When customer experience (CX) is uncoordinated with marketing efforts, customer trust erodes.

If loyalty and customer-relationship leaders are to drive retention and growth, they must act to align CX and marketing by bridging silos and focusing on meaningful engagement—in other words, engagement that exists at the intersection of not only business outcomes but also customer needs.

One of the big problems of delivering CX-centric marketing is that many of the metrics used by marketing teams to gauge the engage-ability of their strategies are burdened by bias, and they may be unintentionally manipulated to paint a rosier engagement picture than what is really going on.

Not having an accurate portrayal of CX can lead to businesses' thinking they're on stable ground with their customers when more and more of those customers are becoming disengaged and pulled down gravitationally toward churn.

That's because, simply put, the metrics are lying, and therefore they can't paint the full picture.

To clear inadvertent cognitive bias in marketing and customer engagement, businesses need to re-evaluate the metrics they know and have grown to love, to see whether they're still driving value—or painting a facade.

This piece will examine three metrics commonly used in CX, including why marketing teams should consider whether those metrics are useful in analyzing outcome-driven engagement.

1. Open Rates

Open rates are most commonly used to measure the effectiveness of an email or marketing campaign. The metric does track inbound traffic well enough, and it can account for the volume of clicks to a site, but its usefulness doesn't extend much beyond that.

The issue with treating transactional touchpoints such as open rates as a meaningful measurement of engagement is that they do not map back to any well-defined business goals. Simply opening an email or viewing a notification in an app does not offer enough data to accurately say who customers are or why they opened; it just indicates that they did open. Overreliance on the open rate metric can lead to marketing teams' believing that their current outreach and marketing strategies are working, when those customers may very well lose all interest right after seeing the message.

Instead, businesses should keep track of customer touchpoints made after the email is opened:

• How many other links were clicked after the fact?
• Is there a correlation between the different links that were visited and the email?
• Can we accurately map where this customer is on the lifecycle?

Those are the questions that derive true business value and paint a clearer picture of who is being marketed to.

2. Clickthrough Rates

Measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns is crucial for marketing teams; but, similar to open rates, clickthrough rates are transactional in nature and therefore not a true indicator of a customer's intent.

Worse, relying on clickthroughs as a key metric can inadvertently create a complete echo chamber for marketers. For example, if a marketing campaign is disseminated to 1,000 customers, and 100 open and click through and 100 opt out, the resulting clickthrough rate is 10%. If the next campaign is run to the existing 900 customers, and 100 click through, it looks like the clickthrough rate increased to 11%, when really the campaign engaged fewer people.

That incidental echo chamber of feedback can lead to marketing teams' feeling more confident about their campaigns than they should be—which is exactly how cognitive bias starts within marketing teams. Since 11% is better than 10%, one could be forgiven for viewing the new clickthrough rate as a positive, especially because marketing automation reporting often minimizes the elephant that is the 100 customers who are now actively disengaged from the brand.

Consider that the most powerful engagement metric is disengagement rate. One way to measure disengagement is via opt-out rates. Opt-outs are essential to measure because they are a true indicator of how many people are actually engaging with a business's outreach. Opt-out rates are up double-digits year over year, recently published research has uncovered.