In audience engagement strategy sessions, we stress the importance of clearly identifying objectives for performance. Establishing standards, goals and expectations are essential for maintaining a healthy, growing database and monitoring activity levels. But what criteria is best for setting those goals? How does the administrator/manager know if he/she is tracking the right metrics? It starts with establishing priorities by choosing exactly what to measure.
Choose the statistics that are most important. There are four main areas to track: Membership, Confirmed Members, Member Activity and Amount of Content Consumed. These are all easy statistics to gather. Your work comes in evaluating what the statistics suggest and how they fit into your success.
Membership: A healthy program should see consistent growth in membership. Many find it useful to evaluate membership as a percentage of total reach. For example, a radio station with a reach (cume) of 100,000 listeners would measure success based on a percentage of that audience becoming members.
Confirmed Members: Having a name in a database is just the start, however. A prospect that registers but does not take action by confirming the registration or participating in an activity has very little value. Persuading members to confirm and participate (confirmed members) is a much better reflection of effectiveness of your program. Consider measuring confirmed membership as a percentage of total members AND as a percentage of your reach.
Member Activity: Once registered and confirmed, the next measure is the percentage of confirmed members who participate in at least ONE activity in a designated period of time. We recommend measuring activity in 28-day increments. Track promotional tactics to measure impact on activity so you can fine-tune your approach to engagement. One of the yardsticks of success is your ability to create member habits, returning to your site several times a week, or even every day. It’s helpful to measure activity as a percentage of membership, of confirmed members and of total reach.
Content Consumed: Among active members, how much content are they consuming? The easiest measure for this metric is the total number of page views, but you might want to create more detail in your analysis based on responses to daily appointment features, total number of survey responses, trivia responses, instant win activity or any number of features you use. One of the most common statistics to track is the total page view activity divided by the number of active members. This will help you gauge success in leading members into a deeper relationship with your brand.
Of course, statistics are only numbers until meaning is assigned. In all measures of success, it’s important to realize the perspective of your audience. Remember that consumers join loyalty programs for many reasons. Some (typically about 30% or so) will be enticed for one specific purpose (maybe they wanted to express their opinion in a survey about a topic that motivates them) and may not return again for quite some time…or ever! Others (perhaps another 30%) may become obsessed with the program and return over and over again. They will account for massive activity. Many more (about 40%) will fall somewhere in between. Luring them into deeper engagement represents opportunity! Take this into account as you establish evaluation criteria.
Finally, remember that a loyalty program is most useful for identifying your most passionate fans (that 30% of the database accounting for up to 90% of activity), then rewarding them for passion. It’s easy to get hung up on the total size of the database—it’s the largest number, and the most obvious statistic to communicate. However, it’s not necessarily the most effective. A strong, deep relationship with 1,000 active, engaged and passionate fans is far more valuable than a casual relationship with 100,000! For more on this discussion, visit this excellent blog post from Kevin Kelly, titled 1,000 True Fans.
The Triton Loyalty Engagement Team is standing by to help you establish or implement your strategy. Let us know how we can help!
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