rate is not the same as your conversion rate. In reality, your conversion rate should be viewed as a subset of our engagement rate (we will discuss conversion rates in a different article, but for our purposes understanding the connection is important here, if not for simply laying the groundwork for future understanding.) Engagement rate simply refers to how often your customers interact with you.

Engagement is something that should happen through multiple channels. On social media, it is liking, sharing, commenting, or messaging with your presence there. It could be a phone call, email, or SMS with your staff. It could even be a customer deciding to come into your office to talk with you. At the end of the day, there are many potential channels for engagement that you can and should monitor to determine what your engagement rate might look like.

Therefore, the first step you have (and, admittedly, a relatively easy one), is to classify all of the channels that you have for talking with your customers. The way that you monitor and track them will be quite easy and likely lay itself out (e.g. with an email blast that you send out with an email app, you can see the total number of sends. From opening the email to actually responding to it, all of these actions classify in some way as an engagement since the customer has engaged with your communication in some capacity. How you choose to classify engagement moving forward is definitely up to you.)

The most important aspect of determining your engagement rate after this is to follow through: track your rates very carefully. Learn as much as you can from your data. Consistency when it comes to your monitoring will help you very quickly get an idea about your customers, especially if you decide to segment these interactions as much as possible.

An important consideration here is to properly understand benchmarks. Years ago, I worked with a company where the owner was quick to dismiss things I said, especially if they did not like the answer. In one situation, they viewed the number of opens per email blast as being low: too low for their liking. In reality, the opens were higher than with most newsletters. I even remember that they wrote to the provider, complaining about this. I don’t know what the results of that conversation were, but I can assure you that a good bit of time was wasted on it, especially since nothing could be done to fix the problem. Simply understanding the benchmark with where things compared would have helped them realize that they were actually over performing by almost 5%.

The big takeaway from this article for a Startup is this: lay the groundwork properly by trying to identify all of the potential channels of communication. You might revise the number, and it is possible that you might find yourself adjusting the definition of the type of engagement that you wish to track. At the end of the day, the revision process here is to be expected. Just keep your focus in trying to quickly identify the channels of communication for tracking engagement rates, and at the end of the day, you will very quickly be able to get everything falling into place.