The 6 Best Customer Retention Strategies to Maximize Customer Lifetime Value

 

 

 

Improving customer retention should be at the top of every company’s to-do list. After all, it’s much easier to keep existing customers satisfied than it is to find and attract entirely new ones. Customers who’ve already taken a chance on your company are a valuable asset and smart companies leverage that existing relationship. 

If you’re ready to explore how customer retention strategies can increase your company’s profits, Kissmetrics has all the information you need here. 

What Is Customer Lifetime Value?

Customer lifetime value or CLV is a metric that measures the amount of profit your company makes from a single customer. To estimate a customer’s lifetime value, you’ll need to do a few calculations. The first one is to average customer expenditure per visit. Then, calculate the average number of visits or purchases per year. Multiply those numbers together to get your customer revenue for one year.

You’ll then need to predict the number of years you expect your customer to stay with your brand. Multiply that by your original number. Depending on what you’re selling, those purchases will ideally continue for many years to come.

Why Is Customer Lifetime Value Important?

Studies have shown that it is more cost-effective to retain existing customers than to attract new ones. The higher your CLV is, and the more customers you retain, the more profitable your company will be. 

Ideally, you would want a customer to purchase your products for the rest of their life. That’s unusual, but not unheard of, depending on your industry and the products you’re selling.

How Can Customer Retention Help Maximize Customer Lifetime Value?

Your CLV is innately tied to your customer retention. If customers only use your services on average for around a year before churning, your CLV will be lower since it only encapsulates purchases made within that year. 

However, if you increase your customer retention and see people staying loyal to your company for longer, they’ll have longer to purchase your products. 

How Can Companies Increase Their Customer Retention?

Increasing your customer retention is crucial for saving on customer acquisition costs and optimizing your profit. There are various ways for companies to increase their customer retention, as we address in the sections below. 

Increase Repeat Customer Rate

If you’ve noticed most of your customers only use your service for a few months, you’re likely losing money since that won’t cover the customer acquisition costs. However, if you can encourage customers to pay for an annual subscription instead of a monthly one, you’ll likely increase your repeat customer rate since your customers will have more time to experience the benefits of your service.

One way to entice customers to sign up for an annual payment plan is to offer a discount when compared to the monthly plan. Even with the discount, ensuring that customers stick around for longer and decreasing your churn rate is still more profitable than having customers churn every few months. 

This is especially true if you’re constantly introducing new features or offer a comprehensive service plan. Often a few months isn’t enough for a customer to fully experience everything your company has to offer. Still, by staying in the plan for a full year, customers will be more likely to renew when their subscription expires. 

Increase Purchase Frequency

Another way to increase CLV is to require a customer to purchase your products or services more frequently. An example of this is rolling out your software in pieces and delaying the pieces. By separating services or features into separate packages, your customers will have to purchase your updates as they come out which increases purchase frequency.

Your company could develop and release a new version of your product each year. If you can improve upon your product, you’ll entice some existing customers to upgrade whenever you release something new, instead of waiting for their old product to break. 

Increase Average Order Value

Upselling is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and if you can routinely upsell your customers, their CLV will naturally increase. For example, if your company provides a streaming service, you could pre-set the boxes checked for additional channels. A customer would need to physically uncheck the box in order to not have extra channels bundled into their channel package.

Since the box is pre-checked, the customer may opt to pay the additional cost and complete the purchase. By increasing their average order value, streaming services increase a customer’s lifetime value. 

Use Email and SMS Retargeting

While many companies engage with their existing customers via email or texting campaigns, you’ll want to ensure that your messages aren’t regarded as spam. To do that, you should create valuable content for your customers. This can come out of customizing or personalizing your messages. 

It doesn’t have to be completely personalized, for instance, simply reminding customers how much they’ve saved by subscribing to your loyalty program might be an incentive to stay loyal to your company. Use the opportunity to explain the benefits of your company that your customer has already gained, instead of simply advertising your next big hit. 

With Kissmetrics’ email tracking tool, you can monitor the number of customers who open your email and click through to the URL you provided inside. That way, you can see whether your current email campaign is successful or if you need to tweak some things. 

Use Customer Accounts

When you offer customer accounts, you enable a personalized experience with your company. Whether that means offering occasional promotional discounts on products, adding them to your email list, or saving their information for faster checkouts in the future, the majority of customers will feel more engaged with your website if they can log in to their account. 

Customer accounts are also the perfect place to add recommendations based on previous subscriptions or purchases. Although some products are fine on their own, many require additional components. For example, if you are selling clothes and a customer has a shirt in their cart or has recently bought a shirt, your website could recommend matching pants or a jacket. 

Improve Customer Support

One of the reasons that customers churn is due to poor customer support. Depending on your industry, customer support might not be crucial. But if you offer SaaS or are in the tech space in any way, you should ensure that your customers have plenty of ways to contact customer service/success. 

Waiting on hold for several hours and having someone answer questions quickly and efficiently through a Live Chat can be the difference between a customer churning and staying loyal to your company. 

Additionally, ensure that your support team is knowledgeable and knows who to contact if they can’t solve a customer’s issues. Apple is well-known for having excellent customer support in the form of the Genius Bar in their stores, and that makes a big difference to customers who are already frustrated with something going wrong. 

How Do I Measure Customer Retention?

Kissmetrics can measure customer retention by monitoring churn rate, the opposite of customer retention. You can also look at the number of active users in a given timeframe and subtract the number of new users to see how many users are returning customers. 

You can also measure customer satisfaction through surveys like the Net Promoter Score or NPS. It asks customers a single question: How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or family member? They’re given the options of one through ten, with one being the lowest score and ten being the highest. 

Anyone who rates your product one through six was likely dissatisfied with your product and is classified as a detractor, while anyone who ranked nine or ten is a promoter. Promoters are most likely to become return customers. After subtracting the detractors from the promoters, you should know the percentage of customers who plan to purchase again. 

How Do I Know Which Customer Retention Strategy Is Right for My Company?

Depending on your industry and whether you’re selling a product or a service, any or all of the suggestions above might be appropriate ways to increase your customer retention. With Kissmetrics, you can learn more about your customers, see what they want from your company, and rise to meet those expectations. 

Conclusion 

Determining the right customer retention strategy requires you to know your customers and understand what they want. When you know your customers’ needs, you can work to fulfill them and continue to appeal to those users by reminding them periodically that you value their purchases. By retaining your customers, you’ll see an increase in company profits and decreased customer acquisition costs. 

 

Check out our website for more information on the metrics for monitoring customer retention and how we can help you improve. 

 

Sources:

  1. 12 Proven Tactics to Increase Your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) | Retently.com
  2. 10 Tactics For Increasing Your Customer Lifetime Value and Loyalty | Neil Patel
  3. How to Optimize Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)—15 Effective Tactics That Every Marketer Needs to Know | Useinsider.com

Building and Optimizing Your Data Ecosystem

 

 

 

You’ll find that product ecosystems are not static and centralized like data environments typically are. Instead, they incorporate an encompassing analytics platform that your entire organization can use to track user groups and monitor performance metrics by automating analysis from multiple data sources. 

As we explain below, the modern data ecosystem is formed by the complex interactions of tools and applications that both gather and organize data into actionable information. 

What Is a Data Ecosystem?

A data ecosystem is the sum of a company’s infrastructure and applications that work together to collect and organize data. These applications collect and filter information for businesses to better understand their users, website visitors, and audience members. The best way to build a functional data ecosystem is to start with a product analytics tool and build out from there. 

The Kissmetrics product analytics tool focuses on organizing data into reports so that your teams can extract useful insights. When you build your tools around the idea of gathering actionable information and measuring your progress through KPIs, you’ll save yourself time and effort in the future.

Since it’s an ecosystem and not an environment, your applications and infrastructure must be designed to evolve over time to accommodate your business’s changing needs. Because every business has different scopes and goals, there is no single solution for a data ecosystem. The applications and cloud services making up the infrastructure must be flexible to allow for future modifications and improvements, thus allowing your company to grow. 

What Are the Main Components of Big Data’s Ecosystem?

There are three major components of the data ecosystem: 

Data Sources

As the name implies, the data sources are where your data is coming from. How is your infrastructure gathering information, and where does that data originate from? This component also includes linking the disparate data to draw meaningful conclusions in the analytics step. 

Data Management

Data management includes integrating applications, the storage of data, and how your infrastructure processes the data into readable reports. Without the ability to properly store and access data in the future, capturing it becomes all but meaningless. 

Data Analytics

Data is virtually useless without critical thinking and proper analysis. Otherwise, you’re stuck with massive amounts of numbers that don’t translate into any actionable strategies. Data analytics is the process of drawing insights from reports and making sense of the numbers. 

Analytics tools can help you understand why certain users are at risk for churning and others remain loyal to your company. 

How Do I Create a Data Ecosystem?

There are three major aspects to consider when it comes to creating your company’s data ecosystem: 

Infrastructure

Your data ecosystem infrastructure is the foundation of everything else. Imagine it as the ground and the rivers for your forest to grow out of. You can’t have any trees, grass, or animals without soil and water. Your infrastructure stores collected data in a database as one of three subtypes:

  • Unstructured data – unorganized data like text responses to a survey. 
  • Structured data – organized data like you might find in an Excel spreadsheet listing the total number of purchases made.
  • Multi Structured data – data arrives from multiple sources that can be structured or unstructured. 

Analytics

Think of analytics as the monkey who swings between the branches of your applications in the data ecosystem. Analytics helps you tie everything together and make something useful out of the data. 

A monkey takes what it needs from trees, picking fruits and creating a tasty meal. As the analogy goes, your analytics tools will grab the data it needs to pull insights about your products, like which users commonly purchase them. 

Applications

The applications are the trees of your metaphorical forest of a data ecosystem. The trees give the forest shape and form. Applications allow teams to access data across multiple platforms and utilize the data as it comes in. 

How Do I Optimize My Company’s Data Ecosystem?

Optimizing your company’s data ecosystem will require patience and time as every company has different goals and a different type of data ecosystem. In the meantime, there are a couple of ways to keep things running smoothly. 

Democratize Your Data Science

One of the major benefits of good data management is the ability for everyone to access reports and insights. When just a few people have access to the data, it can cause a bottleneck of information flow. Purchasing a large number of licenses for your data analytics software eases that bottleneck and helps your teams work collaboratively and efficiently. 

Consider Data Governance

Considering the enormous scope of gathering data and analyzing it, your company needs to set rules and boundaries for everyone about collecting, storing, protecting, accessing, and using data. 

These rules shield your company from liability and help you comply with any federal laws about privacy protection and how you’re able to leverage personal data. 

Why Do I Need a Data Ecosystem?

With a solid data ecosystem, companies can make fact-driven decisions about operations management, pricing, and marketing campaigns. All products, but especially digital ones, record how a user interacts with your company’s products and services. Data can help provide valuable insights into why users behave the way they do. The sections below dive into the specific benefits of data ecosystems for businesses. 

Increases User Engagement

When users feel like their voices are being heard, they’re much more likely to start a conversation. User feedback provides some of the best information about your company. With a data ecosystem in place, users can discuss their reactions to changes in your website, products, services, or advertising. 

Identifies Hidden Data Relationships

It’s not always easy to see the relationships between certain factors. Which demographic factors influence whether or not a visitor is more likely to become a user? Who should you be marketing your company to? Why do users leave your website without following through with a purchase? 

The Kissmetrics product analytics tool can uncover hidden relationships between data points that it would take you a long time to see on your own. 

Notifies Teams of Changes

With the ability to track user reactions and interactions with your products or services in real-time, you can monitor how they respond to updates or changes in everything from your company’s advertising strategies to features. This way, you’ll know if you take a step in the wrong direction and can work to change it to suit your clients better. 

Tracks Conversions and Marketing Funnels

Watching your marketing funnels to ensure that potential users are directed through the process of completing their purchase is the heart of every business. With Kissmetrics in your data ecosystem, you can track your conversion rates and see what works for your audience and what doesn’t. 

Increases User Retention

The flipside of knowing when users react poorly to new updates or features is that you can incentivize users to continue using your products and build company loyalty by monitoring your KPIs with Kissmetrics. 

Knowing what your audience wants is the best way to satisfy their needs and keep them coming back for more. 

Conducts A/B Testing

With A/B testing, you can monitor the difference in user engagement for two different versions of the same content. This can be done by comparing two email campaigns with different wording, the same social media post made on separate platforms, or similar concepts. 

