Customer connection can be a very vague concept. Do you have connection? How do you know if you do and how do you know if you don’t? Unlike profits and ROI, there’s not one place you can look and say “aha, we now have connection.”
Instead, to figure out how much of a connection you’re making, you have to collect a variety of different metrics and statistics and make an inference.
These statistics can show you whether or not your message is hitting home with your customers.
==> Facebook Virality
In your Facebook Insights stats, there’s a number called “Virality.”
This is essentially what percentage of people who see your posts end up commenting, liking or sharing it, which makes your story appear on someone else’s news feed.
The higher your virality, the higher the percentage of people who connected with your message enough to pass it on to their friends.
Your Facebook virality is one of the most accurate gauges of how well your message is hitting, because it takes quite a high bar for someone to recommend something to a friend.
==> Twitter Retweets
The same can be said of Twitter retweets. Pay attention to what kinds of messages get retweeted and what kinds of messages don’t.
If you run a sales training organization and find that tweets about cold calling tend to get ignored while tweets about closing existing customers seem to take off, then you know where to focus your attention.
==> Analytics Numbers
There are a few numbers you should pay attention to in your analytics software: bounce rate, average length on site and pageviews per person.
Of all these statistics, the one that is most indicative of whether your message is connecting is “average length on site.”
All of these numbers will tell you essentially how much someone likes your content. If they don’t like it, they’ll bounce. If they like it, they’ll stay longer. If they like it, they’ll view more pages.
Take a look at the time on site of your various content pages and your various traffic sources and see if you can spot any patterns.
==> Surveys
Finally, one last way you can gauge whether or not people are connecting with your message is to simply ask them.
Using a service like Survey Monkey, you can easily construct a survey in under 30 minutes.
Make your survey short. Ask customers to fill it out, preferably in exchange for a bonus or a chance to win a prize.
Gather all the data from your survey and determine how well your message is hitting. Make changes, then re-do the survey a few months down the line.
Applying metrics and statistics to your efforts at building a connection is crucial. Simply guestimating whether or not you’re connecting isn’t a good way to run a business. By tracking metrics, you’ll be able to steadily improve those metrics over time.