Key KPIs for Each Stage of the Customer Journey by John Jantsch Read more in Duct Tape Marketing
The customer journey is often a long and winding road. And that means it can be difficult to track the effectiveness of your business at each stage of the journey. The easiest way to gain more clarity about your customer journey and identify strong points and weak spots is to pinpoint and evaluate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each step of the journey.
Once you’ve found metrics that can help you understand the effectiveness of your business in guiding the journey at each stage, you can begin to make changes to your existing approach. You can find ways to lean into the strategy that is working and eliminate the less effective elements of your strategy.
Since travel changes a lot over time, there are different KPIs to consider at each stage. Let me walk you through the most important KPIs to focus on at each stage of the customer journey.
Know, Like and Trust
Knowing, liking and believing in the customer journey are the steps at the top of your marketing hours. This is where customers first discover your business and then understand what you do.
The very first thing you’ll want to know in this part of the journey is how many people are actually searching for your business online. To measure this, you can turn to the metrics for organic and paid search campaigns.
A tool like Google Search Console lets you understand how your keywords are performing. You can see search traffic and reach. You can track which queries are actually bringing visitors to your website. When you understand these SEO metrics, you can revisit your keyword research and make changes to boost your SEO.
Tracking paid search results is also important at this stage. Understanding metrics like Quality Score (which measures the relevance of your keywords) and clickthrough rate on your ad campaigns gives you a deeper understanding of how many people are seeing your ads, and your copy to drive viewers to clicks. Your link is compelling enough or not.
Once you move through the same stage, you start evaluating metrics that cover engagement on your website and social media. Tracking the number of visitors to your website is important. Are they all first time visitors, or do you have returning visitors? How many times do people usually visit your site before going into the conversion phase of marketing hourglass? All of this information can help you understand the potential barriers to knowing, liking, and believing the hourglass part.
Social media engagement metrics also give you information on likes and trust stages. How many people are following your accounts? Are you constantly increasing your audience? And beyond just the number of followers, are the people following your account engaging with your content? Are people liking, commenting and responding to your follow-ups? More engaged followers on social indicate that the content you are sharing is useful and meaningful to your audience. You are actually working to earn their trust.
try and buy
Once you initially win over prospects, they move on to the ultimate conversion goal: making a purchase. But before they hand over their credit card information, they want the opportunity to try out what your business has to offer. They need that last assurance that everything will go smoothly if they decide to buy.
When it comes to the trying phase, you want to measure metrics that clearly show the difference between those who were in those early marketing hourglass phases and those who have made it to the next level. Tracking conversions by site visits versus source is a great way to visualize this difference.
Is there a certain channel that drives more traffic to your site than others? You might see most of your traffic coming from your Instagram profile. The content you’re creating is meaningful enough to vault those followers up to the trying and buying stage. From there, you also want to measure conversions by channel.
Let’s say only a small fraction of those Instagram followers actually convert once they visit your site. But with a significant number of people coming through your newsletter – a less popular channel – take the next step with your business. This gives you some idea of the effectiveness of messaging on your Instagram versus your newsletter. While Instagram content tends to garner more positive attention, it is in no way in sync with what visitors are getting to your website (hence the higher number of visits but fewer conversions). Your newsletter, on the other hand, isn’t as compelling but provides a clear picture of what you do.
Measuring the performance of a call to action button and landing page can also provide valuable information at this stage. Are people actually clicking through to your CTA, whether on your website, in your social ads, or in your newsletter? And once they’ve clicked on the CTA and landed on your website, are they filling out the form they get to meet or take the next step to buy—whether it’s a demo for you to try out Requesting or making a first purchase?
repeat and see
The final step in Hourglass takes you beyond the initial purchase and into the realm of your long-term relationships with customers. Do your customers like you enough to keep coming back to you for additional purchases? And beyond that, would they refer you to a friend?
There are a handful of KPIs that can help provide clarity about those questions. Retention rate is one of them: How many of your customers are sticking around at the time of renewal? If you run a gym, do you see people renewing their memberships month after month? Or is there a major drop at some point in the cycle?
If you see a pattern in your retention rate, why is that? In a gym that sees a big drop in March as people making New Year’s resolutions start to take away from working out, can you offer them an incentive to stay? It doesn’t even need to be monetary; Maybe it’s a popular instructor-led class called “Keep Your Resolutions Through Spring.” And those who signed up for a gym membership in December or January get their first dbs on the spot.
Reviews can also help you identify problems in your customer journey. Do you continue to see positive feedback on your customer service team? This means you’ve built an empowered team that is ready and able to go the extra mile for your customers (a great way to boost retention). But at the same time, do you see a common complaint that drives customers to your customer service team in the first place? If so, take steps to address the problem, which has been identified by multiple customer reviews.
And finally, there is the Net Promoter Score, or NPS. If you’ve ever taken a survey for a business, you may be faced with the NPS question: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”
People who respond with a nine or a 10 are known as promoters—loyal fans of your business. People in the seven to eight range are in a bit of no-man’s land; They are considered inactive. While they are quite happy with you, they can easily go with a competitor, if the right offer came along. Anyone who ranks you six or below is considered an adversary. They are unhappy with you and can damage your business with negative words.
Understanding how many of your customers are ardent supporters versus how many may take you or leave you (or worse, your bad for a friend), helps you gain clarity about the final stages of the customer journey. . With opponents, you did everything right in hourglass so they could buy from you. But something went awry in the last few stages, and now they are sad enough to tell others about their negative experience. This is valuable information! From there, you can assess things like your onboarding process for new customers and take a closer look at your customer service approach to identify weak spots.
When it comes to getting a better understanding of your customer journey, it’s not enough to rely on your gut. Travel is complicated. The best way to understand this is with cold, hard data. By tracking specific KPIs for each stage of the customer journey, you can identify strengths and weaknesses in your strategy, and make changes to better facilitate a smoother journey for your customers.
If you liked this post, check out our Small Business Guide to Shaping the Customer Journey.
