In the digital world, successful customer engagement depends on effective language. But how do you measure it? What can you do to improve it? Chris West explains the role of a good verbal identity for a brand.

1. What’s the
hard commercial value
of a nice verbal identity?

2. In the digital
world, language is the hinge
of customer engagement.

3. Good news.
In the digital world, we can
measure what customers
make of a brand’s language…

4. What do customers make of your brand’s language?
1. ONSITE COPYANALYTICS
2. TEXT ANALYTICS
3. SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYSIS

5. What do customers make of your language?
1. “ONSITE COPYANALYTICS” – now that we
can measure progress through a site (e.g.
Tealeaf ’s tools), we can see where customers
stumble. Are they packing the cart but never
checking out? It might be a technical problem -
or it might be that the language on the site
doesn’t give them confidence about delivery.
Or perhaps earlier on, the language
undermined the credibility of the brand…

6. What do customers make of your language?
2. TEXT ANALYTICS – unstructured data (free-
form replies from customers, e.g. contact-
centre conversations, comments on the bottom
of a form) is about 5x as big as structured data
(which box was ticked). The unstructured
nature also means it can reveal unexpected
issues and themes developing…if you can
spot them and value them.

7. What do customers make of your language?
3. SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYSIS – it’s not about
the 5,000 people your brand is connected to.
It’s about their 500,000 friends that they’re
talking to. Who’s most influential? What kind
of language do they use? What kind of
language do you use which motivates them?
How do you use language to spot potentially
valuable customers in your area? How do you
use language to convert them?

8. If you know the value of a
potential customer or you
know the value of a
customer lost,
then you know the value of
effective language.

9. An effective verbal identity
identifies the role of
language in successful
customer engagement and
makes the language of your
brand more successful.

10. How do we measure it?
Copyanalytics, “before Vs. after ” – improved
conversion rates, improved values across key metrics.
Identification of opportunities and developing themes
via text analytics – we work with what the customer
likes and the client values
Growth of influence in social media– beyond last-click
valuation.

11. “We create language
which creates value
for our clients.”

13. Hear more:
@verbid
Find out more:
yowesty@verbalidentity.co.uk