Two very important things to building revenue and increasing growth are acquiring new customers, and keeping the old ones. Customer loyalty is just a step away from product or service advocacy. Marketing metrics can help keep track of who is new, what new demographics can be attracted to a given product, and what is keeping loyal customers happy. Often, executives who get too mired in the company’s bottom line lose sight of what they should be measuring and what can be put aside.

Marketing metrics for these two categories are varied – below are the fundamentals that a company should ensure that it is measuring.

Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty can be useful in a step toward advocacy – and that, in and of itself, can help recruit new customers. The most vital marketing metrics to measure loyalty must include NPS (Net Promoter Score), lifetime value, and retention versus abandonment rates. Determine which strategies have been implemented that have created a leveling off or increase in repeat revenue, versus that which has seen a drop in repeat business. There is a great advantage to using NPS – it enables the company to measure just how many customers are actively promoting one’s product versus how many detractors a company has. It also enables the company an opportunity on how, if possible, to get those detractors to either passively satisfied customers – if not to the level of loyal product enthusiasts who will promote a product via word-of-mouth. In fact, NPS is one of the biggest trends in measuring customer loyalty and retention rates.

New Customer Acquisition

Of course, a company can’t rely on customer loyalty to attract new customers. The marketing metrics used to determine what strategies are working effectively are also going to be different. Additionally, they will differ with the inclusion of internet marketing metrics for customer acquisition. However, the fundamentals should always include the cost spent to attract new customers versus the ROI, customer acquisition rates for new campaigns and old, awareness of how the customer came to the company for business, and CPA – cost per acquisition. It’s also important to get an idea of what attracted a customer to the company’s site or business in the first place, either fulfilling a curiosity or an attempt to fulfill a need. An additional consideration for internet marketing metrics with customer acquisition is to look at the money spent on SEO and PPC is effective in attracting new customers, or if it is just pouring money into a black hole with no significant results.

Having these fundamentals in marketing metrics is a good reminder of ways to ensure measuring is being done properly, and that the metrics are strong enough to help move the company in a direction of growth. Getting new customers, and keeping them, and measuring customer loyalty are the surefire ways to continue in an upward trend.