Have you ever wondered how to tell if your customers are genuinely engaged with your product? Customer engagement can occur in different ways and not all kinds of engagements will hold the same importance for the ultimate goals of your brand. So, it’s important that you understand not just how much but also what kinds of engagements are happening. That’s where the customer engagement score (CES) comes in. This metric goes beyond surface-level stats, giving you a clear view of how customers interact with your features, services, and support.
In this blog, we’ll define what customer engagement score (CES) is, how to calculate it, and how you can use insights from it for better customer engagement.
What is the customer engagement score (CES)?
The customer engagement score (CES) measures how actively customers interact with your product or service. It tracks meaningful behaviors like feature usage, activity frequency, and interactions with support to provide a clear picture of a customer’s relationship with your brand.
Unlike broad and general metrics, CES is customized for your product and customer journey. It evaluates not just how often customers use your product but how deeply they engage, offering actionable insights. A high CES active customers, while a low score may indicate disengagement or risk of churn.
Why is calculating customer engagement score important?
Calculating customer engagement score (CES) gives you a clear view of how well your customers are connecting with your product or service. Let me break down why calculating CES is essential and how it helps brands:
1. Spotting at-risk customers and boosting retention
CES helps you identify at-risk customers so you can focus on them and improve retention. A low score means a customer is highly disengaged and might leave soon. Acting quickly with the right strategies, like offering support or highlighting key features, can re-engage them.
2. Optimizing features
CES data shows you which features customers engage with the most. This insight helps you focus on enhancing these popular features or introducing new ones that align with customer interests. This ensures that your product keeps evolving to meet their needs and also improves the experience of the customers who use the existing popular features.
3. Improving sales performance
Customers who are highly engaged are much more likely to respond to upselling or cross-selling. By understanding engagement patterns, you can send the right offers to highly engaged customers and drive revenue through personalized suggestions.
4. Enhancing customer experience
CES is your guide to creating exceptional customer experiences. A high CES not only shows what’s working but also highlights areas for improvement. You can easily analyze and learn from the behavior and preferences of the customers with high CES and apply similar tactics to provide a better customer experience to your entire customer base. Similarly, you can also identify what’s causing lower engagements and fix what’s hampering the overall customer experience.
Missing here is that a customer engagement score's most important use is to help you understand who your most engaged customers are, creating the opportunity to better understand what they have in common, what can be learned, and how that can be applied to increasing the engagement of more customers.
- Braden Kelley, Customer Experience and Innovation Solution Director, HCL Technologies
How to calculate customer engagement score
Calculating CES can be a complex process, but we’ve broken it down into simple steps to make it easier for you. Here’s how to accurately calculate it:
Step 1: Define engagement and identify key events
Before you calculate the CES, you need to define what engagement looks like for your product. This varies depending on the type of product or business model you have.
These interactions are referred to as events and reflect how users are engaging with your product or brand. The key events you could be tracking may include:
Product usage frequency: How often users log into your platform or app provides insights into their activity levels.
Feature utilization: Which features users engage with highlights what functionalities are most valuable to them.
In-app actions: Actions such as upgrading plans, customizing settings, or completing specific workflows.
Support activity: Creation of support tickets or engagement with help resources.
You will be selecting a group of events that will be unique to your product and should reflect the core behaviors that will lead to brand growth. For example, a project management tool might prioritize task creation and collaboration, while a social media tool might focus on posting frequency and content scheduling.
Step 2: Assign a weight to each event
Once you’ve identified key events, the next step is to assign a score to each one based on its significance. The weight of each event depends on how critical it is to your product’s success.
Assign scores to events based on their level of engagement. High-value events, like scheduling a post in a social media tool, may be allotted 8 points, reflecting its higher importance. Low-value events, like clicking through an onboarding tutorial, might only get 1 point, as they don’t indicate sustained engagement. This helps prioritize the most meaningful interactions.
Companies typically measure customer engagement score (CES) on a scale from 1 to 100. To make the CES easier to interpret and use for customer segmentation, it's important to scale down the total CES so that it falls within this 1-100 range. This helps simplify analysis and ensures consistency across customer groups.
Step 3: Track events using event-tracking tools
Once you’ve defined your key events, you can set up event tracking to monitor these events as they occur, giving you the data needed to assign scores effectively.
To accurately track events, you might need to use multiple tools as different tools are required based on the type of events you're tracking.
For instance, if you're tracking website interactions, tools like GA4 (Google Analytics 4) will help monitor behaviors such as page visits, account logins, or feature usage. On the other hand, if you want to measure email engagement, an email service provider (ESP) like Mailmodo will give you detailed insights into open rates, click-throughs, and other email-specific actions.
Step 4: Calculate the CES using the formula
To calculate the CES, you add all the total values of different events. The total value of each event would be the product of the weight you assigned to that event and the number of occurrences of that event. Take a look at the formula and example below for better understanding.