Integrates with Other Applications

Automating manual processes saves your employees time and overhead costs that could be better spent on running your business and improving your products. Everyone has heard that, but one of the best ways to facilitate that automation is to connect your applications so that you don’t receive everything piecemeal.

By integrating your applications into a central organization system, you ensure that everything is working and sending you the data to be compiled into neat reports. These reports make it easier to see the big picture and form strategies. 

Additionally, integration allows multiple teams to all have access to the information at any time. 

Conclusion

Understanding your company’s data ecosystem is the first step towards segmenting your user base and knowing who your users are. With that knowledge, you’ll be able to effectively market your product or service to a broader audience with similar needs and customize your company to be what your clients want to see. 

Contact Kissmetrics to get started building your data ecosystem today.

 

Sources:

  1. What Is Unstructured Data & How Can You Analyze It? | Monkeylearn.com
  2. Janev V. (2020) Chapter 1 Ecosystem of Big Data. In: Janev V., Graux D., Jabeen H., Sallinger E. (eds) Knowledge Graphs and Big Data Processing. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12072. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53199-7_1
  3. 5 Key Elements of a Data Ecosystem | Harvard Business School Online

Kissmetrics vs Mixpanel: What Are the Differences

 

 

 

Kissmetrics and Mixpanel are classified as product and marketing analytics tools. They can help you track your customers and how they interact with your products, as well as the success of your marketing efforts and ecommerce site. Their purpose is to provide your company with the necessary information to anticipate your customers’ changing needs as well as outside market forces, so you can prioritize what gets fixed and built and better target your advertisements. The end goal is to reduce churn, increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and improve conversion rates. However, there are plenty of differences between the two tools. 

Here we’ll give you an accurate comparison between our services and our biggest competitor, Mixpanel. 

Common Features

Both products offer several standard features like tracking the number of page visitors, showing you who’s purchasing your product or services, and other information about your marketing funnel and the subsequent conversion rate. 

The Differences

Despite the similarities, there are many major differences between Kissmetrics and Mixpanel that you should consider when deciding which is better for your company. 

Kissmetrics has routinely been rated the easiest behavioral analytics tool to use with a straightforward interface and a small learning curve. Geared toward small and medium businesses, our tool makes it easy to get the two or three reports you really need without a bunch of other noise. It’s also cheaper than Mixpanel.

Mixpanel, on the other hand, is more geared toward enterprise-level companies. It has a lot of fancy capabilities but unless you have a data scientist at your disposal or a background in statistics, you might find you’re paying for a bunch of features you don’t use.. 

What Is Kissmetrics?

Kissmetrics gives you the information you need to optimize your checkout funnel and marketing campaigns, anticipate users’ needs, reduce churn, and increase the lifetime value of your customers. We offer language-specific APIs for Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Python, and PHP. Once our code is on your site, we track recorded events. 

Whether your business is e-commerce or SaaS, Kissmetrics has the tools to measure the metrics and events you value like who is purchasing your products, which events they triggered, and how long it took customers to move through your conversion funnel. Our tools compile the data into easy-to-understand reports to help you pull useful insights from your data. 

Overview

Kissmetrics delivers the information you need to acquire qualified prospects, convert more trials into paying customers, and reduce churn. Kissmetrics ties every event on your website to a real person because it’s people who are buying your products or services, not anonymous numbers. 

Pricing

E-commerce and Saas services through Kissmetrics start at $299 per month for the lowest tier. This tier includes features like tracking up to ten thousand users, ten populations, or groups of people with similar identifying characteristics like age or locale and running basic reports. Our next tier, Gold, begins at $499 per month and includes all of the basic features plus more comprehensive reports like A/B comparisons, revenue reports, cohort reports, and the ability to track double the number of users and populations.

Our final tier requires you to contact us for a quote. In it, we offer the capability to customize the features that are important to you. It also provides you with the best support we can offer, basic or guided onboarding, and technical implementation.  

Kissmetrics Features

Kissmetrics puts the focus on people instead of aggregate data. Kissmetrics’ SaaS and e-Commerce tools include key features like:

  • Distinguishing between new visitors to your website and returning visitors using different devices.
  • Tracking information directly from your website and simplifying otherwise complicated dashboards of endless numbers.
  • Watching customer behaviors in real-time.
  • Discovering which categories and products are trending.
  • Seeing sales and revenue drilled down by category, device type, traffic source, and campaigns.

What Tools Integrate With Kissmetrics?

Kissmetrics understands that you need other applications to generate data and store your information, so it integrates with popular apps like:

  • Shopify
  • WooCommerce
  • Zapier
  • Gmail
  • Mail Chimp
  • Slack
  • Calendly
  • Google Sheets
  • Trello
  • GitHub
  • Paypal
  • Twilio
  • SQLServer
  • Common social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter

Which Companies Use Kissmetrics

Companies like Microsoft, eBay, WordPress, and Carvana have relied on the valuable insights of Kissmetrics for years. These companies enjoy the integration capabilities, comprehensive goal tracking to achieve their business objectives, and how Kissmetrics helps them monitor user habits. 

Pros and Cons of Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics offers the ability to learn more about your customers since we emphasize who is buying your products. Segmenting your customers into cohorts and tracking their activities on your website in conjunction with their demographics provides valuable information about what they’ll want in the future and allows you to adjust accordingly. Our data reports pull vital information about the features that your customers love, what they’d like to see in the future, and which features they think could use some improvement 

In an effort to display your data in a clear and straightforward way, we opted for a clean, streamlined dashboard. We’ve found it’s easier for customers to synthesize the information if there isn’t a lot of “noise” on the page. But if you prefer more customization in the way your reports are presented, this could be a point of frustration. You always have the option to export your data to excel and build your own reports if our presentation isn’t exactly what you want.  

We also offer a comprehensive resource and support center to ensure your learning curve is shortened, enabling you to understand and implement the dashboard capabilities quickly.  

What is Mixpanel?

Like Kissmetrics, Mixpanel is a product and marketing analytics tool that gathers data from a variety of sources and provides useful insights into your customer base, how they interact with your brand, and who is visiting your website. With these tools, you can easily monitor changes in customer attitudes or needs and change accordingly to satisfy them. 

Overview

Mixpanel gives you innovative ways to track your users and learn more about what drives them to purchase your products. Their complex data reports give you information about which features are working and which could use some improvement. 

Pricing

Mixpanel offers three pricing tiers for you to choose between depending on which capabilities you want to leverage. The first tier is free, and it includes features like core reports, a data dictionary, basic monitoring, and alerts. The next tier is called Growth, and it starts at $25 per month. It includes the basic features and additional features like impact reporting, unlimited saved cohort segments, data modeling, and email support. 

Two things to be aware of with Mixpanel’s first two tiers: 

1) Your MTU limit is 100,000.

2) Your event limit is: 1,000 events per MTU.

We’ve found even small businesses surpass these limits pretty quickly. 

Finally, they offer a third tier called Enterprise. You’ll need to contact Mixpanel for a quote, and they provide no estimation of the cost online. Still, they offer advanced capabilities like single sign-on and custom pricing based on the time of year and other events you designate. 

Mixpanel Features

Mixpanel offers a variety of useful features to track customers and conversion rates through your website. Some of the crucial features include:

  • Creating complex queries without needing to utilize or write SQL.
  • Building retroactive funnels and analyzing conversion rates on the fly.
  • No need to build processes to send data to Mixpanel; it can read your data automatically from any data lake.
  • Segmenting your visitors through specific demographic and event information.
    • For example, you could break down the number of people who visited a specific product page who are female, under the age of 30, and own a dog.

What Tools Integrate With Mixpanel?

Mixpanel allows you to integrate plenty of applications into their data gathering services. Some of these applications include:

  • Amazon Web Services
  • Google Cloud
  • Mail Chimp
  • Slack
  • Zapier
  • Common social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter

What Companies Use Mixpanel

Many companies have used Mixpanel over the years. Some of these include Uber, ZipRecruiter, Twitter, and Expedia. 

Pros and Cons of Mixpanel

Mixpanel offers customization for plan building since they provide three separate pricing tiers. That can be good for smaller companies on a strict budget who can’t afford a more comprehensive enterprise solution. However, that low price comes with its share of downsides too.

Users note that Mixpanel doesn’t provide all of the tracking needed to follow the important metrics and KPIs for their business, and they must occasionally use another product analytics tool to supplement Mixpanel. Additionally, other customers find that Mixpanel’s reports aren’t intuitive and are difficult to understand. It can be challenging to determine whether you’ve input the correct parameters or make sense of the information presented in a single report. 

The free tier doesn’t come with support and the support they give the second tier is often limited.

Mixpanel does offer a comprehensive suite of features. Still, without the proper instructions on how to use them and what counts as triggers, many users can’t utilize everything they’re paying for. Some clients even require data engineers just to understand the reports and set up the system during installation. 

Conclusion: Why Choose Kissmetrics over Mixpanel?

Though they share many of the same qualities, Kissmetrics is the clear choice for small to medium-sized businesses that want to analyze their user base, the success of their marketing campaigns, and the strength of their product. Users continually rate Kissmetrics as the top product for ease of use and instant, friendly, and in-depth customer support. 

While Mixpanel offers a wide variety of features, they can’t compare to Kissmetrics’ thorough onboarding and straightforward user interface. Mixpanel doesn’t offer as many features in a single package as Kissmetrics does, and the features they do have can be difficult to learn and leverage.  

Kissmetrics makes it easy for customers to discover and leverage all of their features offered, so you can follow your customers from brand discovery to becoming loyal buyers. Mixpanel has no instant customer support and has a steeper learning curve which means more time spent figuring out their tools rather than utilizing them. 

Kissmetrics offers comprehensive reports and tracks all of the crucial metrics and KPIs you need to ensure that you’re responding to your customers’ changing needs. You’re paying for the ability to aggregate your data in one place and pull valuable insights from a single product instead of needing to access multiple products.

 

Sources:

KISSmetrics vs Mixpanel | What are the differences? | Stackshare.io

Mixpanel Pricing | Mixpanel

Pros and Cons of Kissmetrics 2021 | Trust Radius

https://www.trustradius.com/products/mixpanel/reviews?qs=pros-and-cons

 

Customer Loyalty: How to Measure and Increase Loyalty

 

 

 

 

 

Every company wants one thing: loyal customers. Loyal customers who are excited to try out new products and services when they come to market. Customers who leave great reviews and help advertise your brand through word-of-mouth and their social media. Customers who stay with your company for many years.

But what does it mean to have a fanbase of loyal customers? How do you know whether your customers are returning over and over again or just people searching for the best price? Most importantly, how can your company promote customer loyalty? 

We cover all of that and more below. 

What is Customer Loyalty? 

Customer loyalty means that someone will continue to choose your company’s products or services instead of trying out your competition. The more loyal your customer base is, the more they will tolerate accidental missteps and higher prices. 

Loyal customers are excited when you announce a new product on social media. They leave your company great reviews online. They might even help you with advertising by spreading the word themselves. 

A loyal customer will continue to shop from your company even if a competitor offers a similar product for less because they know they can trust you. 

Metrics Used to Measure Customer Loyalty

Measuring trust in your company might seem tricky. However, some essential metrics will show what your customers think of your brand and how likely they are to continue shopping with you or using your product. 

Net Promoter Score

The Net Promoter Score, also known as NPS, allows you to measure your customer loyalty by directly asking your customers the question: how likely are you to recommend our service/product to a friend? The customer fills out a questionnaire where they can rate your brand, product, or service, usually on a scale of 1 to 10. 

When evaluating your company’s scores, grade them as you would a test at school. 1-6 is not what you want to see. Those numbers mean the customer had a bad experience and is likely to recommend that others don’t use you in the future. A 7 or 8 is considered neutral. But if you see 9s and 10s that means customers had a great experience and are likely to tell their friends about it.

Finding your NPS means subtracting the percentage of your customers with bad experiences from the percentage of 9s and 10s. This score may not give you an insight into what to change specifically, but it does give you a good idea of how customers are experiencing your brand. 

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) measures the total profit a single customer is expected to bring to your company during their entire relationship with you. This includes all of the years they will be buying replacements, new editions, resubscribing, everything. 

Repurchase Rate

Repurchase rate may not apply to every industry, but it is an important KPI for companies that sell products with short lifespans. 

The repurchase rate measures the number of customers who buy the same item a second time within a given period. 

Upsell Ratio

The Upsell Ratio looks at customers who spent more money than they had planned to when they visited your company’s store or website. 

