The digital marketing blogs have been buzzing recently about how to measure engagement for different types of online business.

For example, Avinash Kaushik has suggested uncharacteristically in a recent post Engagement Is Not A Metric Its An Excuse, arguing that it’s alternatively impossible or not worthwhile. This generated a lot of discussion.

Other commentators such have Ron Shevlin have contested this and provided a useful framework for thinking about, measuring and improving engagement . In his blog post, Ron refers to these measures of engagement. He says:

"Customer engagement encompasses a number of dimensions:

1. Product involvement. A customer who doesn’t care about the product, is likely to be less committed or emotionally attached to the firm providing the product.
2. Frequency of purchase. A customer who purchases more frequently may be more engaged than other customers.
3. Frequency of service interactions. Branding experts like to say that repeated, positive interactions lead to brand affinity. And they’re right to a certain extent, but….
4. Types of interactions. …not all types of interactions are created equally. Checking account balances is a very different type of interaction than a request to help choose between product or service options.
5. Online behavior. Time spent on a site might be very important. But, like types of interactions, not all web pages are created equally.
6. Referral behavior/intention. Customer who are likely to refer a firm to friends/family might be more engaged — a customer who actually does refer the firm, even more engaged.
7. Velocity. The rate of change in the indicators listed above may be a signal of engagement."

Of course, Ron’s list rightly and usefully goes beyond online interactions to look at all customer touchpoints. From a web marketing perspective, I like the way that activity levels of individuals are identified for different types of interactions from response behaviour, through purchase behaviour and recommendations or advocacy.

This can help marketers identify communications or touch strategies to deliver relevant personalized communications to influence engagement and so change behaviour – what I call Right Touching

Right Touching strategies have to be developed throughout the customer lifecycle, so I also like the Forrester framework for online customer engagement from their recent research report Marketing's New Key Metric: Engagement because it looks at customer engagement across the lifecycle.

This research report by Brian Haven, Senior Analyst at Forrester on Customer Engagement has been summarized by Don Peppers of 1to1 Marketing fame. This framework is based around engagement through the customer lifecycle and also away from the brands own site, such as on publisher sites or social networks.

According to Forrester, engagement has four parts:

1. Involvement. Forrester says this includes web site visits, time spent, pages viewed.
2. Interaction. This is contributed comments to blogs, quantity/frequency of written reviews, and online comments as well as comments expressed in customer service.
3. Intimacy. This is sentiment tracking on third-party sites including blogs and reviews, as well as opinions expressed in customer service calls
4. Influence. This is advocacy indicated by measures such as like likelihood to recommend, brand affinity, content forwarded to friends, etc.

It should be measured by data collected both online and offline.

He says:

"Using engagement, you get a more holistic appreciation of your customers' actions, recognizing that value comes not just from transactions but also from actions people take to influence others. Once engagement takes hold of marketing, marketing messages will become conversations, and dollars will shift from media buying to customer understanding."

This is all useful thinking, but for me it largely misses one of the most important measures which can relatively easily measured at the individual level - and that’s e-mail response.