How marketing teams can master customer engagement metrics and reporting

There are two key challenges that marketers encounter when attempting to measure the impact of their customer engagement campaigns:

1. Some brands have so much data that they either can’t or don’t know how to prioritize the most important customer engagement metrics that affect top-line/bottom-line business outcomes. They often need to hire additional data analysts and pipe to 3rd party tools.
2. On the other hand, many marketers either lack the data necessary to understand their outcomes or have a limited, static view of performance. These folks seldom review their data, and when they do, it’s already outdated.

In this piece, we’ll walk you through the customer engagement metrics you should consider tracking to make good tactical and strategic decisions that support your marketing and business goals, and best practices to affect change for your brand with relevant, real-time data.

Contents:

• Why analyzing customer engagement correctly matters
• The most important customer engagement metrics for marketers
• What to look for in a customer engagement and marketing performance reporting solution
• Customer engagement metrics and reporting FAQs

Why analyzing customer engagement correctly matters

When you don’t have a full picture of your customer engagement performance, bad things can happen. Issues with marketing efforts and campaigns can fester, it becomes harder to double down on wins, marketers are inevitably left in the dark about what they could be doing to optimize their marketing campaigns, and ultimately, opportunities to increase revenue and KPIs can be left on the table.

The Braze Customer Engagement Index (CEI) is a framework marketing leaders can use to evaluate their customer engagement maturity. Two of the 12 crucial elements of customer engagement success assessed by the CEI are customer engagement performance and customer engagement metrics. The most advanced brands, those that are found to be operating at the “Ace” level, set themselves apart by analyzing performance in real time, rather than relying on static reports. And when it comes to metrics, Ace brands focus on top-line and bottom-line business metrics. These practices matter because Ace brands outperform the competition:

• 85% of Ace brands surpassed their revenue goals, according to our 2024 Braze Global Customer Engagement Review
• From 2021-2024 Ace brands met their annual revenue goals 10% more often than non-Ace brands
• Ace brands also generate 73% more purchases per user and have a 30% higher 90-day retention rate compared to non-Ace brands

The most important customer engagement metrics for marketers: 35+ KPIs and reports to analyze the health of your marketing program and campaigns

Looking to get started with or improve how you’re measuring customer engagement performance? It’s important to keep in mind that the “right” metrics to track will vary depending on your unique brand, your business goals, your audience, and the specific engagement channels you’re using. That said, here is a broad overview of the types of KPIs you should consider monitoring using a marketing performance reporting tool to support a holistic understanding of your brand’s performance.

Conversion metrics

These KPIs will help you track the high-value actions your customers are taking in connection with your app, website, or other digital touchpoints.

1. Conversions: Total number of desired actions completed (purchases, app downloads, email opt-ins, etc.) resulting from your marketing campaigns
2. Conversion event (name, rate): Specific types of conversions you're tracking, such as:
   1. Purchase rate: Percentage of users who make a purchase
   2. Download rate: Percentage of users who install your app
   3. Signup rate: Percentage of users who create an account
3. Conversion rate: Percentage of users who complete your desired action (e.g., "11% of email recipients joined your loyalty program").

Monetization metrics

Keeping an eye on these metrics will help your monetization campaigns reach their desired effect and make it more likely that you drive the behaviors that support business growth.

1. Purchases (over time, weekly, monthly, etc.): The number of items customers buy in a given time period or product category
2. Revenue (over time; by segment, campaign, region, etc.): This is a measure of the number of items sold times the price of the items sold; you’ll likely want to track different revenue calculations, including lifetime revenue, lifetime value per user, average daily revenue, and daily revenue per user
3. Average number of basket or cart items: The average number of items customer purchase at one time
4. Average order value (AOV) or average basket value: The average value per customer transaction as calculated by taking the total revenue divided by the total number of orders
5. Order frequency or purchase frequency: This is the number of orders or purchases in a given time period, divided by the number of customers who purchased during that time period
6. Upsell rate/purchase add-on rate: The percent of customers who are successfully upsold or add on an extra item to their order; calculated by the number of customers who purchase an upsale or an add-on, divided by the total number of customers who complete a purchase during a given time period

Customer health, retention, and loyalty metrics

When these metrics improve, you’ll be better positioned to fuel long-term, sustainable outcomes.

1. Retention rate: Percentage of customers retained (who haven’t churned) over a given time period (Note: There are various ways of calculating retention rate, so choose an approach that fits your specific business and needs)
2. Customer lifetime value (by channel, etc.): The total revenue a brand can expect a customer to generate over their entire relationship with the brand
3. Ratio between customer acquisition costs (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV), over time by segment and by cohort: This allows marketers to understand the ROI on their customer acquisition efforts more effectively
4. CAC payback period (over time by segment and by cohort): A measure of how long it takes for CLV to catch up to and cover the costs of acquiring any individual user, segment, or cohort; this customer engagement metric sheds light on the profitability of segments, not just a company's overall profitability, and helps measure whether customer profitability increases with time

Key messaging campaign metrics

At the channel level, here’s a range of KPIs that will help you manage and optimize your messaging touch points across mobile, web, and more.