For example, what if someone planned to buy a cell phone, but while at the store they see a case they like and decide they also need the bluetooth earbuds the salesperson suggested. That would be an upsell since the customer ended up paying more than they initially planned.

Customer Engagement Score

Like the NPS, Customer Engagement Score is a single number that represents the experience your customer had with your company by looking at how often they interacted with your brand and their repurchase rate. 

What is the Customer Loyalty Index? 

Customer Loyalty Index is an alternative to Net Promoter Score, which, as discussed above, is a way for customers to rate their experience with your company. 

However, understanding customer loyalty requires more than a single number if your company wants to find any actionable suggestions from the information.

The CLI measures a variety of inputs on a scale of one to six (one the best and six the worst) to give your company a better picture of how to improve your customer experience. 

Repeat usage

One of the metrics in the CLI asks customers how likely they are to use your brand’s products or services again in the future. 

Expansion

Another question the CLI asks is how likely the customer is to try other products by your company. Their orders may expand if they’re loyal to your brand and trust you enough to give other products a try.

Action

Measuring the actions of your customers is crucial. Loyal customers may interact on social media with your brand, discuss their experiences with others, sign up for your mailing list, and much more. 

Tolerance

Tolerance refers to how much negativity a customer will deal with before losing their loyalty. Does one bad experience with a customer service representative mean they won’t use your services again? The more loyal a customer is, the higher tolerance they will show for occasional missteps or issues with your company before becoming a detractor. 

Stated preference

Remember that, as with any type of self-reported information, customers may not always tell the truth. This isn’t always because they’re intentionally lying, but customers may not fill out the survey immediately after their experience and memories fade unless they’re momentous.

For example, a customer may have had a pleasant experience purchasing a product, only for it to be delivered two weeks late. The customer gives the brand a negative review and becomes a detractor because what stood out was the annoyance of shipping, even if the delay was out of your control. 

Revealed preference

Revealed preferences are found by monitoring customer activity and engagement with your brand. One negative review might not mean that your customer never tries to interact with your brand again, or they may have varied experiences with your products and services. 

By measuring KPIs, it’s possible to find revealed preferences without directly asking. 

Improving Customer Loyalty

Once you’ve begun employing KPIs to measure customer loyalty, you’ll want to start enacting strategies to capitalize on the information to improve customer loyalty. 

Some KPIs offer more specific suggestions than others, like when customers leave lengthy reviews, but in many cases, your company simply knows that they want to do better. So, what should you do?

Build an Exceptional Product

The best way to capture new customers and encourage old ones to return is to have an exceptional product or service. 

Exceed Expectations

It’s always nice when things turn out better than expected. Understanding and then exceeding customer expectations is a fantastic way to improve customer loyalty. Depending on your target audience and your product or service, customers will have wildly different expectations. 

For example, shopping at a discount store will begin with much lower expectations than shopping at a niche, high-end retail boutique.

If your customers have no reason to expect better customer service, give it to them. If they’re shopping for a generic product, make yours have fun or innovative packaging. Run promotions by donating a portion of your proceeds to charities that your customers support. 

Effective Communication

Many customers find their opinion of a company comes down to whether or not they feel that the company listens to them. This doesn’t just mean having plenty of ways to contact customer service representatives (although that’s important too). It means tracking the market trends and getting to know your customer base on a personal level. 

Reward Loyal Customers

One of the best ways to keep customers coming back for more is to add incentives. Many stores offer promotional discounts that are only available to customers with rewards cards or special offers for credit cards. 

There are plenty of ways to reward loyal customers. It’s an effective way to give benefits for repeatedly buying from your company.

Analyze and Use Metrics to Improve Business

Every company starts with the intention of sharing something with the world. Whoever your intended audience may be, your company’s goal is to design a product or service that people want to buy. With the right metrics available, you’ll learn a lot about the people who keep your company in business. 

Conclusion

With a better understanding of your customers and the right metrics to continuously measure them, your company will quickly be on its way to building a loyal customer base. With them on your side, it’s time to grow and expand without worry.

Sources:

NPS The Importance of Customer Loyalty May 11, 2020 | Nicereply.com

Repurchase rate — the most overlooked eCommerce KPI | by Matteo Sutto

Top 6 Metrics to Measure Customer Loyalty | Capillary

Marketing Success Through Differentiation

 

 

 

 

The best way to achieve marketing success is by differentiating your brand, products, or services to best meet your customers’ needs. By effectively utilizing a differentiation strategy, your brand can stand out in your industry with features that enhance your customers’ lifestyles.

This article discusses various types of marketing differentiation, the advantages, and how your company can distinguish itself from the competition. We break it all down below. 

What Is Differentiation?

Companies develop a differentiation strategy to provide consumers with something new, exclusive, and distinguished from what their rivals sell in the market. The primary goal of executing a differentiation approach is to gain a strategic edge. 

A company can normally do this by evaluating its own capabilities and disadvantages, as well as the desires of its consumers and the potential value it can offer.

What are Different Types of Marketing Differentiation?

While there are plenty of options, not all differentiation strategies are equally successful. What’s successful for your company will depend largely on what you offer, your company’s culture and capabilities and your industry. 

Product Differentiation

As the name implies, product differentiation is achieved by adding or enhancing special features that are unique to your product. Cornering the market on a specific feature or service is a key way to entice customers. When you are the only company offering something, customers will flock to your brand in droves. 

The downside to focusing solely on product differentiation is that businesses are constantly changing and evolving. No sooner than you’ve released software that performs a specific function than other companies are improving upon your efforts. 

If your only focus is on product differentiation, you’ll likely only see a brief boom in sales because your competitors will quickly move in on the idea and make it their own. 

Relationship Differentiation

Your employees are the backbone of your business. When they’re happy, your customers are much more likely to walk away satisfied and happy too. Team members must have the tools and communication channels they need to operate efficiently and spot errors before they escalate into major problems. 

You can accomplish this by monitoring customer satisfaction metrics like user adoption rate, net promoter score, and churn rate. With concrete data, your team can analyze customer opinions regarding new products, advertisement campaigns, and your brand. 

Service Differentiation

Service differentiation encompasses every supportive aspect of your company. 

  • Onboarding, 
  • Customer service, 
  • The ordering process, 
  • Website design, 
  • And everything that aids in the process of selling your product. 

Showing your customers that they will always get great service, fast responses, and helpful advice regardless of what products they order or where they order from is an excellent way to promote brand loyalty. 

Distribution Differentiation

While this isn’t a customer-facing aspect of your business, ensuring that you can deliver to people in your target audience is essential. This means keeping lines of communication open and delivery smooth for all manufacturers and distributors involved in producing your products. 

It also means increasing quality assessment procedures to ensure that all products meet your high standards. 

Image Differentiation

Your brand’s reputation directly impacts customer loyalty and should be tailored to your target audience. Understanding your audience’s expectations and needs will help your brand position its reputation as one that your customers trust and rely on for the products you provide. Customer loyalty is essential for building a solid base of returning customers.

A positive brand image can lower advertisement costs and increase profit by enticing previous customers to return for other products or services and tell their loved ones to do so also. Unfortunately, cultivating a distinctive image within your industry takes time, shrewd marketers, strong products, a large marketing budget, and a bit of luck.

Your brand must stand for something immediately recognizable through a slogan, logo, and name. In addition, your brand must promote your product’s value and follow through by providing the value advertised. 

Differentiating your company’s image goes a long way toward overall success. 

Price Differentiation

Price differentiation means finding the sweet spot for your product or service’s price. Many consumers look for less expensive alternatives when first selecting a product from the market, so ensuring that your product is appropriately priced is one way to differentiate your company. 

It is also the go-to option for most companies and may not be reliable in the long run.

Reducing the cost for your product necessarily reduces the profit earned, and some other company will undoubtedly find a way to do whatever you do but cheaper, faster, or more efficiently. So you want to avoid a price war with your competitors. 

What are the Advantages of a Product Differentiation Strategy?

Product differentiation offers plenty of advantages like increasing profits, heightening your company’s customer retention rate, and positioning your product strategically in the industry. 

Creates Non-Price Competition

Pricing competition is not the only way to differentiate your product. Product differentiation also allows your company to stand out by showing that it has other valuable and unique qualities. 

If you prove that your product features are better than the competition’s, customers will take price out of the equation when evaluating your company. 

Creates Value

The advantage of a product differentiation approach is that it capitalizes on a product’s distinguishing features. Your company can compile a list of features that your products have that your competitors do not. 

These features help distinguish the product, and you can express them effectively through promotion and advertisement.

Creates Brand Loyalty

Your brand’s distinguishing factors may become the standard for your entire company. Great customer service, for example, applies to more than one product or service; it’s a reflection of your company’s willingness to put the customer’s needs first. 

Customers will become more loyal to your brand if your differentiators are reflected across all of your company’s products. 

Eliminates Perceived Substitutes

A good product  differentiation strategy could instill the idea that there is no other product in the market that can replace it. Even if alternative products are available, a company can gain a competitive edge in the market because consumers aren’t likely to substitute their product with another. 

How can Product Differentiation be Achieved?

There are four specific ways to differentiate your product and position it for success. With these, you can enhance your existing product(s) to better appeal to your existing and prospective customers. 

Distinctive Design

One of the best ways to promote and differentiate a product is to use a distinctive design. Something that is unique and that will stick in your customer’s minds. 

Perfume bottles are a good example of this; they are often designed in fascinating shapes and are beautifully decorated in addition to being memorable. 

Branding

Perception is king. Enhancing your brand and customer perceptions of the products and services you offer can add a lot of value, even if your product is similar to others on the market. Nike is an example of fantastic branding.

Another way of positioning your company is to use social media as an entity that does something different or noteworthy. This also enhances the standing of your products without altering anything in the production process. 

Performance

Monitoring the metrics of your customers’ experiences is vital when aiming to improve product performance. By knowing what the product currently provides and how much effort it takes to achieve a goal, your teams can find ways to streamline the effort required and improve functionality. 

USPs

Finding a USP, or Unique Selling Point, is an important aspect of differentiation. Almost anything could be a USP, and what you choose should relate back to the image your brand projects. 

For example, if you have positioned your brand as one that frequently donates to a particular charity, your product’s USP could be that a portion of all proceeds goes directly to that charity. 

Conclusion

Understanding how various types of differentiation can enhance your brand’s marketing success is a crucial learning point for every company. Measuring your current customers’ perceptions of your products, how they react to implemented changes, and modifying your strategies based on those measurements can assist your marketing team in positioning your brand for success.

 

Visit the Kissmetrics blog for more information on differentiation and market positioning

 

Sources:

Differentiation Strategy: Definition, Benefits and Creation | Indeed

What is Premium Pricing Strategy? | Chron.com

6 Ways to Differentiate Your Business from the Competition | Marketresearch.com

What is a Power User? Definition and Overview

 

 

 

 

If you offer SaaS or you’re in the tech industry in general, you’ve probably heard the term ‘power user’ thrown around a few times. The devotion a power user shows to a specific company or product is the lightning in a bottle that turbo-charges growth and helps insulate companies from challenges by their competitors. 

Therefore, it’s important to understand exactly how to attract power users and what they add to your company. Here we explain the term power users, and we tell you who they are, and why your company needs to know how to leverage them for your benefit. 

What are Power Users?

Power users are people who have been using your product or service for quite some time and have become intimately familiar with all of its features, quirks, and flaws. 

Power users tend to be your biggest fans and the first to point out issues. They’re the people who write long, detailed posts on forums explaining complex technical workarounds for common problems, send bug reports to your staff, and tell everyone they meet that they should be using your product. 

In essence, power users are the engine that drives your company forward.. 

How Do You Identify a Power User?

Knowing the influence that power users wield is only the first step toward using them to your company’s advantage. The second step is picking them out from your user base. If you know what attributes to look for, it’s surprisingly easy to find your power users and create user personas around their needs. 

Identifier #1: They’re Repeat Users

Power users use your products or services on a daily or weekly basis. They’ll never let a subscription lapse, and they’ll likely buy at least one copy of every product you sell. Even if they don’t need those products, they want to experience them and leave detailed reviews or requests for your company and other potential users. 

Keep in mind, the definition of repeat usage will differ for each company. For a reporting-type SaaS business, it might be once a week. For a podcast streaming service it might be daily. For a chat-type product it might be hours a day. So to identify the power users for your product, you have to determine what high-volume use looks like.  

