How To Leverage Metrics Through the Customer Lifecycle – 5 Brands Weigh In

Metrics are part of any good marketing strategy. But, if you’re monitoring metrics at just one or two stages of the customer lifecycle, you’re missing the whole picture. Focusing on just acquisition might mean you’re missing opportunities to engage with your new customers. Or, if you’re only considering retention, you could be losing valuable new users. 

So, what metrics matter most through the customer lifecycle, from broad brand awareness to user retention? We gathered real-world tips from marketing and growth experts featured on the How I Grew This Podcast, hosted by our very own CMO and co-founder, Mada Seghete.

Awareness

Gessica Bicego is a computer scientist with a deep passion for marketing. She is currently the CMO at Paired, an app that focuses on helping users build deeper connections with their partners.

“One [metric], for example, is the share of search in terms of how many people would look for our brand on Google. And this is highly correlated with partnership or more brand awareness activities. We also look at organic mentions in general. We look at engagement on social media. We try to put together a lot of different metrics and see how they all relate together. … We believe that if we invest more in brand activities, we will be able to increase our conversion rate or at least lower our cost proposition.”

Listen to the full podcast now.

Acquisition  

Yoann Pavy is a growth marketing leader. His main passions include disruptive businesses, growth marketing, and culture. Currently, he is the CMO of Nude, a UK-based FinTech app that helps first-time homebuyers save faster for their deposits.

“We actually did quite a few tests with influencers, despite our size. One of them, when she posted organically before we even used it as an ad and boosted it, it was like a medium-sized influencer. Maybe 100,000 followers — not huge, not really small. That video got, I think it was 600,000 views or something in the first 24 to 40 hours, which was a lot for our account compared to the rest.

We got a nice boost from that, which was nice, but since then we used it as an ad and … that video has 4 million views now. Massive. So my obsession since that time is to find 20 others that will have the same results. I’m scouting TikTok every day for the next success like that. But yeah, massive, massive impact for business. You can clearly see from one day to another. And then, since then, we took … a decent 30% to 40% business growth from that day — from one video.” 

Listen to the full podcast now.

Purchase

Patricia Martorana is the former senior product manager, mobile growth at The New York Times. She led the cross-functional team to grow the subscription footprint and design the customer journey within The New York Times news, cooking, and games sections.

“I would say for our team, the north star metric is subscription starts and subscription cancels.

So whatever the net is of those. So we’re looking at what our growth trajectory looks like, and there are a lot of leading indicators for that. So on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, there was a lot of attention on conversion rates … from both anonymous users and registered users. And we look at audience to understand how that’s impacting our overall funnel.

We look at how effectively we’re moving users through. So what percentage of users are hitting our paywall or one of our other metered assets? Those are some of the top metrics that we look at.”

Listen to the full podcast now.

Engagement 

Heather Lind is the director of product, and mobile app at TechStyle Fashion Group, leading the product team for the company’s trendsetting mobile applications. She has been operating in product and technology for 11 years, and her unique career trajectory includes working at every stage of the product life cycle.

“We look at things like bounce rate. Especially on something like the homepage, you want people to stick around for a little while. We look at engagement with the content, like click-through rate to PDP [product detail page]; how much revenue is that page driving for the business? Those are the primary ones — time-on-page engagement. Then I think a really interesting difference between a website and a mobile app is, it’s a lot easier for customers to give you direct feedback. On a mobile app, they’ll have to write app store reviews, and it’s not as easy to get that direct feedback on a website, but we try to find ways to do that as well.

Also, another mechanism that I use, especially when we’re talking about technical features, is the estimated impact. How do we think customers are going to engage with this? How much value do we think it’s going to bring? It really depends on the feature but some of these things can be forecasted.

Sometimes I’ll even work with our finance team to forecast what we think the impact of something like this would be and try to put it into revenue into dollars. Then I measure that against what is the level of effort (LOE) for us to actually complete this work. Anything that has a really high revenue impact and very low LOE, that stuff’s going to jump to the top of the list. That’s one way I do it.”

Listen to the full podcast now.

Retention

Martijn Lancee is the director of business development and growth at LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, where he has grown as a product leader over the past four years. 

“We, first and foremost, look at app activations … because that’s when folks sign in or sign up in the app, which is good to understand if we’re still driving value. … But then we look at the retention metric across different timeframes to make sure that we’re not just getting people to find the app and log in but also actually find value so that they’re coming back.”

Listen to the full podcast now.

Want to learn more about what metrics matter most? Check out our webinar, Metrics That Matter: What to Report Up and Across.