How to Calculate the ROI of Online Communities

One of the most underused benefits of an online community is customer acquisition. Very few organizations use their community to attract new customers. Most prefer to increase the retention rates or advocacy. However, a community can be a powerful tool by which to acquire new customers.

We have to make a big assumption here. The assumption is that the customers we acquire and convert through our community would not have been acquired through any other method. You could test this, but for now let’s assume this is true. If these customers would have been reached anyway, we would instead classify this as a cost saving (hopefully) compared with other methods.

The reality is often more nuanced with both additional revenue and saved costs being a factor. However, this will require a balancing model (i.e. assigning percentage weights to the percentage of leads that may have been acquired through either method and adjusting the values accordingly. This is a deeper model than we wish to cover here).