How to keep a birds-eye view on your marketing metrics? Mieke Houbrechts, digital marketing manager at Cumul.io, gives you a framework to select your 5 key metrics in each phase of the customer journey.
According to the Global Data-Driven Marketing SurveyOpens a new window by Teradata, 87% of marketers considers data their most underutilized asset. As a marketer, this is really relatable when you think about the vast amount of marketing data you can access these days. Where to start?
How to Select Key Metrics to Track Your Full Customer Journey
How do you know which data is relevant to analyze, and which data isn’t? In this article, we’ll share a simple framework to get started with these questions. With this step-by-step guide, you learn how to select 5 key metrics to track your full customer journey.
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1. Tie Your Metrics To Customer Journey Stages
To efficiently track your customer journey, the key advice is to create a high-level view first. Best practice is to select 1 key metric per customer journey phase. A metric that can show you, with a single number, whether your business is growing or stagnating.
By tying 1 metric to each stage of the customer journey, you keep a snapshot view of your marketing efforts. From there, you can deep-dive further into the marketing tactics in each phase of the customer journey. It’s like a sort of ‘compass’: these metrics will show you where exactly you should further investigate, in order to optimize your marketing funnel.
In this article, we’ll define a key metric for each phase of the Bow Tie Funnel, as shown above. If you’re using a different customer journey model, you can easily apply the same method to that model. It will just result in less or more metrics, depending on the amount of stages.
2. 5 Example Metrics Per Customer Journey Phase
The metrics below are relevant across business industries. You could still tweak them a little bit, to align them with your specific type of business. For example, an e-commerce store might define their metrics differently than a consultancy company.
The idea behind these metrics is to quantify the volume of buyers in every stage.
If you know the volume in each customer journey stage, and the conversion rate from one stage to another, you can pinpoint exactly which stages slow down your growth. Let’s have a look at the metrics:
- Awareness: # number of visitors, this can be either online or in your brick & mortar store
- Consideration: # marketing conversions, an action indicating buyer intent before the actual sale (e.g. add-to-cart, filling in a contact form, requesting a product sample)
- Conversion: # items sold, whether it’s physical goods, services or a license to use a digital product
- Loyalty: # recurring purchases120, or in case of services, this could be a renewal of the contract
- Ambassador: # promoters or positive customer reviews, to identify how many of your customers have the potential to be ambassadors of your company
Consolidate these key metrics in a dashboard, like the example above, for a realtime snapshot of your customer journey. To create more visibility on the full customer journey within your organization, you can show the dashboards on a tv screen or embed the dashboards in your employee portalOpens a new window as a reporting layer.
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3. Optimizing Your Customer Journey For Success
Now, the next step is to use these metrics to make better marketing decisions. Ideally, the 5 customer journey metrics serve as a starting point for further analysis: “In which stage do we lose people, and why?†Dive further into the performance of your marketing tactics in that specific stage.
For example, if a lot of people drop out before the loyalty stage, you’ll want to analyze the performance of your loyalty marketing tactics:
- Are clients making use of your loyalty/reward programs when buying multiple products?
- How are your marketing offers for related/recommended products performing?
- Are your clients happy with your service & customer support?
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Optimizing these activities will increase the conversion rates from a one-time buyer to loyal buyers. This can be repeated for each customer journey stage, which allows you to optimize the full funnel step by step.
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Optimizing Your Customer Journey
The advantage of the 5 key customer journey metrics is that you’ll always have a birds-eye view on your funnel. In one glance, you’ll see which stage needs improvement the most urgently, so you can set the right priorities when optimizing your customer journey.
After you’ve identified the key pain points in the customer journey, implement small tests or changes to improve the flow from one stage to another. Measure how your 5 key customer journey metrics are affected, and repeat the process of identifying & optimizing the pain points.
If you repeat this method on a regular basis, your customer journey flow will improve bit by bit. Your 5 key metrics will help you set the direction for your marketing strategy & focus, and lower the risk of focusing on the wrong marketing tactics.