Identifier #2: They’re Vocal and Share Regular Feedback

It’s hard to imagine that a company wouldn’t be aware of at least a few of their power users. Power users rarely let more than a few weeks go by without submitting feedback of some kind. This may be through social media channels, emailing your support team, submitting bug reports, or leaving detailed reviews on your product pages. 

Power users are often quick with their praise and suggestions. When you release a new update, power users will typically be the first to reply with a laundry list of comments or praise. However they choose to get in touch, you’ll quickly become familiar with the username and can include them in your beta test groups for new launches. 

Identifier #3: They’re Early Adopters

Power users don’t come out of nowhere; the reason they know so much about your product or service is that they’ve either been with you since the beginning or quickly adopted your product after they discovered it. Whether your company is new on the block or has been around for decades, these people have been using your stuff since day one, and they have plenty of experience to share. 

For software providers, the people who initially beta-tested your products or services often become power users. For companies that have existed for more than a year or two, the very presence of power users is reassuring. It means that, whatever missteps you might have made, there is a core of dedicated users who are willing to stick by your products and build your reputation. 

Identifier #4: They’re Influential

This isn’t always true outside of your sphere of influence, but among your user base, power users are royalty. They have their own form of clout within your other users and may be able to draw in new users as well. If your company has a forum, chat room, or discussion board for users to meet up and discuss aspects of your products or services, you’ll likely see power users become the moderators of such chats or the top-rated answers to questions.Considering how much time, money, and effort they’ve invested into your company, other users often respect their opinions and listen to them. 

This influence can also mean that power users may feel a certain sense of entitlement towards your software or products. From their point of view, they have devoted a lot of work into helping you refine your company and bring it to a wider audience, all without any compensation. Power users don’t want money; they want the power to have input into your company. 

What is the Difference Between an Administrator and a Power User?

An administrator is someone affiliated with or employed by your company. They have access to aspects of your product or service that normal users don’t. This might mean being on the development or design team, a marketing consultant, or someone else with professional experience hired by you to assess your company’s offerings. 

A power user’s only defining features are their loyalty and experience using your product as an individual. They have no legal affiliation with your company. The line can get blurry if you take power user advice and recommendations and make them official, but to be clear: the power user is choosing to assist you in a non-employment context. 

What is the Responsibility of a Power User?

A power user has no responsibility because your company doesn’t employ them. Their only obligation is for themselves. On the one hand, they can provide valuable insights about using your product as an individual in a typical setting, something your employees cannot. On the other hand, because they have no ties to your company outside of their loyalty, power users may become frustrated or bored with your product and stop providing any service at all, with little to no warning. 

What is a Power User Curve?

A power user curve is a histogram that shows your users broken down into groups based on the number of days they use your product in any given month. This might be the number of times they log into their account on your website, how often they tune into your Twitch channel, or when they utilize your services. 

This type of data model will demonstrate how many of your users count as power users or people who use your product, many if not every day of the month, and how many are more casual. Ideally, you’ll want to see a higher percentage of power users than casual users, but some of your data will depend on the industry you’re in. 

How Can Power Users Benefit My Business?

First, power users are often the gas in the growth engine for a company. They’re monthly recurring revenue (MRR) you can count on, they tend to have very high customer lifetime values (CLVs) and can reduce your customer acquisition cost (CAC) because they help bring in new users. As long as you use product analytics to track the features your power users use and where they get stuck, you’ll be able to stay ahead of any problems and keep them happy. 

Second, power users will often broadcast your services and tout how great your company is, increasing your net promoter score (NPS) and drawing in new users. 

Third, power users can act like unofficial customer success. They provide answers to questions casual users post to forums, they serve as moderators in your chat rooms, they provide regular feedback and bug reports and they tell you what they want to see in future updates or releases. 

Conclusion

Developing devoted, experienced power users will keep gas in your engine of growth. They provide income you can count on, their behavior shows you the strengths and weaknesses of your product and they serve as a promoter of your product out in the world. To stay on top of and leverage your power user base, you need a behavioral analytics tool like Kissmetrics. For more information about analyzing the data power users can provide, check out Kissmetrics to get the inside scoop on your users. 

 

Sources:

The Problem With Power Users | Usability Geek

Power User Curve For Mobile Marketing Superheroes | Clever Tap

The Power User Curve: The Best Way to Understand Your Most Engaged Users

Growth Metrics: Know What to Track

 

 

 

 

Evaluating the data you collect with specialized tools is all a part of growth analytics. Businesses can grow in various ways through their revenue, customer base, and conversion rate. It’s essential to understand the information coming in about your users and your company as a whole to measure your own success. 

Join us for an exploration of various growth metrics and how to analyze your company’s progress with them.

What Are Growth Metrics?

Growth metrics are the key measurements of your business. Like other metrics, they’re made of objective numerical data, but growth metrics are specifically used in analytics to monitor your business’ growth over time. They’re used to calculate growth KPIs which look at how your company measures up to your business goals.

Your company’s growth in the past should help you make realistic predictions about future growth and give you an idea of what looks healthy for you. 

Why Are Growth Metrics Important?

Consistently measuring your company’s growth is an excellent way to prevent any hiccups with your bottom line. Knowing that you’re bringing in profit is fine, but predicting trends in your customer base by monitoring client behavior will help you stay ahead of your competitors. Analyzing growth metrics allows you to understand better what the future holds for your company. 

With the information you collect, your teams can make data-driven decisions to improve the quality of your offerings, market to the right audiences, increase customer satisfaction, and increase customer retention. 

Track Revenue Growth

Monitoring revenue increases or decreases for specific products and services allows you to see which areas of your business bring in the most money. If a product or service costs more than you see in returns, you can change or eliminate it and focus on the areas that positively impact your bottom line. 

Know Which Channels Have Growth Potential

Not only do growth metrics shed light on successful products and services, but they also highlight where and to whom you should be advertising. There’s nothing better for a growing business than to learn that they have a largely untapped market. 

By monitoring your customers’ details with tools like Kissmetrics’ person profiles, you can draw insights about their demographics and form new marketing strategies to continue your company’s growth.

Find Weak Links

Finding areas of your business that stop growth is just as important as exploring the places where growth can flourish. If you notice that you’re getting poor reviews noting that your staff can’t keep up with service requests for your products, that’s an indication that your customer service department is hindering your growth.

They may be the reason you don’t have more returning customers or why you aren’t attracting as many new customers as you’d hoped. This provides an actionable goal: hire more team members and thus reduce the weak link. 

Determine Your Business’s Health

A growing business is a healthy business. Growth metrics help you analyze whether or not your business is growing and by how much over a specified timeframe. If your company is growing at a slower rate than your competitors, that’s likely a sign that you need to be doing something differently. 

Stagnant or declining businesses are usually a sign that trouble is just around the corner, so you must stay on top of growth metrics to learn about problems as soon as they arise. 

Measure ROI

Growth metrics measure ROI and can differentiate between campaigns. Kissmetrics offers the ability to track campaigns by issuing multiple URLs for social media posts and drip email campaigns. By measuring your ROI, you can see which avenues lead to company growth so that you can pursue them and not waste your time in other marketing efforts. 

How Do I Know Which Growth Metrics to Track?

Determining the right growth metrics depends on your industry and business model. For example, e-commerce companies and SaaS companies will likely track somewhat different metrics. The number of subscriptions is a metric that only applies to businesses with a subscription model. 

The best growth metrics are the ones that contribute clear and relevant information that pertains to your business goals. Once you have created your KPIs and know how you measure your business’s success, you’ll be able to find the metrics that give you the information you need. 

What Are the Most Important Metrics for Product Performance?

Your growth analytics, or growth KPIs, depend on your business goals and what you want to achieve. Choosing those KPIs may not look the same for every company, but everyone should be watching a few essential KPIs. 

Sales Revenue

Sales revenue may be the most basic metric of all, but undoubtedly one of the most important. Your sales revenue ought to increase with each successive year. However, many external factors can affect your revenue. 

If your sales revenue isn’t growing according to your expectations, then you may need to realign the company with your business goals. Tracking your revenue from year to year can help you create realistic goals for the future or see if there is a serious problem within your business that needs assistance. 

Customer Acquisition Costs

Customer acquisition costs measure how much you need to spend on a single new customer to get them to convert to your brand. Knowing how much it costs to generate a lead is essential when calculating profits or customer lifetime value. Once you know how much a lead costs, you’ll need to factor in the conversion rate.

After all, you’ll likely need multiple leads to generate a single new customer. That customer may increase your revenue, but they’ll need to improve it enough to outweigh what you paid to attract them in the first place. 

Customer Churn

Customer churn shows the percentage of clients who stop doing business with you. This may be unsubscribing to your service or not purchasing any more of your products. Though customer churn can happen for various reasons, a high churn rate often indicates that something is wrong with your products or services.

Customer Engagement

Understanding how your customers use your products or services is crucial when determining which features you should focus on for future releases. Suppose customers all want to use one specific feature on your website. In that case, that is a signal that your company should explore potential growth within that feature by expanding its scope or improving its performance. 

Similarly, measuring the number of active users is an essential growth metric. Ideally, your number of active users should increase as your brand awareness grows, so if it stays steady, that’s a sign that something isn’t working properly.

Customer Retention

Customer acquisition costs are often decreased as companies perfect their marketing techniques, but they’re still expensive. Retaining existing customers is always cheaper than attracting new ones. 

Measuring the percentage of your customers who come back for more can provide valuable insight into customer satisfaction with your products or services. Customers with positive interactions with your products are more likely to buy future releases or updates. 

Upsells

Upselling customers is one of the best ways to improve your sales revenue and reduce customer acquisition costs. When each customer, on average, is spending more on your products or services, you can keep a more significant cut of your revenue. 

Incentivizing your clients to purchase additional products through a bundle or promotional offer or persuading customers to buy a more expensive version of their desired service is something every sales team member should aim for. 

How Do I Track Growth Metrics?

Kissmetrics allows you to track important metrics for your business and generate meaningful reports from the collected data. Our reports are full of insights into how your company is growing and what is stopping you from reaching your goals. 

Before you can get to the insightful reporting, however, there are a few steps you must take:

  • Designate which aspects of your company you want to monitor – when you know what type of information you need, you’ll have a better idea about which metrics to track.
  • Decide on how often you want to report on your metrics.
  • Choose appropriate parameters for data gathering.
  • Set up your analytics software and get tracking.

Conclusion

A solid understanding of growth metrics is necessary to monitor how your business is doing both now and in the future. It mighty not be as good as a crystal ball, but if you know where you have the potential for growth and what to expect in your growing company, you’ll be able to evaluate the success of your strategies and begin new initiatives with confidence. 

Learn more about growth metrics with Kissmetrics’ comprehensive reporting tools. 

 

Sources:

  1. The 7 SaaS Growth Metrics That Really Matter | Appcues.com
  2. Growth Metrics Definition | Ycharts.com
  3. Business Performance Metrics Tracking Growth | Designzillas.com

What You Should Know About Product Adoption and How to Increase It

 

 

 

 

It can be immensely beneficial to your company if you understand the process of how a potential user decides to purchase your product and become a user. It’s one important way to gain new user insights on why they chose your product 

For users, becoming a new user of a product can be challenging, but if the company understands and improves its product adoption process, it doesn’t have to be.

What Is Product Adoption?

The moment when a user finds your product kicks off what is considered product adoption. 

Product adoption is when a user begins using your product for its intended use to help them complete the intended task. For metric purposes, product adoption can be expressed as a percentage of people who successfully use the product for its intended use. 

Depending on your product type, the product adoption process can be very simple or somewhat involved. By using the Kissmetrics product and marketing analytics tools, you’ll be able to map out your product adoption process.

What Are the Stages of the Product Adoption Process?

The process of product adoption may be different for each product or company, but the process should be similar across tech platforms. Product adoption is divided into 4 stages:

  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Evaluation
  • Conversion

Awareness

When a potential user initially learns of your products but has no information, that is considered awareness. 

They may have learned about your product through advertisements, word of mouth, or any other form of media. This phase is important as it is the first impression users get of your product. 

The way your product is advertised will have a large impact on the awareness phase. It’s important that potential users feel intrigued to learn more and see your product as something with potential. 

This first impression leads to the next phase of product adoption, the interest phase.

Interest

After a potential user first sees your product and begins to show interest in it, they have moved to the interest phase. 

The interest phase is when users start to gather information and search for details about your product. This phase is critical because it’s when potential users need accurate and concise information on your product. 

If users cannot find enough information to make an informed decision, they may either choose the wrong product or no product at all. Once users gather enough information to make an informed decision they move to evaluate the product.