Formula:
CES = Total Event Value 1 + Total Event Value 2 + Total Event Value 3 + …
Where, Total Event Value 1 = Weight of Event 1 X Occurrence
For example:
| Event | Weight | No. of occurrences | Total event value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Post scheduled | 1 | 11 | 11 |
| Feature explored | 4 | 17 | 68 |
| Account upgraded | 5 | 1 | 5 |
| Total CES | 84 |
What is a good customer engagement score?
Depending on the customer engagement score that you’ve calculated for any given customer, you can classify it as good, bad or mid-range CES. Let’s take a look at that classification.
Good CES (71-100)
A CES of 71-100 indicates strong engagement and loyalty. Users in this range actively interact with your product, frequently use key features, and complete important tasks. They are highly satisfied, more likely to renew subscriptions, upgrade to premium plans, and recommend your product to others.
High CES demonstrates that your product effectively meets user needs and drives satisfaction. To retain and nurture these customers, consider offering loyalty perks, personalized experiences, and opportunities to participate in brand advocacy, such as sharing testimonials or collaborating on case studies.
Mid-range CES (41-70)
A mid-range CES (41-70) indicates moderate engagement, where users interact with your product occasionally and tend to rely on basic features. These users may not fully grasp the value of your product, increasing the risk of disengagement or churn.
To improve their connection, focus on re-engagement strategies such as onboarding assistance, educational content, and campaigns highlighting the benefits of underused features. Sharing success stories or offering incentives can encourage them to use your product more frequently and explore its full potential, leading to stronger engagement over time.
Low CES (1-40)
A low CES (1-40) reflects minimal engagement, where users rarely interact with your product or struggle to find value in it. This group is at a high risk of churn and often faces challenges or dissatisfaction that need immediate attention.
To address this, businesses should focus on reactivation efforts, such as educational resources, personalized support, or troubleshooting to resolve issues. Proactively engaging with these users can help rebuild trust, improve their experience, and encourage them to explore the product's value more effectively.
What are the limitations of customer engagement scores?
While the customer engagement score (CES) is a valuable metric, it comes with certain limitations:
1. Subjectivity in metrics selection
CES relies on the metrics you choose to track. This selection process can introduce bias, as different companies may measure engagement differently based on their goals.
2. Lack of standardization
While the one that we’ve given is an acceptable and generally used formula, there is no universally accepted formula for CES, which can make comparisons across different industries or businesses difficult. Lack of standardization can reduce the score’s effectiveness as a benchmarking tool.
3. Focus on quantitative over qualitative data
Many CES models rely heavily on numerical data like usage frequency, ignoring the emotional or experiential aspects of customer relationships. For instance, a customer may interact infrequently but still have a strong positive perception of the brand, which might not be captured by CES alone.
4. Overgeneralization
Aggregating multiple engagement factors into a single score can oversimplify the complexities of customer behavior. A high CES might mask dissatisfaction in specific areas, while a low score could overlook isolated positive interactions.
Top 5 strategies to improve customer engagement score
For improving your CES you must focus on increasing the frequency of usage of the specific events you’re tracking. For this, you need to improve specific features and make it more accessible and easy to navigate. Here are effective ways to improve CES:
1. Gamify your interactions
Add fun elements like badges, rewards, and challenges to encourage users to engage more often and use lesser known features. Gamification motivates users with low to mid-range CES scores to interact more consistently and increase the number of occurences of the events you want them to use.
2. Use interactive emails
Incorporate interactive features like polls and surveys in your emails to collect feedback about specific features. Interactive surveys will allow your customers to respond to them within the email itself. This will encourage users to take action and will provide you with more insights about what is and isn’t working well and you can work on that accordingly.
3. Offer premium feature trials
Give users free access to premium features for a limited time. This can encourage more frequent usage and boost engagement, especially for users in the mid-range CES group. It will also give them a taste of these features and they might upgrade to higher plans.
4. Provide in-app tutorials and messages
Use interactive in-app tutorials and contextual messages to guide users through key features and workflows. These can include step-by-step walkthroughs for onboarding, tooltips to highlight underused functionalities, and behavior-triggered prompts to encourage deeper engagement. This helps users quickly understand the value of your product and higher usage.
5. Integrate push notifications
Use personalized and timely push notifications to keep users engaged and informed. These can include reminders for incomplete actions, updates on new features, or reactivation messages for inactive users. By delivering relevant and actionable messages directly to users’ devices, push notifications encourage consistent interaction, driving higher engagement.
Use interactive emails to improve CES
Conclusion
Calculating customer engagement score (CES) helps you understand how engaged your customers are and guides you in improving your relationship with them.
By measuring and segmenting based on CES, you can take action to boost engagement and retention and focus your efforts on where it’s required. While CES has some limitations, it’s a powerful tool for better connecting with your audience.
While you’ll have to use different tools and strategies depending on the metrics you’ve chosen to calculate your CES, we highly recommend using Mailmodo to provide your customers with a highly engaging experience, setting up automated workflows for nurturing them and tracking their engagements with the email campaigns you run.
