Salespeople and marketers are always looking for ways to better engage prospects and customers digitally. They want to understand the effectiveness of that engagement.
There are a number of applications that are designed to track and measure engagement with text, video, audio, presentations, proposals and more.
In some cases, engagement information can be made visible to salespeople right inside the CRM system they’re using.
By understanding how much time someone spent viewing a digital asset or by seeing what specific pages or video segments someone focused their attention on, a salesperson can make decisions on whom to follow up with and where to steer conversations.
With certain platform combinations, marketers can use the same engagement data to automatically re-score leads or to assign leads to a specific list or campaign.
Of course, engagement level is not an exact science, as someone can scroll to a page in a tracked brochure and then walk away for a cup of coffee. The data will show that they were “most interested” in that particular page.
Nevertheless, valuable insight can be gained by tracking prospect and customer engagement with your company’s assets.
1. Tracking Video Engagement
Wistia is an established video hosting application for business. It is not a replacement for YouTube – marketers should continue to upload videos to YouTube, since it’s the world’s second largest search engine. However, YouTube only provides some high level, aggregate statistics that show how videos are generally performing:
Among the things that set Wistia apart from YouTube is the fact that Wistia provides user-level engagement reports. It’s possible to see how much of a video each person watched and what parts they re-watched.
When Wistia is integrated with a marketing automation system, the email address of converted visitors can be linked to a viewing session. This means that individual engagement can be seen within marketing automation systems such as Marketo, HubSpot and Pardot. Depending on the marketing automation and CRM system combination, this information can also be viewed within a CRM system by salespeople.
Wistia offers a number of other features and benefits not offered by YouTube, such as the ability to create a turnstile, which asks for an email address before playing the video. Here is a list of Wistia features.
2. Tracking Audio Engagement
Wistia recently filled a big gap by announcing an audio engagement solution.
Tracking audio engagement, particularly for podcasts, has been elusive. Traditionally, a podcast has been a unidirectional RSS broadcast to the world with little meaningful data returned.
However, with Wistia’s podcasting tool, listening stats for known customers and prospects are now available to marketers and salespeople.
If a salesperson sends a prospect a link to a Wistia-hosted podcast episode, the salesperson can find out whether the prospect listened to the episode at all—and if they did listen to it, what parts did they listen to.
3. Tracking Slide Deck and Document Engagement
Attach from Cirrus Insight is an application that applies some of the Wistia principles to documents and slide presentations.
A salesperson can send a document or a slideshow to a customer or prospect and see which pages or slides the recipient viewed and how much time they spent on each page or slide.
Files can be uploaded from a local drive, DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive or Box.
Once a file is uploaded, any number of links to the file can be created. Links can be specific to an individual email address. Alternatively, a Custom link can be set to prompt anyone who wants to access a file—via a web page, email link, tweet, etc.—for contact information.
If an email address (and other contact information) is required, collected information can be synched to a CRM or marketing automation system via Zapier or using one of several native integrations offered by Attach. There are other available link options, including whether the file is downloadable and whether there’s a link expiration date.
Both aggregate and individual engagement can be viewed. The individual activity information is very granular. In the following example, you can see that this person looked at slides 1 – 8 and then stopped after viewing slide 8 for three seconds:
Attach does not offer the same native, bi-directional integration with Marketo, HubSpot and Pardot that Wistia offers. Direct Salesforce integration is available, but sales users should also be set up as users within Attach so that they can view detailed engagement information there.
