#discussions

@Katlin Hess @Kevin Lau @Rachel Ward do any of you have thoughts or ways you've built this that has worked well for you

did they have a heartbeat and possibly open 1 email in their whole tenure as a customer? ✅ impacted their NRR

but that's just me lol

I would take that approach if our MOps lead would let me

lolol you'd be shocked how much impact i've had when I look at that number lolol

What type of programs are you running for lifecycle? I'd imagine that impacts how you define engagement.

@Shetal Shah @Rachel Ward might have ideas too.

@Shannon Howard if it's a webinar then engaged would be "attended" or "watched on demand", email would be if they clicked through, workshop would be if they "attended" etc. I know demand gen counts when contacts register for their events but that feels like a bit of a stretch to me. That to me would show they are potentially interested but not exactly engaged.

I’m curious if how/if you’d weight different programs differently? Or if you’d give more weight to programs targeting specific product/industry targets.

At this point, I wouldn’t weight the programs since it would add more complexity to the reporting process. Instead, I’d focus on setting a stricter definition of "engaged" for each lifecycle program—for example, I wouldn’t count registrations for a customer webinar as engagement.

I’m looking to understand what others consider a meaningful definition of engagement for this type of report. For instance, if customers who participated in 2 or more lifecycle programs (whether it's a webinar, email nurture, in app engagement, etc) renew at a rate 20% higher than those who didn’t, that feels like a strong indicator of impact.

When I was at Demandbase I reported on the top engaged advocates and their retention and expansion.
It would look like this: Our most engaged advocates were 3x more likely to be retained and 1.25x more likely to contribute to expansion in their accounts.
I had a list of our top advocates and for each activity they completed they would get a number value, then I'd add these up and quickly see who was the most active in the last 3 months.

To decide what engagement looks like, I'd look at the profiles of customers you feel are very engaged, see what activity they've done and compare that to customers that do not seem engaged, by comparing the trends you can better decide what engagement looks like for your programs.

But like you said @Ciana Abdollahian comparing customers in your programs to those that are not is a good measure that is used in community. And the engagement activities were based on taking action in the community, either liking, commenting or DMing.

At a top-line engagement metric level we look at basically at least 1 person from the account had a form fill (basically webinar or enrollment in a G2 University course) or a click-through in a lifecycle specific email type (product/adoption related).

We do also now use Catalyst and I like those metrics better because I can actually see if the person did the thing I wanted them to do! So like we have a campaign for customers with 0 reviews in the last 90 days, and if they get 1+ reviews in the 30 days after enrollment we get credit as marketing influenced.

Let me get back to this in the AM!

@Ciana Abdollahian are you using any sort of scoring method (either a person score using Marketo that measures a clients engagement? or scoring for upsell, for example, if they visit several pages of your website on a specific add-on, they would get scored 15 points for a blog and maybe 25 for a key page? Or do you use 6sense/Demandbase to monitor intent you could incorporate?)

Similar to what you mentioned, for emails we measure engagement by CTR. We measure engagement with a webinar by attendance. If we have customers taking courses in our academy, we measure engagement by course completions. Do you include community within your lifecycle programs? if so, you can measure your engagement using your active community members.

We also score customers, so we have just started measuring engagement through scoring (if a customer scores to 100 for an add-on product, they get passed on as a lead to our Acct Management team). Though, not all content is upsell focused, so we also measure engagement using the Marketo "person score" to monitor an engaged customer. This measures if a customer is visiting your website regularly viewing specific educational content or registering for webinars regularly, etc. This might be worth looking into, perhaps setting a person score threshold to monitor an "engaged customer." You can also test different threshold scores through cohort analysis. Im not sure the best criteria for determining "100 = an engaged customer" vs. "83 = an engaged customer" for your use case, but happy to discuss further.

Since we are an LMS and use our own product, something I have been working on with my MOPs team is measuring the impact of our educational courses. For example, we know that someone who has taken at least one course in our academy is 25% more likely to retain than someone who has taken 0 courses. However, I'm seeking to know what's the course number taken that makes a customer jump from 25% to >50%. Is it 2 or 3? Is it 5? Then I know for onboarding/adoption initiatives to know what our goals are for course completions to passively impact retention as well as usage/upsell.

Engagement within our academy is another engagement measure. As we use it for our lifecycle programs.

This is a lot of information, so let me know if you have any q's or want to chat more.

@Katlin Hess what is Catalyst? Who owns this tool? Sounds cool!