In this post, you’ll learn the 11 sales and retention stats and business metrics examples to help you maximize revenue, and improve your customers’ experience.
If you’re not tracking metrics, you’re missing out on massive growth opportunities. You might be investing too much time and money into offerings that aren’t as profitable as they could be for your business.
Knowing these business numbers will help you forecast your revenue, evaluate your current offerings, and make data-driven decisions that contribute to the overall health of your company.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” -Peter Drucker
Tracking Metrics – Which Ones Matter for Your Business?
Whether you’re running a recurring revenue business or not, you’ll benefit from learning about membership metrics, customer lifetime metrics, and so much more. Watch to get the details:
1. Daily and Monthly Sales Trends:
Whether you have an evergreen offer or you run launches, knowing the number of sales and the income you’ve generated in the past 30 days is extremely useful.
Keeping an eye on daily sales helps you track conversions from ad campaigns, email promotions, and other regular occurrences.
The best part of tracking metrics like these is that you know exactly how much money will hit your business bank account so you can budget accordingly.
2. Monthly Recurring Revenue:
If you run a monthly membership site, then knowing your monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is crucial. It’s the pulse of your membership business, and this single number tells you whether you’re on track to reaching your revenue goals or not.
This is the income you earned from a recurring membership site or offering, and excludes income from one-time product sales or payment plans.
Your MRR helps you understand your business metrics and cashflow better, so you can re-invest into your business with confidence.
3. Annual Recurring Revenue:
The annual recurring revenue (ARR) membership metric is essentially the same as the monthly version, except calculated yearly. It could also come into play if you offer a yearly membership recurring subscription option instead of a monthly payment option.
You could calculate the ARR by multiplying your monthly recurring revenue by 12, or if you offer a yearly plan you can calculate it directly.
4. Refunds and Cancellations:
Every business experiences refunds and cancellations, so it’s important to keep your eyes open and watch for trends so you can address issues proactively.
If you offer one-off courses or products you might track the number of refunds after a launch or over a specific period of time (say your refund period).
When it comes to recurring membership site KPIs, member cancellations are par for the course – but knowing what your average cancellation rate is and working to reduce it over time will help you keep your business healthy.
Need to improve your customer retention strategy?Here are 15 powerful gamification strategies you can implement to reduce your member cancellations.
5. Retention and churn rate:
Calculating member retention or churn rate helps you take your membership cancellation numbers and turn them into a percentage that’s easier to track and improve upon.
If you notice cancellations are highest after a specific number of months you can work to decrease cancellations with a retention campaign to help members make the most of their membership and prolong the length of their membership.
Your churn rate is calculated by looking at the percentage of members who cancel during a specific period (usually monthly for recurring memberships or yearly for annual). This does not take into account new members, since that skews your retention numbers.
6. Abandoned Carts:
Although abandoned carts might not seem like a significant key business metric to track, it can really affect your bottom line. Keeping track of how many people start the purchasing process but decide not to complete their order is a great way to spot when an offer isn’t converting.
Working to improve an offer or the sign up process can lead to higher sign up rates, and that makes for a healthier business over time.
You can also use AccessAlly to tag contacts who initiated the checkout process, but didn’t complete their order to target with an abandoned cart campaign to increase your overall conversions.
7. Customer Lifetime Value:
As far as business metrics examples go, the customer lifetime value (CLV) is probably the most talked about but least understood metric.
Tracking metrics like CLV means you know exactly how much, on average, each customer is worth to your business. That means you know exactly how much you can afford to spend to acquire a customer through paid channels, affiliate marketing, or other means.
It’s also a great membership metric to strive to improve upon: by keeping members engaged and happy for longer durations, you’ll automatically increase your CLV.
8. Free to Paid Conversion:
If you offer a free membership level, free trial, or perhaps you’ve implemented The Login Option™ Strategy, then you know that a certain percentage of free members will become paid members.
Knowing how many of your free community members turn into paying members can also help you budget and invest in growing your following.
The “free to paid conversion rate” is another great business metric example of a number that you can work to improve… by offering more perks, testing pricing, and running different promotions to get people to upgrade.
9. Projected Income:
If you run a recurring membership program, then you know that your MRR or your ARR give you the projected income of your business.
But tracking a metric like projected income that includes even more data points, like upcoming payment plans due and other forecasted metrics will help you gauge whether you need to work harder to grow your membership and budget for upcoming business expenses.
The only downside to tracking projected income is that it’s just that – a projection. It’s always possible that you’ll see people default on their payment plans, cancel memberships at a higher rate, or even see an influx of new paying members that will throw off the expected income.
10. Upsell Conversion Rate:
If you offer an upsell, an order bump, or even a downsell on your products then you will want to track the conversion rate of these additional offers.
Just like tracking the conversion rate from free trial to paid member, tracking the conversion rate at which people upgrade to additional levels or products helps you understand if your offers are hitting the mark.
Maybe you’re not explaining the value of the upsell clearly enough, or you might need to test a different price point. This is another business metric you can use to experiment with, and will increase your CLV over time once you figure out how to best serve your customers.
11. Member Engagement:
If you offer any type of online learning or membership site experience, then tracking member engagement will help you track the health of your offering.
Tracking member engagement will depend on what kind of experience you’ve put together: it could be the frequency of logins, membership points earned, content consumption, or a mix of these, and other key metrics.
You’ll need to decide what matters most when it comes to engagement in your membership site, since every site is different.
Start Tracking Metrics To Uncover Actionable Data For Your Business
Once you start tracking these metrics, you’ll be able to make informed, data-driven decision to improve your offerings, and grow your customer base.
We’ve been able to use these metrics to reduce shopping cart abandonment, increase our customer lifetime value and retention rates, and improve our onboarding experience to help our customers reach their goals even faster. It’s a win-win for everyone.
AccessAlly’s robust features make it incredibly easy for you to gather all your business performance metrics data, and more, using our membership plugin and the brand new LMS reporting dashboard. You can crunch the numbers right inside your membership site so you can easily access and analyze the tracking metrics and focus on what matters most – giving your customers the best possible experience you can.
If you enjoyed these membership metrics examples and you plan to start tracking metrics better in your business: please share this post on social media! We’d love to have more business owners tracking and growing together.
