How To Measure Success Along The Customer Journey

How To Measure Success Along The Customer Journey

I'm going to dig into how to measure success along the customer journey. Why would I do that? Because if you want to increase lead conversions, retention, and referrals, this is a critical skill to master.

Hi, I am Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks if you want to accelerate revenue growth.

Thanks so much for taking the time to tune in. I'm excited to dig into this today.

The Importance of Tracking Metrics along the Customer Journey

When determining which marketing metrics to track, it's important to look at the customer journey and define the metrics for each of the key stages of the customer journey. So many businesses overlook this. They don't think about metrics along the customer journey that help them determine whether the customer journey is fully optimized and it's as efficient as it can possibly be, which, again, if it is, you're going to increase lead conversions, you're going to increase retention, referrals. Sometimes you can decrease the sales cycle, the time it takes for people to work through. So there's a ton of benefits to doing this. I'm going to share some example metrics to kind of give you an idea of what types of metrics you could look at tracking at each phase of the customer journey.

What is the Customer Journey?

First things first, let's make sure we're on the same page. What the heck is the customer journey in its most simple definition, which I like to keep things as simple as possible. That's always resonated with me. It's just that experience that a customer has from the time they think about working with a company like yours all the way through buying and doing repeat and referral business, that's it. It's the entire experience, the path that they take when they work with you. The best way that I've seen to look at the customer journey and outline the customer journey is from John Jantsch over at Duct Tape Marketing. He talks about the marketing hourglass. We're all familiar with an hourglass. In the marketing hourglass. There are seven stages to the customer journey. So, you know, the sand is at the top, and it's slowly filtering its way all the way down to the bottom. At the top, you have know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer then down at the very bottom one more time. Know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer.

So many people look at at them, the customer journey as a funnel, and they stop at buy. If you stop at buy, you're not optimizing repeat and referral, which is such a critical component of any business, which is why I love the concept of the marketing hourglass. It looks it really looks at the entire journey and doesn't neglect any stage. So that's the customer journey. Again, think of it like the marketing hourglass. Seven steps, know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer.

Examples of Metrics at Each Phase of the Customer Journey

So what are some examples of metrics at each of these stages that you might want to track? Not saying you absolutely should. You need to look at your business and what's going to be most important. Right. And I think when it comes to metrics, it's very easy to track so many marketing metrics that just don't mean a lot. I've talked about this many times. To me, man, the only thing that really matters with your marketing is, are you generating leads that are converting to customers? At its most basic level, that's the only thing that really matters. But as we dig deeper into tracking metrics along the customer journey, these metrics that I'm going to talk about today will just help give you an idea of whether you're making progress or increasing the number of people that are working their way through the journey. That's why they're important. A lot of these metrics I'm going to talk about don't necessarily relate to. Did you generate a lead to convert it to a customer? At a basic level, that's where you need to start. But as you start to get more advanced, more sophisticated with your marketing efforts, tracking metrics throughout the customer journey I think is critically important.

At the beginning. Know. What are examples of metrics that you might look at to evaluate whether how things look at the know phase of the customer journey? These could be things like the number of followers you have on social media. Is it increasing? Right. The more it's increasing, the more people are getting to know you. Things like traffic to your website, how many visits are coming to your website each month? Is that growing? If it is right. There's more people that are coming in to the marketing hourglass at the top. If you're doing direct mail, how many pieces, number of pieces of mail that are being sent. Right. Things like that can all be examples of know metrics that you might want to track. So you just need to look at the various marketing activities that you're using to then determine, okay, what types of people know they're just coming into your world, so what people are just coming into your world? And what metrics can you track so that you can measure that?

Then we go into like and trust metrics, right? Like and trust, there can be a lot of crossover between like and trust. Certain marketing tactics and channels may be hitting multiple elements of the marketing hourglass or the customer journey, and that's totally okay. But at the like and trust phase, we might start to look at how many conversions are you getting from your website? Right? They found out about you, then they converted to know and like you. They're not going to convert unless they start to know and trust you. Right? So that's a good metric. Number of new email subscribers. They obviously liked and trusted you enough to opt in to your email list. Number of reviews. Did you get more reviews? The reason we track reviews here is not because somebody likes you enough to leave a review but reviews are a typical source of information that people use to get to like and trust you. So if we're tracking how many your increase in reviews, that's just more that people can consume to get to like and trust you.

Start to look at try metrics. What type of metrics? Try is kind of that try before you buy phase. How can I interact with you and get a feel for what it's like to work with you without actually buying? This could be free consultations, free strategy sessions, things like that. It could be are you doing speaking? Webinars? The number of signups that you have for that could be a trimetric. Are they working with you directly? No, but man, they're getting an idea of what you're like and what your capabilities are. You could also look at training sign ups as a like and trust metric as well. So that goes back to what I just touched on. Some of these things can cross over into different phases of the customer journey. Free trials. If you can offer free trials, we see this all the time with software as a service. Companies increase in a number of free trials, that's a waste for somebody to try.

Then you move into buy metrics. These are pretty simple in most cases. Number of new clients. How many new clients did you get? Those are people that bought.

Repeat metrics. Retention rate. How many customers did you retain over a certain period of time? Existing client revenue growth could be another good way to track your repeat metrics. Number of repeat clients, right. Did you have an increase in the number of repeat clients for a given period? Again, these aren't overly complicated. We don't need to over complicate this.

Refer metrics. Number of referrals is the most obvious one that most of us are probably thinking of. Okay, but how many referrals did I get in the last month or three months, whatever the time period is that you're tracking. Number of referral partners that you have and that's a simple one as well. But number of referrals, number of referral partners, right. Are you increasing that? Those are both really good refer metrics.

Conclusion: How To Measure Success Along The Customer Journey

So I hope you found this helpful metrics I've talked about this time and time again. Marketing is all about testing, testing, and testing some more. The only way that you can truly test effectively is by identifying what metrics you're going to track that are going to guide your decisions, that are going to help inform the decisions that you make so that you know hey, based on these metrics, we're going to understand what's working and what's not. And we can make strong decisions and course corrections that are going to help us get to where we want to go faster. So metrics are critically, critically important.

Now when we look at metrics, metrics is one of the nine common revenue roadblocks we help clients remove on their path to accelerating revenue growth. Which roadblocks are slowing down your growth? If you want to find out, head on over to RevenueRoadblockScorecard.com. Over there you can discover and assess which roadblocks are slowing down your growth. It takes less than five minutes tons of value there. So please go over there, take advantage of it. RevenueRoadblockScorecard.com if you need some help, some guidance on the best direction for you to take with your marketing to get from where you currently are to where you want to be, you can always head on over to our website at RialtoMarketing.com. That's R-I-A-L-T-O marketing.com and book a free GPS call. Be happy to chat with you. Thanks so much for taking the time to tune in. I appreciate you. Till next time. Take care.