Evaluation

The product evaluation phase is where users initially try your product and test its features. This can be part of a trial period or the initial purchase of your product. 

During the evaluation phase, users will determine if your product meets their needs and provides the value they’ve been seeking. They may be comparing the product to previous products they’ve used or attempting to find a solution to a problem that has remained unsolved. Having well-documented user guides is a great way to improve the evaluation experience for new users. 

If the user is satisfied and convinced the product is a good fit, they become a user and move to the conversion phase.

Conversion

At this phase, the user has purchased your product and is fully using the product to their advantage. Remember, it’s helpful to make the payment process easy for the user to increase conversion. Product delivery should also be simple and intuitive for the users. Having new users wait to use the product will not set a good tone. 

The product should solve their issues and deliver value in real world situations. Conversion can be measured directly by monitoring your conversion rate, but that doesn’t always give enough detail. You’ll want to monitor several KPIs to ensure your conversion rates are optimal.

What Is the Difference Between Product Adoption and Product Diffusion?

Product diffusion is similar to product adoption but they are not the same process. 

Product diffusion refers to the process of a large group or social class of people adopting a product. An example would be when mobile phones became normal for everyone to own. At first, mobile phones were very expensive and only for business use or the upper class. 

A few years later mobile phones dropped in price, so ordinary people could afford them. When consumers begin using cellphones en-masse, that is product diffusion.  

The product adoption process is tracking an individual person adopting your product. In other words, when you have a single user purchase and begin using your product that is product adoption.

Why Is Product Adoption Important?

It’s vital to track the process of users discovering, learning, and purchasing your product. Ensuring your users know the ins and outs of your product will maximize the product value and give them a better overall experience. 

A successful product adoption will lead to an increase in long-term users and higher user satisfaction. Kissmetrics can help you track product adoption and find ways to improve your processes.

How Can Product Adoption Be Improved?

There are multiple techniques that can improve your product adoption. Be sure to check out Kissmetrics to begin gaining insights into your product adoption process. 

Some ways to improve your product adoption process are:

  • First-Time User Experiences
  • New Feature Launches
  • Behavioral Emails
  • Targeting
  • Constant Bug Fixes and Upgrades

First-Time User Experiences

When users are new to your product, their first experience using it needs to be smooth and convenient. The first-time user experience could be the checkout process, a trial, or a wizard setup type of process. 

If not designed properly these processes can be frustrating and deliver a bad experience for new users. Kissmetrics has experience with enhancing their first-time user experiences and can help you improve yours.

New Feature Launches

When your product has new features or improvements it’s important to make sure your users and potential users are aware. A new feature can make a huge difference to a user who needs the additional functionality. Making sure your users are aware of these changes can ensure they get the most value from your product. 

New feature launches can help reduce churn by re-engaging users. The new feature launches also improve user loyalty by showing you continue to support and improve your products. 

Email Updates

A tailored way to reach users and improve product adoption is behavioral emails. These emails are created for specific situations and sent to users when certain behaviors or actions occur. 

Some examples would be when a user gets halfway through a signup process then stops, or a user has been inactive for a long period of time. A reminder email to a user to finish the signup process is a nice way to improve product adoption. 

Behavior email updates are not generic blast emails sent to all users at once. Emails that are not personalized are likely to be ignored by users and won’t be as successful.

Audience Targeting

Getting your product in the hand of its target audience is a sound strategy. Products are not typically one size fits all, so marketing your product to everyone wouldn’t be the best use of resources. 

Targeting your core audience with a cohesive marketing strategy will have a large impact on your conversion rate. So, having the proper information about your core users is needed for proper user targeting. Kissmetrics can help you analyze the key characteristics that you need to target the right audience. 

Constant Bug Fixes and Upgrades

Every site and product must deal with bugs and the need to upgrade from time to time. When bugs arise it’s important to prioritize and fix them as often as possible. Bugs can diminish the overall experience for users, especially if the bug occurs during a critical task for the user. 

If users consistently experience bugs, you’ll likely have a much higher turnover rate and lose user loyalty. 

Upgrading your site should also be a consistent practice. This will reinforce that your product is being cared for as constant improvements are happening. Keeping your product fresh with new features and constantly improving the interface will create positive feedback and increased loyalty from your users.

Conclusion

Product adoption is something every new user will experience. While the process may differ from company to company, the key phrases will be the same across your industry. 

Understanding your product adoption process will give you more insight into what it’s like to become a new user of your product. Using this knowledge to improve your processes will increase user satisfaction and lower your churn rate.

Visit kissmetrics today to schedule your demo and learn how we can help your product and market analytics. 

 

Sources:

  1. How To Spot Companies Accelerating Through The Adoption Curve | Forbes
  2. First Impressions – a Guide to Onboarding UX | Toptal.com
  3. 5 Stages to the Consumer Adoption Process | Linkedin

How to Improve Your Website’s UX

 

 

 

 

Improving your website’s user experience (UX) is paramount when it comes to making a good impression on potential and existing users. Even if you have brick-and-mortar stores, most people are moving their shopping online, and you want to keep their business.

Kissmetrics breaks down why website UX is vital, and how to measure and improve it. 

Why Website UX Is Important

More people are shopping for products online or subscribing to online services in the digital age. So, even if you have the best products in the world, no one will ever know unless they can find their way to your checkout page and convert.

In order to get your customers there, you have to give them what they want. And what they want is an appealing, functional website, intuitive navigation, clear information and clear call-to-actions. In short, they want you to guide them through the experience. 

Anything less and  visitors will never make it to your purchase page. 

Types of Metrics Used to Measure UX

There are a variety of ways to measure user behavior and how they experience your website. 

These metrics can be measured and compiled into reports using a digital analytics tool. The following sections list nine of the primary metrics used by businesses across all industries to measure their UX. 

Journey Mapping

Mapping your users’ journey throughout your website can lead to essential insights about where your content is working and where it falls short. Seeing what pages they visit and where their sticking points are can help you refine your sales funnel. It can also show you how far through the funnel potential users get before dropping out. 

When you see where visitors drop out, you can focus on fixing what’s wrong at that specific stage of the journey. Maybe our account registration is too complex to navigate or you’re missing a call-to-action. Maybe the page took too long to load. You can only fix these problems if you know which pages your visitors are seeing.

User Churn Rate

User churn rate measures the number of users who stop using your products or services in a given period. It gives you insight into user satisfaction and indicates whether there is a problem with the product that needs fixing. In the short-term, it provides an idea of how much money you’ll need to spend attracting new users. 

Keep in mind that a high user churn rate is not uncommon in certain industries. 

User Retention Rate

The user retention rate is the opposite of the user churn rate and measures the percentage of users who stick with your service. The higher your user retention rate, the less you’ll have to spend on customer acquisition costs (CAC). 

Statistically speaking, it’s almost always less expensive to keep existing users than it is to attract new ones. 

Conversion Rates

Once you attract visitors to your website, the real work begins. Visiting doesn’t automatically mean that someone  converts. 

Conversion rates measure the visitors to your website who proceed through the sales funnel and eventually complete desired events like: signing up, providing their email, watching a video, or completing a purchase. The majority of visitors may not complete any events or convert, but you can use the data you collect to optimize your site so that more of them do.. 

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value, or CLV, measures how much money a single user is expected to spend on your products throughout their entire relationship with your company. This can be calculated by assuming that the user continuously stays loyal to your company and purchases new models or updates to your product at specified intervals. Those intervals will vary based on the products you offer.

For example, you could expect a customer to buy new clothes much more frequently than you would expect them to purchase new cars. 

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The net promoter score, or NPS, measures which users are most likely to recommend your company to their friends and family. Those who are likely to recommend you are classified as promoters and people who will actively speak against your company are classified as detractors. 

Ideally, your percentage of promoters will outweigh your detractors. 

Unlike other metrics, NPS is measured by surveying users directly, meaning their responses may be biased. A user might respond negatively if they’ve had a bad day, regardless of how they normally feel about your product. 

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer effort score, or CES, is a similar survey to NPS and measures how satisfied your users are with their experience on your website or within your product. Instead of asking how likely they are to recommend your product(s), it asks how easy they found your service, website or product to use. 

If possible, you want to minimize the required user effort as much as you can since people prefer to use simple and straightforward products.

Average Response Time

If your company or website offers any kind of customer success or support, this is a crucial metric. Whether users are ordering products through an e-commerce website or struggling to install software, they will likely want to speak to a representative. 

This can happen through an email, live chat, text, or phone call. Average response time measures how long customers have to wait before they get a response. 

Average Resolution Time

Similar to the average response time, the average resolution time measures how long it takes for a user or customer’s issue to be resolved. A resolution doesn’t necessarily mean a fix since they might be contacting your company with a question or complaint that is out of a representative’s control. Still, the faster your team can resolve the issue or answer their questions, the happier the user or customer will be. 

How To Improve Website UX

Improving your website’s UX comes down to a few basic ideas: 

  • Know your target audience.
  • Format the right design.
  • Speed up the process of page navigation.
  • Add key touchpoints.

Understand Your Audience

The first step to understanding your target audience is to install a  behavioral analytics tool like Kissmetrics on your website. By analyzing the data you collect,, you can segment out your users based on the actions they take.  You’ll be able to create user personas and predict their needs and wants based on factors like average age, location, annual income, household size, previous purchases, features used and other data.

When you know who your users are, it’s easier to improve your products and give them what they want. 

Improve Page Speed

A user’s page speed may not always be in your control, but you should make every effort to get your website running smoothly and speedily whenever possible. In this modern age, users have very little patience for slow, clunky websites, and even a few seconds of waiting for a page to load can cause them to leave the page. 

Google also considers page loading time when assigning rankings to websites, so if your page is slow to load, even the best SEO content won’t feature very high on the list. 

Consider The Layout and Design

The design of your website is the first thing your visitors see, and you want to strike a balance between exciting and sleek. Too much information or graphics can overwhelm the visitor and distract them, whereas too little can bore them. 

You also want to make navigation straightforward so they’ll easily find what they’re looking for. 

Simplifying your formatting using any top eCommerce website builders isn’t just about making your website sleeker and more aesthetically appealing. It can also decrease loading time. The majority of your page’s loading time comes from making HTTP requests for each element on the webpage. These elements come from fancy graphics, fonts, styles, icons, and other scripts.

Add Key Touch Points

Key touchpoints are the instructions or tips your users need to understand your products, how they work, and get to know your company. These key touchpoints are areas of interaction between your users and your company. 

Key touchpoints can include:

  • Online advertisements,
  • Social media posts, 
  • Chatting with user representatives, 
  • Product reviews,
  • Feedback surveys.

The more interaction visitors can have with your company, the more you can develop their loyalty and investment. By demonstrating that you care about them, your company turns into a friendly presence instead of a faceless corporate entity. 

With the right key touchpoints, you can increase your conversion rate and keep existing users from churning to your competitors. 

Conclusion

UX is constantly in flux so monitoring the metrics listed above over time is the best way to quantifiably measure and improve experiences. With granular data at your fingertips, you can see how users react to changes in your website and tweak issues proactively instead of waiting for them to affect revenue.

Visit Kissmetrics for more information on measuring UX and improving your website.

 

Sources:

Key Product Management Metrics and KPIs | Altexsoft.com

User Effort Score | Questionpro.com

20 Ways to Speed Up Your Website – and Improve Conversion by 7% | Crazy Egg

What is Product Intelligence?

 

 

 

 

Product intelligence might make you think of robots and other smart technologies. However, the term doesn’t mean your products will start walking and talking on their own. It’s another term for product analytics, and you can use the two interchangeably. Product intelligence is a critical aspect of supporting your company and listening to your users’ feedback. 

Kissmetrics explores the ideas behind product intelligence, how it works, the type of information it gathers, and how you can leverage it for your company.

How Do You Define Product Intelligence?

Product intelligence is the term for gathering information about how your users interact with your product, interpreting that information, and then strategizing to leverage your insights. 

It’s something that you may already do in some way or another. Finding out information about your users is the number one way to improve your products, services, and a company’s interactions with their audience members. 

How Is Product Intelligence Different From Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence is a hot topic, especially among roboticists and engineers nowadays, but it is very different from product intelligence. Artificial intelligence refers to the study of machine learning or how non-organic devices can interact with the world intelligently. A Roomba, for example, demonstrates artificial intelligence by learning where your walls and furniture are, so it can vacuum the areas around those spaces without bumping into anything.

Product intelligence doesn’t have to be so high-tech. It describes the process of gathering information about how humans use your products and then translates that data into insights and actionable goals. 