1. Audience growth: Rate of growth of users by channel (mobile, email, web, etc.) by month, quarter, and year
2. Sends: Number of a messages sent (such as number of emails sent for a given campaign)
3. Delivery rate: The percentage of emails or SMS campaigns that are successfully delivered and do not bounce; a good email delivery rate is around 98%
4. Opens: Number of messages opened (such as email opens, push opens, etc.); for email, the rise of Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection has complicated the value of opens, but they still provide insight into your emailable audience.
5. Clicks and click rate: The total number and percentage of users who have clicked within a given message, inclusive of a user clicking on something multiple times; this can be used across different messaging channels, including email, SMS, and Content Cards
6. Unique clicks: The specific number of recipients who have clicked somewhere within a message
7. Impressions: The number of times a given campaign has been seen; this can be used for a variety of channels, including ads, Content Cards, in-app messages, and in-browser messages
8. Unsubscribes or unsubscribe rate: The number of recipients who opt out of receiving future campaigns per a given campaign; this can be used for multiple channels, including push notifications, emails, and SMS

Email marketing campaign metrics

1. Email bounces/email bounce rate: The number of emails that could not be delivered; the percent of emails that could not be delivered out of the total number of emails sent
2. Spam rate or email complaint rate: The percent of emails that have been flagged as spam; this is important to track as it is an indicator of individual engagement, but it can also damage your email sender reputation and overall email deliverability
3. Non-open rate: The number of emails NOT opened, divided by the number of emails delivered; this rate tells us about the relative reach of each campaign
4. Click-to-open rate: This is the number of unique user email clicks divided by the number of unique user opens and the higher this is that tell us whether we’ve given users a reason to not only open the campaign but click on the call to action

Keep reading to learn about even more essential email reporting KPIs and email marketing metrics.

Mobile marketing campaign metrics

1. Active users (daily, monthly): Any user who has at least one app session during a given time period; active user campaigns are a great way to increase this number
2. Push opt-in rate: The percent of your mobile app users who have opted into receiving push notifications out of your total mobile app users
3. Direct push opens: The number of times your company’s app users open the push notifications they receive
4. Influenced opens: The number of times your company’s app users manually open your app after receiving a push notification (vs. tapping on the notification to open the app) within a specified window after receipt
5. Total push opens: The sum of your direct opens plus your influenced opens

Keep reading to learn about additional mobile messaging metrics. Plus, discover even more report metrics by channel for SMS, web push, Content Cards, and more.

Additional reporting

1. Campaign performance over time: See how well your campaigns have performed across different factors
2. Campaign and Canvas performance by channel: See how campaigns and canvases are performing by channel
3. Funnel-drop off reports: Track where users are dropping off in your funnel
4. Impact reports: See how your overall customer engagement efforts have driven incremental conversions
5. Retention reports: Understand how your customer engagement campaigns and journeys are keeping your audience engaged and retained over time
6. Variant analysis: Reports that reveal the winning variants in a campaign analysis (e.g. the top-performing channel combinations, timing, message copy, creative, etc.)

What to look for in a customer engagement and marketing performance Reporting Solution

The right marketing performance reporting tool should help you more effectively measure the impact of your campaigns, iterate, and optimize your efforts for maximum results over time. Here are the most important features.

An all-in-one solution

Having one platform that supports key marketing functions, from the first data ingested to the final report is a game changer. Being able to confidently report on the overall health of your customer engagement program (including the key metrics above) and action on them in one place saves time, increases trust in data, and allows you to make adjustments as users engage with your brand to more quickly improve customer satisfaction.

A platform that gives you flexibility and control with a user-friendly interface

You want to own your customer engagement strategy from the top to bottom and that includes on the reporting and analytics side of things. Accordingly, make sure to look for tools that offer pre-built reports, allowing you to get up and running right away; easy-to-build self-serve reports and industry benchmark reports that don’t require ongoing engineering support are also a major plus, allowing marketers to more easily control their outcomes and measure up to the best.

Breadth and depth with no code-required

You want to easily be able to measure the impact your different efforts are having at different heights. So, you need the ability to compare performance broadly across every campaign you’ve sent this year, while also having an easy time diving deep with reporting sliced and diced by any measure you need—tags, time periods, campaigns, user journeys, or even more complicated queries that can be built with AI-assistance.

The integrations you need

You want to tie back your customer engagement efforts to your company’s broader business goals, so you’ll want to be able to connect your customer engagement reporting tool easily into your company’s overall tech stack with minimal effort.

Final thoughts

By finding the right KPIs to effectively assess your business and the performance of your customer engagement program and then leveraging the right reporting technologies to get in the moment understanding of what is and isn’t working in your marketing efforts, companies can let themselves up to become top-performing “Ace” brands that are capable of competing successfully even in challenging landscapes.

Customer engagement metrics and reporting FAQs

How do custom reporting tools benefit marketing teams?

Because each marketing team’s needs are unique, it’s helpful when marketing performance reporting tools have a custom report builder available. That makes it possible for companies to create custom reports that can measure the impact of a particular campaign or strategy that may otherwise be hard to monitor using pre-built dashboards.

What are the challenges marketers face with engagement metrics reporting?

As discussed above, the two key challenges marketers face are having too much data but lacking a clear vision for which data and KPIs to prioritize or having limited access to timely data, making it difficult to evaluate performance in a meaningful way.

What is the role of dashboards in marketing performance tracking?

Dashboards make it easy for customer engagement teams to quickly assess the impact of their campaigns and strategies without having to sift through manual static reports or rely on outside teams to build custom reports. They can also allow marketers to surface and share these insights with other internal stakeholders.

How can marketers optimize campaigns using data-driven insights?

The first step is to set goals that define what success means for your organization and your specific campaigns. This will help make it possible for you to track how you’re performing. Next, you need to have a marketing performance reporting tool that monitors your most important KPIs in real time and has data-driven marketing automations in place to help you optimize your efforts based on these insights. For instance, if a particular email campaign subject line is leading to more opens but another is generating more revenue, and you’re optimizing for revenue, then ideally your customer engagement platform has an Intelligent Selection feature capable of sending the best-performing variant (based on revenue gains) to users.

Forward Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the performance of and expected benefits from Braze and its products. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in the Braze Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2025, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on March 31, 2025, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.