Customer engagement is one of the strongest predictors of retention, loyalty, and revenue, but most brands rely on surface-level metrics to measure it. Likes, pageviews, and email opens only tell part of the story. To truly understand how engaged your customers are, you need to look deeper at the behaviors that signal intent, interest, and long-term value.
Some of the most useful engagement metrics are also the most overlooked. They aren’t flashy, but they reveal how your audience is really interacting with your brand across channels, devices, and stages of the journey.
In this article, we’ll explore 10 customer engagement metrics that often fly under the radar, yet offer powerful insight. You’ll also learn how platforms like Opensend help uncover and act on these signals to drive smarter campaigns and stronger customer relationships.
Most marketers track email open rates and click-through rates, but fewer focus on click-to-open rate (CTOR), which offers a clearer picture of how engaging your content really is. CTOR measures the percentage of recipients who clicked a link after opening the email.
It’s a stronger indicator of performance than open rate alone, which can be inflated by image loading or privacy filters. For example, if 1,000 people open an email and 100 click a link, your CTOR is 10%. This shows how well your message converts interest into action once the email is opened.
CTOR helps you gauge whether your content, offer, or design is aligned with audience expectations. A high open rate with a low CTOR often signals a disconnect between the subject line and the email body. To improve CTOR, experiment with clearer calls to action, streamlined design, and relevant link placements that guide the reader toward next steps.
Repeat visit rate tracks how often users return to your website after their initial visit. It’s a simple but powerful indicator of ongoing interest and brand relevance. If people are coming back, it means your site left an impression and likely provided enough value to warrant another look.
Unlike one-time traffic spikes, repeat visits suggest that your audience is moving beyond curiosity and entering the consideration phase. This metric is especially useful for evaluating content strategy, email effectiveness, and retargeting campaigns.
To improve repeat visit rate, focus on creating value-driven content, personalized offers, and clear pathways that encourage visitors to return, such as product recommendations, email reminders, or loyalty perks.
Opensend enhances this by identifying returning visitors across devices and sessions, allowing brands to follow up with personalized messaging that keeps interest high and the journey moving forward.
Scroll depth measures how far users scroll down a webpage, revealing how much of your content they’re actually consuming. Unlike pageviews, which only show that someone loaded a page, scroll depth helps you understand whether they engaged with it meaningfully.
For content-heavy pages like blog posts, landing pages, or product detail pages, scroll depth is a critical engagement metric. If most users drop off after the first screen, your messaging or layout might need work. If they’re scrolling all the way through, your content is resonating.
You can segment scroll depth by percentage (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%) to pinpoint where people lose interest. This makes it easier to test improvements, like moving key calls to action higher or breaking up long blocks of text with visuals or headers.
Tracking scroll behavior gives you a more accurate picture of engagement, especially for audiences in research or consideration phases.
While open rates and click-throughs get most of the attention, email reply rate is a lesser-used but highly valuable engagement metric, especially in onboarding, support, or sales-oriented campaigns. It measures how often recipients hit “reply” to engage in a direct conversation.
A reply signals a deeper level of interest or trust. It means your message prompted a question, a comment, or a next step — all strong indicators of intent. For customer success teams, it’s a sign that recipients see value and want more interaction. For sales or product education emails, it can uncover objections, feedback, or purchase intent.
Reply rate can also help gauge how human and approachable your emails feel. Messages that invite responses, ask questions, or offer assistance tend to perform better than broadcast-style content.
Consider optimizing key sequences with a conversational tone and clear prompts to reply, not just to click.
Cross-device activity tracks how users interact with your brand across multiple devices, like starting on a mobile phone, continuing on a tablet, and completing a purchase on a desktop. This type of behavior is now the norm, especially in longer buying journeys, but many brands still struggle to connect the dots between sessions.
Understanding cross-device behavior helps you identify how customers actually move through the funnel. It can explain drop-offs, delayed conversions, or why certain channels seem underperforming when, in reality, they’re part of a larger journey. Without this insight, you risk misattributing conversions and missing key touchpoints that influence decisions.
Opensend solves this by resolving identities across devices and sessions, giving you a full view of user behavior, no matter where or when they engage. This allows for more accurate targeting, smarter attribution, and a better overall customer experience.