You can collect information about any kind of product, robotic or not. It’s all about finding a new way for users to show you what features they like and which ones they don’t.

How Does Product Intelligence Work?

Product analytics tools like Kissmetrics gather data about various aspects of your users and how they interact with your website. This data is compiled into meaningful reports that demonstrate areas that attract more users and places where you need to make some improvements. 

Performance

The first step in product intelligence is gathering the data. With product analytics tools, you don’t have to worry about manual inputs; your tools will automatically function and mine the information. 

Automation is a critical part of the tool and can save you time and effort when aggregating data. 

Quality

The second step is analyzing the data. Of course, now that you have tons of detailed insights, you don’t want to waste time wracking your brain to interpret it and understand what it all means. Product analytics tools do that for you, compiling the information into a simple, straightforward report. 

For marketing and product development teams who want to get into the nitty-gritty details, they’re available. Most tools allow you to customize your data gathering and the subsequent reports to get the information that adds the most value. 

Keep in mind that product analytics won’t give you the whole picture. It doesn’t replace important surveys asking users about their overall satisfaction; it simply augments them. 

Test Data

The nature of science is to test. So once you’ve gathered your data and formed some ideas about new things to try, the best thing to do is try them out and continue recording the information. 

Your original data might have focused on one feature of your product, which led your company to focus on it too. Keep watching to see how your users react to the changes you make and adjust your product development accordingly to keep them satisfied. 

Which Information Does a Product Intelligence Tool Gather?

Product intelligence tools specialize in gathering and aggregating information about your users and how they use your products. This data is then compiled into an insightful report documenting your users’ preferences. 

Product intelligence tools gather information like:

  • Which features see the most use.
  • How often users use your product.
  • How your products perform based on the season.
  • When users buy from you.
  • Customer information like location, age, and other demographics.

Why Is Product Intelligence Important?

Product intelligence is a way of analyzing user habits and interactions. When users interact with your products, learning what features they use the most and which ones sit ignored will help you move forward with your company. 

One of the most significant benefits of product intelligence over surveying your users is you can be sure the information is accurate.

Not to imply that users purposefully lie on surveys, but they may make mistakes and leave things out. Their feedback can often be fueled by emotions and not cold, hard facts. Product intelligence skips over the sentiment and brings you the facts you need to make decisions about your product. 

Product intelligence tools are vital for scalability. As your company comes out with more products, gathers a more extensive user base, or simply grows in size, it becomes an enormous task to monitor your users’ feedback and understand how they are using or not using your products. 

Without an automated tool gathering data for you, you’d have to hire increasingly large numbers of employees whose sole task would be to monitor product usage. That’s not a good use of their time or your money.

Creating New, Improved Versions of Your Product

The best way to stay ahead of competitors is to give the people what they want. There are few better ways to do that than constantly monitoring and recording how people use your product. 

Customers use the features that add value to their lives and give you the information you need to tweak products and make adjustments to function better.

For example, your company might have been very excited to release a product with new features, but if your users continue to use the same three and leave the other ones alone, you’ll know that it’s best to focus on strengthening the original ones.

Accelerating the Product’s Time-to-Market

Instead of assigning members of your development team to closely monitor all of the feedback rolling in about your new product, using a product intelligence tool automates the process. When you can easily click on a report generated by your analytics tool, you save time and effort.

With accurate, real-time insights about your product and its features, you can speed up the timeline for your next big product. Users may be eagerly awaiting the release from beta-testing, and with product intelligence, you can continuously monitor progress throughout testing and development. 

This is especially relevant in e-commerce spaces when putting out the idea or product earlier can make a difference in edging ahead of the competition. 

Automatic Quality Manufacturing Processes Enforcement

With a product intelligence tool, everyone will have access to the same information. Instead of waiting for a member of one development team to remember to forward a dozen reports to a secondary design or implementation team, the reports are instantly available to everyone with access to the software. 

This can help speed up the product’s time-to-market and ensure that bugs and other flaws will be caught before they come out.

Your teams will appreciate the ability to correct errors without writing additional code or spending hours pouring over the lines they’ve already written. Simply input error parameters into your product analytics tool, and the tool automatically flags anything that pops up. 

How Can I Use a Product Intelligence Platform?

When you understand your audience, you can design the right products and features to satisfy their needs. Additionally, as you roll out updates, products, services, and features, a product intelligence platform will document how users interact with your product. This allows you to see which aspects are particularly useful to those users.

Besides giving you ideas for enhancements and new designs, this information can also influence your marketing strategies. Knowing your audience also means knowing how to appeal to them and entice them to convert. 

It’s not just about getting them to your website, either. Documenting the users’ journeys from the first visit through conversion gives you a better idea of what content attracts people. It incentivizes them to move beyond a casual visitor to become a regular user or customer.

Conclusion

One of the biggest questions a company should ask is why do some people buy my product and others don’t? Product intelligence looks for innovative ways to answer that question by documenting user interactions, illustrating conversion paths, and detailing which marketing campaigns attract new visitors to your website, as well as how your product adds value to peoples’ lives. 

Visit Kissmetrics for more information about product intelligence and how you can leverage your users’ information. 

 

Sources:

Product Intelligence | Mixpanel.com

What is Product Intelligence? Your Guide to a Product Intelligence Platform | Talend.com

Product Intelligence is the New Wave in Retail Analytics | Digitaldoughnut.com

6 Engagement Metrics That’ll Help Improve Your Search

 

 

 

 

Improving your website’s traffic is essential for building a wider audience for your company. Every successful company nowadays spends time and money measuring various engagement metrics to understand their customers’ behavior better and make their online content more meaningful.

Kissmetrics breaks down how to measure user engagement and which metrics give you the necessary information to improve your search rankings. 

How Do You Measure Engagement?

Product analytics and marketing tools measure user engagement by tracking their activities within your website and product. This software can track IP addresses to see how often users visit your website, which pages they view, how long they spend on each page, and many other aspects of their interaction.

What Is an Engagement Metric?

An engagement metric is any kind of measurement of user interaction with your company’s website or product. 

Which Engagement Metrics Will Help Improve My Search?

While there are many different engagement metrics to choose from, the following sections list the six most popular engagement metrics that add real value. 

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who ‘bounce’ away from your website after reading the contents of a single page. Essentially, this bounce rate measures people who read your blog and then decide not to check out more pages on your website or who arrive at your home page and realize that this wasn’t what they were looking for.  

How Do I Track Bounce Rate?

Your bounce rate can be tracked by analytics software. The equation for figuring out your bounce rate is to divide the total number of visitors who come to a page and then navigate away from your website without visiting another page by the total number of visits to your site.

How Can I Improve My Bounce Rate?

Visitors can bounce for several reasons, some of which you’ll have no control over. For example, if visitors are looking for a definition or explanation of a term, they will read the information you’ve presented and then move on. 

Visitors often bounce because your website didn’t provide exciting content that kept them wanting more. Or because the UI/UX was confusing or cumbersome. You can improve your bounce rate by ensuring that all pages are of high quality. 

Why Bounce Rate Isn’t Actionable

While it’s tempting to leave it at, “I need to decrease my bounce rate,” bounce rate by itself doesn’t give you detailed information. In order to utilize bounce rate, you’ll need information provided by other metrics. For instance, bounce rate doesn’t tell you why visitors are leaving. You would have to dig further into those reasons.

Pages Per Session

Pages per session are the number of different landing pages on your website that a single user visited during their session. 

How Do I Track Pages Per Session?

Your pages per session can be tracked by analytics software like Kissmetrics in a cohort report by entering the event parameters. 

The first event will be visiting a page on your website, and the second event will be visiting another page within your website. Your report will show the number of users who fulfilled both of those parameters, as well as the number of pages they viewed. 

How Can I Improve My Pages Per Session?

The best ways to improve pages per session is to make the content relevant and helpful to your audience and make your navigation clear. Conducting audience surveys and charting the user’s journey gives you clues about what type of content your audience would like to see and how it should be formatted. It’ll also tell you where users and visitors get stuck.

Another idea is to include clickable links on every page to make it easy for customers to find similar content or purchasable items. 

Page Depth

Page depth is a measure of how far into the process of purchasing your visitor is. For example, your website’s home page would be considered ‘shallow.’ 

In contrast, the page where the customer enters their credit card number to check out would be regarded as ‘deep.’ The idea is to follow the customer through their journey and to measure how far along your customer journey they travel. 

How Can I Improve My Page Depth?

A page’s depth should dictate how you format it so that it best appeals to customers based on where they are in their customer journey. 

Customers farther along, or deeper in, would likely want more detailed information, whereas you would want to use high-level information on shallower pages. Tailoring pages enhances the customer experience. 

You might also want to evaluate the checkout process if you see a lot of customers dropping out at that point.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate measures how many website visitors complete a set goal. For example, your desired goal may be for visitors to register as account members or purchase products. The conversion rate shows you how much of your website traffic reaches your intended goal. 

How Do I Measure Conversion Rate?

You’ll measure your conversion rate by dividing the number of completed conversions by the number of visitors to your site in a time period and then multiplying that by 100. This gives you a percentage of visitors who completed your conversion goal. 

For instance, let’s say you had 352 conversions last month and 1,582 total visitors. You’d take:

352 ÷ 1,582 = 0.2225 × 100 = 22.25% conversion rate.

So for the month, you had a 22.25% conversion rate.

How Can I Improve My Conversion Rate?

Depending on what you’re selling, your conversion rate may be affected by various factors. However, there is one factor that all companies have in common, regardless of industry: value. For customers to purchase your products or services, you must demonstrate that they can trust you will provide the best value to their lives or businesses. 

Your company can accomplish this by offering positive testimonials on your website or showing well-known companies who use your services. 

Returning Visitors

As the name implies, returning visitors are your visitors who decide to come back for more within a given period. Visitors may return to learn more about your services on an offer, purchase products, or read more informational articles in your website’s blog. Whatever the reason, returning visitors are invested in your company, and that’s a good start.

How Do I Track Returning Visitors?

The same cohort report mentioned for tracking pages per session can also track returning visitors by entering the timeframe and letting the software monitor the visits from individual IP addresses. 

The report should tell you how many people returned to your website and how many times they came back during that time. 

How Can I Increase My Returning Visitors?

Everyone likes to feel personally catered to, so customizing your pages is one great way to increase returning visitors. 

Little details that are helpful to the customer, such as showing their previously viewed products, your similar products, or linking to content related to their browsing history, can increase the number of visitors who use your website again. 

Time on Page

Time on page measures the amount of time (per session) in minutes or hours that a user spends on a specific page. This metric can help you determine if a page is helpful, or inversely, may be causing an issue in your customer’s journey.

What Counts as a Session?

A session is just the amount of time that they spend actively navigating around your website. During a session, a user may only view a single page, or they may go through multiple pages on your website. 

How Do I Track Time on Page?

Once you have determined which pages have the highest times, you analyze those pages for more details. Keep in mind that not every page should have a high time spent. For example, purchasing pages or pages where customers enter payment information should have low time spent, or customers may become frustrated with the complex process. 

Why Time on Page Isn’t Always Accurate

Although time on page can be a useful metric, it isn’t always the most accurate. When people leave a page open and switch to another tab, they aren’t consuming your content and still technically spending time on the page. 

Similarly, if they leave the page open while they take a break and do something else, it can skew your analysis. 

Conclusion

Comprehensive reports showing user engagement metrics are just the first step. By understanding the needs of your target audience, you can change your website landing pages to reflect better what your audience wants to know and interact with. 

It’s essential to measure your website’s user engagement to understand whether your website and landing pages make the most of the visitors’ attention. Before you can add value to your company and website, you must know what the people want. 

Kissmetrics provides the analyses and reports you need to measure customer engagement with your company’s website. Contact us today.

 

Sources:

5 Engagement Metrics That’ll Help Improve Your Search Rankings | Neilpatel.com

Average page depth | Adobe Analytics | Adobe.com

What is ‘Pages Per Session’ in Google Analytics & How Do I Increase It? | Databox.com

UTM Tracking for the Modern Marketer

 

 

 

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) tracking is a “must-have” in digital marketing and analysis, regardless of industry. If your company has a website, you’ll want to know as much as possible about the people who are visiting and how to convert them into customers.

In this post we look at UTM tracking and address what it is, how it works, and how it can benefit your company. 

What Is UTM Tracking?

Essentially, UTM tracking allows analytics tools to see where website visitors are coming from. With customized URLs distributed in different marketing campaigns, you can see which campaigns are successful. That information can provide crucial insights into what exactly your users value and what prompts them to visit your website.

