Customer-first marketing: Focus on customer-centric KPIs

At Marketing Moments we are huge fan of shared KPIs, as we think they set the tone for the relationship between teams and foster a sense of shared accountability and collaboration. In marketing we see that there is often a temptation to focus on vanity metrics such as reach or clicks, but we would always recommend working back from the result you’re trying to achieve whether this revenue-based, customer acquisition or retention-based metrics.

For example, shared KPIs for a marketing team working with an events team could be centred around: increase in conversion rate, achieving the revenue target for the event, and an increase in the percentage of return customers. Having these as shared KPIs offers the opportunity to educate both teams on how they impact and influence each other’s work. It also gets you away from the blame game that can often detract from solving the problems or challenges teams face.

We would recommend taking the time to incorporate KPIs like Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT) and customer lifetime value (CLV) into marketing reviews. We tend to find that organisations either use NPS or CSAT, most don’t do both. We would recommend choosing the one that will offer you the least resistance if you’re looking to introduce it. As both of them are well respected and work as a conversation starter.

There are several benefits to incorporating these KPIs into your marketing work. Let’s start with discussing NPS and CSAT. These offer marketing teams insight into whether the product is meeting customer needs, product development opportunity, positioning or promotional elements that may need tweaking and can act as an indicator on whether to expect retention. The wealth of insight you can capture from working collaboratively with customer experience or customer service teams is incredible.

Customer lifetime value is often an underestimated KPI, but we all know that it costs more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. So, knowing what your current customer lifetime value can prompt useful discussions about how to continue adding value to them and you can track improvements to this over time.

Our next tip is to celebrate marketing campaigns that lead to long-term loyalty and repeat purchases rather than just one-time sales. There are lots of different tactics available to help you to build repeat purchasing behaviour or push up the average order value. This includes things like product bundling, creating product add-ons, re-engagement campaigns for lapsed customers, or exclusive discounts for loyal customers. All of these can impact shared KPIs around customer lifetime value and retention.

We hope that you’ve been enjoying our mini-blog series on taking a customer first approach. We are hoping this prompts ideas and discussions within your marketing team. In our next blog we are going to talk through some ideas to help you bridge the gap between marketing, sales and customer support.