Engaging your audience is a key strategy for any successful ecommerce business. It’s not just about transactions; it’s about building connections that foster loyalty and trust. Effective audience engagement involves personalized communication, interactive content, and thoughtful outreach that encourages customers to participate and share their experiences.
Your small business can create strong, lasting relationships with your audience by leveraging social media interactions, email campaigns, and engaging content. These tools can help capture your customers’ attention and keep them invested in your brand.
Explore the importance of maintaining audience engagement and discover how to measure your results for ongoing improvement and success.
What is audience engagement?
Any time a customer interacts with your company, whether online or in person, it’s an example of audience engagement. Businesses commonly track this metric across social media platforms to evaluate how well their content resonates with consumers. Getting likes, shares, and positive comments shows that your audience is interested in your message and content.
Social media is a popular audience engagement tool, but feedback from your customers isn’t limited to these platforms. Brand activations, surveys, and third-party review services, like Amazon Reviews or Yelp, are all opportunities for engagement.
How to engage with your audience
Audience engagement can take many forms. These are some common touchpoints to encourage customer interactions and how these metrics may be measured:
Customers engage with content every time they read a brand email. Open rates and click-through rates are two of the most important metrics for measuring email engagement. These statistics tell business owners how many customers open their emails and how many users engaged with the content by clicking a link.
Websites
Visiting a business website, reading content, and clicking on product links are all forms of engagement. Marketing professionals use web analytics metrics like time on page, pages per session, and bounce rate to help assess website engagement. Customer actions like spending significant time on a webpage, scrolling down the page, and clicking on multiple links are signs of an engaged audience.
Social media
Social media engagement metrics vary depending on the platform. Likes, shares, saves, comments, and link clicks are common measurements. Views alone aren’t always considered engagement because social media viewing is passive. A user who pauses over your post while scrolling through their feed may register as a view, but they haven’t necessarily demonstrated interest in your content.
Active engagements, such as commenting or saving a post, are stronger signals. Use an engagement rate formula—calculated by dividing total interactions by total number of views—to compare platform engagement to industry standards. Calculating this rate helps you measure social media engagement against other brands with a larger or smaller number of social media followers.
Events
Live events, such as product launches, workshops, or pop-up shops, create multiple opportunities for engagement. Registering to attend an event and ticket sales are both considered engagements. At an event, attendees can get to know your brand further by adding their name to a sign-up sheet, listening to a speaker, or making a purchase. Businesses evaluate metrics such as event attendance, new email newsletter sign-ups, and purchases to measure success.
Video
Views, watch time, and completion rate are critical indicators of engagement for video content. These metrics apply to social media videos as well as video content that appears on a website. Reviewing each of these statistics may help reveal the strengths and weaknesses in your videos. If a video has a lot of views but a short average watch time, for example, it may mean the concept was interesting, but the execution didn’t hold their attention.
Reviews and responses
Writing reviews or responding to a survey takes time. Both are deep, valuable engagements. Reviews and responses can take the form of direct feedback, like an email to a customer service representative, or public feedback, such as a review on a third-party platform. Evaluating these engagements involves measuring both quantity and sentiment.
Audience engagement strategies
- Consider your target audience
- Respond to comments
- Share high-value content
- Optimize for the platform
When businesses compete for an audience's attention, email inboxes and social media platforms can get flooded with content. Janell Stephens, CEO of the skin care brand Camille Rose, shares the strategies she uses to stand out in a crowded market and build an engaged audience:
Consider your target audience
First things first: You need to understand your customers to get them invested in your business. You can determine demographic and psychographic details with social media insights, web analytics, and third-party industry reports. This information should help you shape your content strategy and produce content that’s relevant to their interests. “We're very heavy on social media to figure out what customers need,” says Janell.
Direct feedback is also a valuable resource for learning more about your customers. Janell’s team uses it to inform marketing, product development, and audience engagement strategies, since it tells you exactly what’s on your customers’ minds. “Listening to what my followers are saying is very important to me and to my brand,” she says.
Respond to comments
If your customers take the time to share their thoughts, it’s important they know you’re paying attention. Actively engaging with commenters helps build meaningful connections, and it's a way to communicate directly with them. Sharing authentic reactions to positive responses and leaving sympathetic replies to negative ones shows you’re paying attention. It also humanizes your brand and helps build brand loyalty.
In the early days of Camille Rose, Janell relied heavily on word-of-mouth marketing and grassroots growth. Her initial marketing budget was small, but Janell built a loyal community by engaging in authentic, personal dialogue. Though her company has expanded its marketing capabilities since then, Janell says, “I still talk to my followers as their best friend.”
Interactive content like quizzes, surveys, and chatbots also gives viewers a way to share their thoughts and engage. Interactive elements can also include open-ended questions, which get your audience involved and give you a stream of fresh, relevant ideas.
Share high-value content
High-value content is anything that provides a substantial and clear benefit to your customers. Video content, for example, should have striking visuals and crisp editing, while written content is most impactful when it has clear, substantive information.
Producing high-value content often requires creativity and time, and sometimes happens when you need to pivot. When Camille Rose was forced to cancel a string of brand activations in early 2020, Janell refocused and brought her energy to Instagram. She created a series of high-quality social posts to take the place of the brand’s planned marketing events.
“We had our brand stylists on our page talking about styles and how to use our product, we had an esthetician on our page, we even had yoga instructors,” she says. By partnering with professionals and experts, her team created elevated, informative content that added a new dimension to the user experience for their customers.
Optimize for the platform
The key elements that drive engagement will vary by platform. For example, an attention-grabbing subject line is essential for email campaigns, solid captions support social media performance, and YouTube requires great thumbnails and titles. Paying attention to specific platform needs can help you connect your content with your desired audience.
Audience engagement FAQ
What does audience engagement mean?
Audience engagement refers to the interaction and connection between brands and their customers. There are many ways for customers to engage with a brand, whether it’s sharing social media posts, attending live events, or filling out a survey.
How do you measure audience engagement?
Audience engagement metrics will vary depending on the type of engagement you’re using. Brands can track engagement on social channels by reviewing likes, shares, and saves associated with posts. For an in-person event like a pop-up, the success metrics would include attendance and social media mentions.
What are the strategies for audience engagement?
Creating high-value content tailored to customers' interests can help increase audience engagement. Common audience engagement strategies include writing compelling email subject lines to boost open rates, responding to social media comments, and sharing interactive content.