What Does UTM Tracking Do?

UTM tracking performs various functions by letting you know where your users are learning about your website and what is prompting them to visit. Often, this happens through ad campaigns, but people can come from all sorts of places, like from an influencer’s Twitter account. 

Tracks Social Marketing Campaigns

Knowing your user base is critical in digital marketing, and understanding where to find your customers is a big part of that. Comparing social media campaigns with A/B testing can provide key insights into your customers’ personas, their interests, and which social platforms they frequent. For example, depending on their demographic, you might find that promotional ads on Facebook attract more visitors than ads on Twitter or vice versa. 

Provides Traffic and Conversion Data

Instead of just seeing how many people visit your website every day, UTM tracking allows you to analyze where those users are coming from and which ones become customers. 

With UTM tracking, you might see plenty of people come from a Twitter post, but notice that the majority of visitors who purchase a product actually stem from your email marketing campaign. Then, depending on your business goals, you can use that information to decide where to ramp up your marketing. 

Test Individual Messages

Suppose you conduct an A/B test and you track the link provided in the A email and see that it is generating very few visits over a given period. You’ll probably conclude that your customer base is not responding well to your A campaign. 

From there, you and your marketing team can strategize different ways to reach customers and launch the B email campaign with a separate URL and different wording or formatting. 

Again, the ability to know which messages are generating the most revenue for your brand is vital for your marketing team to use as a template for future content. 

What Are UTM Tracking Values?

There are five UTM tracking values. In an analytics tool, you enter the established values, and the tool will generate customized URLs with the parameters that you input. This makes it easy to compare email campaigns versus Facebook ads.

An example URL with tracking values is:

http://www.acme.com/landingpage?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweet&utm_term=accounting+software&utm_content=buyer-guide+A&utm_campaign=q4+leadgen

We’ll go into the specific tracking values within that URL below. 

Campaign Sources

The first part of the example URL says “utm_source=twitter.” This section refers to the website at which the users began before visiting your landing page. 

When generating a URL, the first field asks for the source of your URL. 

Campaign Mediums

The second part of the example URL says “utm_medium=tweet.” This part refers to the campaign medium

When generating a URL, the second field asks for the medium, meaning the platform where the users will receive this URL. In the example, the users are directed to your website through a Twitter ad.

Campaign Terms

The third part of the example URL says “utm_term=accounting+software.” This section refers to the paid keywords in your campaign. 

When generating a URL, the third field asks for the keywords of your campaign.

Campaign Content

The second to last part of the example URL says “utm_content=bu yer-guide A.” That part refers to the campaign content. 

When generating a URL, the second to last field asks for the content of your campaign, meaning the wording you’re using or how you want to differentiate this particular post. In this instance, it’s your buyer’s guide.

Campaign Names

Finally, the last part of the example URL is “utm_campaign=q4+leadgen.” This refers to the campaign name. 

When generating a URL, the last field asks for the name of your campaign. This detail is especially important to help you distinguish between multiple campaigns run through the same source, like two email campaigns with different wording. 

How Do I Create UTM Tracking Parameters?

By using a specialized tool, your company can generate parameters for tracking URLs. Though they will all take the visitor to the same landing page, the URLs will vary depending on the parameters that you set in the tool.

Once these URLs have been generated, your analytics tool will record which is used by visitors to your landing page. 

Keep in mind that the visitor will not see any of this behind-the-scenes tracking despite the distinctive URLs. Instead, they’ll always click through to the same landing page.

How Do I Use the Data From UTM Tracking?

The data from UTM tracking can inform your company about user preferences, alternative websites they frequent, which types of promotional offers they respond to, and the wording that brings them to your landing or home page. 

How Can I Use UTM Tracking to Optimize My Marketing?

You can search the URLs used during a given timeframe using a product analytics tool and see which of your campaigns successfully attracted visitors to the website and which ones you need to take a second look at before continuing. 

How Can I Use UTM Tracking to Assess Social Media Success?

UTM tracking can help you analyze social media success in a few different ways, as we explore below. 

Measure ROI

You know how much money you spent on your Twitter ad. When you’re able to track the people who click through the link on that ad and see if they purchase your products or services, you can balance the increase in revenue with the costs of hiring a writer, designer and paying Twitter to promote your brand’s ad.

Refine Your KPIs

With the data provided by UTM tracking, you can test out your ideas with concrete results and see how effective your marketing strategies are. With these numbers, you can define key performance indicators to reflect your business goals better to align with your results.

Track Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Hiring an influencer to promote your brand is becoming a reliable source of new visitors and customers for many companies. However, it can be difficult to tell just how many of an influencer’s hundreds of thousands of followers are purchasing your product simply because they heard about it from the influencer or somewhere else. 

With UTM tracking, you can give your influencer a customized URL and keep track of the people who click through from their post, ensuring that you get an accurate count of your revenue from their influence. 

Be Consistent with Tags

Consistency is critical, especially when you want to publish posts for returning customers. 

Discovery by new users is great, but maintaining existing relationships is critical. For example, people often follow specific tags, and UTM tracking allows you to ensure that your posts are appropriately tagged so that your audience will see them. 

Conduct A/B Tests

When you aren’t sure which call-to-action will be most effective or are trying a new slogan for your brand, you can see which is more effective by using an A/B test

This type of test directly compares two posts that differ only in content to see which one attracts more customers to your website. 

Use Tracking Tools

There are plenty of other tracking tools that work with UTM parameters to tell you more than where your visitors came from. These URLs can also help you compile information about your user base, including their locations, ages, preferences, and other data that can inform the content your brand creates and the services you provide. 

Conclusion

UTM tracking is a powerful way to hone your marketing campaigns with surgical precision. Finding out what works and what doesn’t is more than half the battle. When you know which influencers bring in the most traffic or where your users satisfy their social media needs, you’ll be able to target them with your ad campaigns in the future. 

Check out our website to learn more about how Kissmetrics can help you collect and make the most of your user data.

 

Sources:

How URL Tracking Works and Why It’s Important | Dashthis.com

URL Tracking – Sprout Social Support | Sprout Social

A Guide to URL Tracking- Understanding Where Your Traffic Comes From | Gray Group Intl.

What is Product Analytics? Definition & Overview

 

 

 

As a member of the product team, a considerable weight lies on your shoulders. Your task is to develop what your company is selling, marketing, and relying on to give them a competitive advantage and generate revenue. 

If that wasn’t stressful enough, you’re also responsible for driving adoption and usage, and customer interviews are only as good as the questions asked. 

Making the right decisions on what to build and how to build it requires the right data. With the correct data at your fingertips, you can make smarter decisions, influence stakeholders, and enhance your team’s credibility within the company. 

What is Product Analytics, and Why Is It Important?

The term product analytics refers to capturing and analyzing quantitative data through embedded tools that record how customers interact with a product. 

Product analytics is vital for many reasons. As you know better than anyone, creating a product is a complex process — hundreds of decisions go into building it, and sometimes it can be difficult to tell if what you’re doing is leading you to the result you want.

Product analytics helps you:

  • Gain a deeper understanding of your customers.
  • Gain insights that are difficult to get from qualitative data, such as surveys, customer feedback, etc.
  • Set goals when adding new features. 
  • Gauge your customer experience.

While thousands of successful products were developed over the years with intuition and experience, today, data science and analytics provide us a more innovative and accurate path to decision-making. 

You can get timely information on how well you’re meeting user needs. You can measure individual features’ success and base product decisions on metrics that support your larger business goals. When used correctly, analytics can transform your ability to develop ideas and design great user experiences.

Data Points and Insight You Can Pull From Product Analytics

Product analytics allows you to address crucial questions like:

  • Who is using your product?
  • How much usage do certain product features get?
  • Which of your marketing efforts are driving the best users?
  • How are customers using the product?
  • What are the characteristics of your most engaged customers?
  • Where are your users getting stuck in your onboarding funnel?
  • How do you diagnose issues, reduce churn and personalize interaction for users?

Product analytics shows businesses what their users do — not just what they say they do. These are known as revealed behaviors, and they are highly telling. Customers aren’t very adept at predicting or assessing their behavior (consider any given New Year’s Resolution). Having analytics allows product teams to dive deeper than human-error-prone surveys and questionable user interviews. High-quality data and insights lead to more profitable decisions — plain and simple. 

How To Use Product Analytics To Develop Sales and Marketing Strategies

Data can help inform the strategies employed by every team and get everyone pulling in the same direction. Because there are facts (i.e. data points) that tell you which direction that should be. But the data is only as valuable as the insight drawn from it. So training your sales and marketing teams on how to use the product analytics tool so they can read the data it produces will help drive synchronicity within the company. It will also reduce their dependence on the engineering and product teams.

Product analytics platforms perform two core functions that help companies to answer essential questions about their users:

  • Tracking data: Capturing events, actions, and visits
  • Analyzing data: Visualizing data through reports and dashboards


Here are some examples of how product analytics helps align sales and marketing strategies with product objectives: 

  • Acquisition: Product analytics can tell you where your customer comes from — which channels they use primarily, which users are the best prospects, and the optimal costs for acquiring each user.
  • Activation: Each experience a user has with your product on the journey to becoming a paying customer is known as a micro-conversion. The point at which users fully connect with your offering and realize its value is called the moment they decide to purchase. Product analytics can help you optimize these steps.
  • Retention: This is perhaps the most crucial metric to understand: are customers staying or leaving? On a basic level, product analytics answers this question. But it also tells you the behaviors indicative of a user staying. Which features do they use? How long did it take them to realize the value of your product? Product analytics will show you your stickiest features as well as which cause users issues. So you can prioritize what to build and fix.
  • Referral: The only thing better than a satisfied customer is a whole bunch of them. Product analytics enables you to create a tracking plan to measure your customer loyalty through their actions.
  • Revenue: Ultimately, it’s all about how you make money with your product. Product analytics can tell you who your most valuable customers are, the features they use and the products they bu. It will also tell you at a very basic level, how much money you’re making.

The more data teams get back from product analytics, the better the product iterations will be and the more aligned the marketing campaigns and sales efforts will be to those product iterations. 

Most Common Analytics Reports and How They Can Help

A product analytics platform works by tracking the actions users take within your product:logins, features used, engagement, and other activities involved in navigating a digital product. 

Here are some of the most common analytics reports that will help you analyze your data:

Cohort Analysis

A Cohort Analysis allows you to segment your customers into groups (i.e. cohorts) based on demographic information, acquisition channel, job title, industry, or any other way you want to group your customers. This report will tell how well each of these cohorts does within your product and can help sales and marketing teams assess their target audiences. 

Behavioral Segmentation

Behavioral Segmentation is another standard analytics report that offers much greater refinement than demographic segmentation by letting you sort your users according to the actions they take within your product. You not only see who your very best customers are — you know what they do. You also see the actions taken by power users and your customers who churne

This report helps inform the product team on what they should build and fix, and to prioritize that never-ending list.

Event-Based Sequences

Event-Based Sequences provides you with endless flexibility in taking advantage of all the data you have gathered through auto-capture. Different teams can assign multiple labels to the same auto-captured interactions — even retroactively — without modifying that specific data. 

These labels allow you to put events into context to answer questions and prove or disprove multiple hypotheses without going back to the source and rewriting the code. Simply put, your dataset stays clean yet accessible. 

How Kissmetrics Helps Behavioral Product Analysis

Kissmetrics is a person-based analytics tool that will help you to identify, understand, and improve the metrics that drive your SaaS product. We make it simple to get the information you need to make better product decisions. 

Other analytic platforms emphasize page views or isolated events, meaning they will tell you how many times a page was accessed or how many times a specific event was performed. But that does not connect the activity to your users or how they use your product.

The Bottom Line

Product analytics expose the raw reality of how customers use a product — or even a particular feature. Tapping into these metrics could be the key to your product’s growth and, ultimately, a happier customer.

 

Sources: 

E-commerce Market Share, Growth & Trends Report, 2020-2027.

What Is Intuition, And How Do We Use It?

Why we make (and break) New Year’s resolutions, and 4 tips to help you achieve your goals | Norwalk.

How to Develop and Measure a User Adoption

 

 

 

User adoption is a crucial element for all new products and services. In order to maximize your user adoption, you’ll need to do some research. That research entails looking at specific user metrics, understanding your target audience, and tailoring features to work smarter, not harder. 

This article explores why user adoption is essential for your business, how to measure it accurately, and how to improve your rate. 

