Boaz Ronkin just published an inspiring article on engagement and conversion. It is about the “engagement” stage in the online marketing paradigm: “acquire, engage, convert, retain”. He argues that engagement for engagement’s sake does not make any sense, and that engagement should always serve the conversion goal.

This blog is all about customer engagement, so we always emphasize the importance of the engagement phase. We’ve seen many examples where engagement plays an essential role on websites. Especially for complex products (for example mortgages or cars), customers will not make a purchase decision before they feel totally comfortable with all the options.

Conversion, however, is still the ultimate goal. I fully agree with Boaz that engagement by itself is not what you want to optimize for. Engagement should prepare the visitor for a purchase decision or a registration (e.g. becoming pre-qualified for a mortgage). With standard web analytics tools you can usually measure the correlation between visitor engagement and conversion, so that’s what you optimize for.

Still, visitor engagement is a pretty broad term. We usually define it as any interactive module on a website, as opposed to static content. Interactive meaning that the user is actively interacting with the website: entering information in a calculator, using a faceted search tool, contributing content, and so on.

Many sites already use some kind of interactive modules. However, they are typically buried deep down in the website, and are often not linked to a conversion action. So they don’t get enough traffic, and they don’t funnel visitors towards the sign-up form: a missed opportunity.

A fictitious example of engagement starting on the home page: just specify the price of your dream house and playfully start the pre-qualification process.

Let’s take the example of mortgage calculators. A survey of the websites of the largest mortgage providers showed that several calculators are hard to find or not explicitly linked to a pre-qualification form. The first thing we recommend to our clients is to expose a small calculator on their home page, so visitors start playing with it right-away. This calculator will ask for some more data, and steer visitors towards a pre-qualification form, using the data they have entered into the calculator. This usually results in double-digit conversion increases.

So I’d say: “acquire, engage, convert, retain” is the new paradigm for online marketing of complex products, but please skip the engagement stage for selling simple widgets.