Abandonment recovery rate measures how many users you successfully re-engage after they abandon a key action, like leaving a cart, form, or checkout flow. While most marketers track abandonment rates, fewer look at how often they win those users back.
This metric reflects the effectiveness of your re-engagement strategies, including cart recovery emails, SMS reminders, retargeting ads, and even direct mail. It’s especially valuable for e-commerce and lead generation, where drop-offs are frequent and expensive.
A strong recovery rate indicates that your follow-ups are well-timed, personalized, and persuasive. A weak one suggests missed opportunities or irrelevant outreach.
Opensend helps increase recovery rates by triggering behavior-based campaigns the moment a user drops off. Whether it’s an abandoned cart or an unfinished signup, Opensend ensures follow-up happens across channels, increasing your chances of turning almost-lost visitors into converted customers.
Customer re-engagement rate tracks how often inactive users return and take meaningful action, such as visiting your site, opening an email, or making a purchase. This metric is especially valuable for evaluating the performance of win-back campaigns or ongoing retention efforts.
Inactive customers aren’t always lost. They may just need a well-timed nudge. Monitoring how many you successfully re-engage helps you gauge the long-term health of your relationship with your audience and whether your messaging remains relevant over time.
This metric also highlights which segments respond best to re-engagement strategies, helping you refine your timing, channels, and offers.
Micro-conversions are small, meaningful actions users take before completing a main goal, like downloading a resource, saving a product, watching a demo video, or signing up for a newsletter. These steps don’t always lead to an immediate sale, but they signal intent and interest.
Tracking micro-conversions gives you insight into where users are in their journey and how engaged they are, even if they haven’t purchased yet. A user who downloads a buying guide or interacts with a product quiz is far more engaged than someone who simply scrolls through a homepage.
These actions can also help you segment and personalize follow-up. Someone who saves multiple products might be ideal for a cart reminder, while someone who signs up for an educational series might be nurtured differently.
This metric measures the amount of time it takes a user to move from one significant step in the journey to another, such as from viewing a product to adding it to their cart, or from signing up to making a purchase. It helps uncover friction, hesitation, or gaps in your funnel that traditional conversion metrics might miss.
Long delays between steps can indicate confusion, lack of urgency, or missed opportunities for follow-up. Shorter times typically suggest a smoother path or stronger intent.
Analyzing these time gaps allows you to adjust your automation timing, retargeting windows, or email sequences to better match customer behavior. For example, if users typically wait three days between viewing a product and adding it to their cart, a reminder email or SMS on day two could help speed up the decision.
Attribution-weighted engagement looks beyond whether a user converted and asks a more important question: which interactions helped make that conversion happen? Unlike basic attribution models that give credit to just the first or last touch, this approach factors in the overall contribution of each channel or campaign along the customer journey.
For example, a customer might click a Facebook ad, open two emails, revisit the site via a Google search, and finally convert through an SMS reminder. Each of these touchpoints played a role, and attribution-weighted engagement helps you understand which ones had the most influence.
This metric gives you a clearer picture of campaign effectiveness across the funnel, not just at the finish line. It also helps optimize your channel mix, prioritize content that drives action, and refine your timing across touchpoints.
Opensend supports this by connecting behaviors across sessions and channels, helping brands track multi-touch engagement and uncover what’s really driving conversions.
Customer engagement goes far beyond clicks and pageviews. The metrics you're not tracking often reveal the strongest signals of intent, loyalty, and long-term value. By looking deeper at micro-conversions, re-engagement, scroll depth, and beyond, you uncover hidden opportunities to improve the customer journey and drive real growth.
Opensend helps surface and act on these high-impact behaviors by connecting data across channels and automating timely, personalized follow-ups.
Want to turn overlooked engagement into higher conversions? Start your free trial or book a demo with Opensend today.
Sources:
The ultimate list of customer engagement metrics to monitor | Sprout Social
The 5 Underrated Customer Metrics Every CS Executive Should Be Monitoring | EverAfter
What are good open rates, CTRs, & CTORs for email campaigns? | Campaign Monitor
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