What Is User Adoption?

User adoption is when a new customer sees value in your company’s products or features and then implements them into their daily tasks. This process, sometimes known as onboarding, describes a user’s willingness to learn and acclimate to a new product and continue using it after dealing with the learning curve. 

Depending on the effort it takes to learn to use your company’s products, they may decide that the effort is not worth the benefits. A high user adoption rate indicates that your company is bringing on new users who keep using the service. 

Why Is User Adoption Important?

User adoption shows your product is providing value to customers and marketing is keeping users invested in your brand. Also, higher retention through user adoption leads to higher customer lifetime value. 

When it’s easier to attract new customers because of your brand reputation, you’re going to see an increase in profit. 

How Do You Develop User Adoption?

Developing user adoption means focusing on your customer’s goals through product-led growth. By using your product or service, those customers seek to accomplish specific goals. As long as your service is furthering their goals, they’re more likely to continue buying from your brand or using your product. It’s crucial to research those customer goals to ensure that your product is always best for your customer.

How Do You Measure User Adoption? 

Measuring user adoption requires a team to choose their intent for a product, select the metrics that best reflect their goal, begin with a baseline, and then monitor ensuing differences in user adoption rate as changes are implemented. 

That sounds complex, but by breaking down the steps involved, your team can gather crucial information about the audience to which your product appeals and their expectations. 

Pick a Goal

First things first, you must know what user adoption looks like for your company. SaaS companies need to monitor users who begin a paid subscription, install the software, and continually use it for their needs. Car companies might monitor repeated sales of units to enterprise clients.

Select Metrics

The metrics your company monitors largely revolve around the goal your team created in step 1. To track your user adoption rates, you’ll need to know your number of new users and your total number of users.

You’ll need powerful product analytics tools like Kissmetrics to help you and your team view these valuable insights. 

Develop Your Tracking Plan

Once your team has decided which metrics to monitor, they’ll need to lay out their plan to track users. They should list the tracked events, how often they will be recording their tracking, which tool they’ll be using, and the overall timeline for monitoring. 

This is also the step where your team learns to look for any flaws or weaknesses that their plan should account for.

Capture Your Baseline Metrics

Most pictures show a before and after when they want to capture major change. It’s essential for your team to take the before picture by establishing a baseline of customer metrics for whatever events they plan to track in a given period. Otherwise, your team has nothing to compare user activities to in the future or to see how changes have caused a distinct difference. 

Implement Changes

After the baseline is in place, your team can make any changes that they brainstormed back in step 2. This is where your company has the chance to monitor how those changes are implemented and whether users are responding favorably. 

You’ll want to watch a range of customers, both new and returning, to ensure that your product or service is adequately meeting their goals and expectations. 

Repeat

The changes have been implemented, and now it’s time to re-evaluate your metrics to see any differences in your user adoption rate. Depending on what challenges your users face in using your products or services, these changes may look different for every company. 

Measuring the same metrics and comparing them against your baseline will demonstrate whether or not the changes had a tangible effect on the user adoption rate.

Sometimes changes can have the opposite intended effect. Simplifying your app by getting rid of a certain process might seem initially appealing, but if it turns out to be a core feature that users frequently relied on, it could cause a problem. 

Users might discontinue their business with your product because it no longer helps them achieve their desired goals.

It’s also important to remember that initial fluctuations in user adoption rate right after implementing changes may not reflect users’ true intentions. Instead, a sharp drop in user adoption rate might show that users were intimidated by the changes and weren’t looking for software that requires different processes to operate.

How Can You Improve User Adoption?

Improving user adoption doesn’t have to be complicated. The most important thing is to understand your audience beginning with tracking user metrics such as new users and total users and identifying potential problems if the two begin to fluctuate or drop.

By setting up measures to address those problems, your brand will become known for its positive attitude and beneficial services. 

Track Metrics

One of the best ways to improve any part of your product, service, or brand’s reputation is to track your metrics. It’s impossible to know how users appreciate your products or have negative experiences unless you have a team assigned to track metrics. 

Guesswork has no place in business, and with metrics, tangibly measuring how users interact with your products is possible. 

Help Users Identify Key Features and Benefits of Your Product

Like many things in life, perception is vital for your brand. When you ensure that potential users know what your product offers, they’ll know how it compares to the competition. 

By advertising the features and benefits of your product, you’ll instill the idea that your product provides value. Perception automatically adds value to your brand as a whole. 

Help Users with Technical Implementation of Your Product

Learning new things costs a fair amount of time and brainpower, two things that your users want to avoid as much as possible. By assisting users with the implementation of your product and making it straightforward to operate, you reduce the amount of effort needed to continue using the product and accomplish customers’ goals. 

Conduct User Experience Testing

Like tracking metrics, conducting user experience testing is key to understanding where your users are coming from. Without seeking their opinions, your teams will be taking shots in the dark to address criticism of your products or services. User experience testing allows your teams to experience the same things that users do. 

If your app is a hassle to set up, this is where you’ll learn that as well as ways to simplify the process. 

Analyze Customer Interaction and Make Relevant Changes

As noted in the previous section, knowing your customers is critical when developing a product or service to meet their expectations. Tracking user adoption metrics isn’t a one-time project; instead, it needs to be an ongoing effort over time. 

Your company will add updates and new features or get rid of outdated ones, and you’ll need your team to stay on top of customer opinions regarding these changes. 

Conclusion

Understanding product analytics and user adoption is a critical element of ensuring your product’s success. By comprehending audience expectations and monitoring how many users continue to utilize your company’s product or service to achieve their goals, you and your teams can brainstorm better ways to appeal to your customers and bring them products they’ll be happy to continue paying for.

Need to better measure user adoption? Kissmetrics’ website has more information about essential metrics for connecting with your customers and tailoring your business for a better appeal. 

 

Sources:

How To Develop And Measure A Product Adoption Strategy | Mixpanel

Definition – What is User Adoption? | Tallyfy.com

What is User Adoption – User Adoption in SaaS | UserIq.com

3 Essential KPIs for Product Analytics

 

 

 

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are used to measure various aspects of your products and the users who use them. Every company has business objectives and needs accurate data to measure where they are successful and where they’ve fallen short.

Kissmetrics breaks down what KPIs are, how to choose the right ones for your company, the top metrics to track, and how you can leverage the information they provide.

What is a KPI?

A KPI is any quantifiable method of evaluating a product, service, user, employee, or business. In order to evaluate your current KPIs, you need to track multiple metrics. Metrics are objective measurements (i.e. data) of certain aspects of your business like revenue and churn  that you can meaningfully compare against other results. So KPIs are the indicators aligned with your business objectives (i.e. the big broad idea) and metrics are the smaller components (i.e. the details) that add up to the KPIs. 

You can use metrics to monitor your KPIs and see whether your current strategies are successful. Metrics can measure anything, but KPIs measure your success. 

How is KPI Calculated?

Robust product analytics tools like Kissmetrics calculate your KPIs for you. All you need to do is enter your parameters, set up your event tracking and wait for the data to come in. 

When checking to see how your business’s progress is matching up against your targets, the real-time data from KPIs are plugged into a simple formula. Your current KPI value minus the baseline divided by your target minus the baseline. 

Tracking KPIs in real-time lets your teams react on the spot to effective or not-so effective strategies by watching their progress. 

How do I Know Which KPIs to Track?

Choosing the right KPIs for your company can take multiple steps. You want enough information to get a complete picture of your users and what they value in your products, and you don’t want to be bombarded with numbers and graphs that don’t mean anything. 

Depending on your industry, some KPIs may stand out as more essential than others. However, some KPIs are always relevant, and we’ll be addressing those below. 

What are 3 Essential KPIs for Product Analysis?

While there are many different KPIs available, this article will cover three of the essential KPIs for product analysis. Depending on your company’s industry and the types of products or services on offer, these KPIs may be tweaked or swapped out to achieve your business goals. 

Monthly Recurring Revenue

One of the basic measurements is monthly recurring revenue or MRR. It determines how much money your business brings in monthly by totaling the amounts from goods and services sold. It’s an essential KPI for SaaS companies offering subscriptions to see if customers are returning or churning. 

Revenue doesn’t take expenses into account, but it does give you information about whether your product is selling. 

Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures how much money your company spends to attract a new user. Most businesses find that attracting new users is more expensive than retaining existing users, but if you want your business to grow, you’ll need to broaden your user base.

This metric incorporates costs from advertisements, employing a marketing team, employing a sales team, and any additional creative costs. To understand the budget for your customer acquisition costs, you’ll need to calculate the following KPI: customer lifetime value.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value, or CLV, estimates how much a single customer will contribute financially to your company throughout their purchasing life. In an ideal world, your product or service would be something that a customer would go on buying for the rest of their life. Since that rarely happens, CLV calculates how long the customer is expected, on average, to buy your product.

This KPI demonstrates the average amount of spending from one customer prior to ending their subscription or discontinuing their business. It directly ties in to the customer acquisition costs because if you know what a single customer is projected to contribute, you can calculate the maximum amount of CAC while still retaining a profit. 

What are Common Biases I Should Look Out for When Measuring KPIs?

It’s important to remember that KPIs are only as valuable as your interpretations of the data. Humans are complicated beings, and their behavior is difficult to simplify into nice, concrete numbers. That’s why it’s essential to account for common biases when your company releases a new product or service. 

Early Adopters

One bias to watch out for when you release a new version or product is that of the early adopters. Early adopters are often people who are devoted to your company and have committed to snapping up everything you put out. 

While these users are a valuable part of your user base, their enthusiasm can throw off your measurements.

Since you can’t base your assumptions about most of your users around the loyalty of your top fans, you will need to measure how soon users begin adopting your update or separate old users from new users. 

Novelty

People love new things, right? When you release the latest and greatest gadget or feature, plenty of people will flock to the new technology. As a result, your KPIs for the first few days or weeks will likely skyrocket with a new release but then take a sharp dip immediately after. That doesn’t mean that people suddenly dislike your product.

Humans are naturally curious, and many will try something just to see what it is. But, unfortunately, that doesn’t tell you anything about whether or not they value the enhancements to your product.  

Some find the new product or feature valuable enough to incorporate into their lives, but most enjoy the novelty and then forget about it when the next big thing hits the shelves.

Default Settings

You may have noticed many users tend to stick with default settings. Accordingly, if you implement different default settings, your KPIs might show how users interact with your product in new ways.

Default settings can be a good thing and a bad thing. Giving users automatic options to interact with your products may be the inspiration they need to see how the product adds value to their lives. Alternatively, they may not like the default settings and stop using the product altogether. 

When you give users a default, instead of allowing customization from the get-go, you’ll notice that many users either don’t know enough to change their settings to other options or don’t want to put in the effort. Don’t let your KPIs trick you into thinking that people have suddenly changed how they use your product, though.

How Can I Reach My KPI Targets?

Your company’s KPI targets may need to be adjusted to incorporate realistic expectations depending on your industry. However, by continually measuring your KPIs, you can understand what your users want and modify your products to reach those goals. KPIs are constantly in flux because your company is growing and changing to meet customer demands.

It’s also important to note that not every KPI will be successful. Ideally, you’d meet and exceed all of your goals, but sometimes that isn’t the case. If you are having trouble meeting a KPI, that’s an area for you to hone in on and look for ways to improve. What’s stopping you from reaching the target? Is it something within your control? 

How Can Tracking KPIs Make My Product Better?

KPIs provide relevant insights for companies to improve their products by measuring how well your brand is living up to your goals. When you create realistic KPIs, you can watch to see if your actions are pushing you closer to success by achieving your KPIs, how quickly you’re succeeding, or if you need to rethink your strategies. 

With the real-time information about your success in tracked initiatives, you can make data-driven decisions to benefit your company and make your product better. Plus, you can ensure that your product continues to improve by setting and updating benchmarks so you never become stagnant.

Tracking KPIs also helps you find areas in need of improvement so that you can make those fixes for an overall better product. 

Conclusion

Knowing which KPIs to monitor is a crucial part of achieving your business goals. While all quantifiable metrics provide information, it’s essential to choose measurements that you can leverage to add value to your company. Otherwise, the data pouring in can become overwhelming and worthless. 

Visit Kissmetrics for more information on measuring KPIs to reach your business goals. 

 

Sources:

The Role of Analytics | SVPG.com

Feb 22, 2019, 15 Key Product Management Metrics and KPIs | Altexsoft.com

Customer Acquisition Cost: How to Calculate, Reduce & Improve It | Neilpatel.com