Which metrics are Customer Marketing Leaders looking at regularly & why?
Depends on how you’ve defined the scope and priorities of the customer marketing organization but some to consider are:
- Monthly active users or utilization rate
- Engagement in onboarding/education programs
- Percentage of customers that use “sticky features”
- Number of customer advocates
- referrals
- Net Promoter Score
- Retention rate
- Avg. Customer Contract size
- Account spend
- Growth in customer communities
- Influenced new deal/upsell/renewal Pipeline & Revenue from customer references, case studies, etc.
You should be looking at leading and lagging indicators to determine future success.
Net-Retention Rate (NRR): the best metric to determine if you're growing your existing customers
Net-Promoter Score (NPS): if done right, a great way to get a pulse on the satisfaction of your customers
Health Score: this can be unique for each organization, but is generally an algorithm that looks at NPS, utilization, complaints, bugs, growth, etc. If setup correctly, it's a great way you can color code the health of your customers (red/yellow/green)
# Products: not applicable to all orgs, but if you are a multi-product company, it's important to look at the average number of products per customer (and related +/- growth metrics); it can be a great proxy to the "stickiness" of your customers
Some of the specific metrics you'll want to track should be tailored to your go-to-market motion and how you execute customer marketing. Here are a few general metrics that you should consider as they are success indicators:
Customer retention rate
Customer loyalty or advocacy rate
Customer lifetime value
Net Promoter Score (NPS) and/or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) (However, there has been negative buzz around NPS lately)
Upsell and cross-sell revenue
Churn rate
Personally, I recommend focusing on engagement metrics when possible. They serve as leading indicators of your customer marketing's success and resonance.
