North Star Metric- Will this star navigate your brand to success?

Written by Vanshitha M

Published on Oct 10, 2023

North Star Metric

Are you, as a brand ensuring the long-term success of your brand? Is your product or vision aligning with your brand’s success? If you wish to know the answer, get North Star metrics.

 

What is the whole idea of the North Star metric?

 

North Star metrics simplify complex business goals so each and everyone can work to achieve them.
An example of a North Star metric for e-commerce can be the number of weekly customers purchasing their first order or Customer Lifetime Value.

How can you find your north star?

Screenshot 2023-10-11 at 6.46.41 PM

Source: finmark

It depends on your brand. In the market there can be three types of aims:

  1. Attention: These brands look to grab the attention of the users. It includes social media like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
  2. Transactional: These brands can have a financial transaction from users as the goal. It includes e-commerce apps like Amazon, and Flipkart or food delivery apps like Swiggy, zomato.
  3. Productivity: These brands have the aim to improve the productivity of users. It can include Zoho and Slack.

Understand your business then use these components to choose one metric!

  1. It should align with your Brand’s preset value
  2. It should drive your revenue.
  3. It should measure customer value.

But this doesn’t mean that you can have only one North Star metric, Multiple North Star metric is also seen in a few businesses.

 

In a nutshell, the North Star or Polaris is the brightest star in the sky which is also visible to the naked eye and was used for thousands of years for navigation. The North Star metrics in the same way should direct your employees and customers to your values and beliefs by breaking down the final goal and aim into smaller chunks of targets.

You can find the perfect North Star through an in-depth analysis of your brand and through customer feedback.

Why North Star?

North Star metric was used by companies in Silicon Valley to identify and measure their growth in the marketplace. They focussed on sustainable and long-term growth rather than superficial growth.

  1. Communication and alignment: North Star metrics can establish the right tone of your company to the employees and users making sure employees work to reach that goal and users know exactly who they are buying from establishing credibility.
  2. Focus: This ensures that all stakeholders make a decision over product, and marketing to narrow down to their goal. Their target audience is also narrowed down.
  3. User Engagement: North Star metrics can be the best way to know your consumers and bridge the gap whenever they have bad feedback.

Source: finmark

But when you realign your company’s needs and find out your North Star metric isn’t working out well for you then you can always take a step back and reevaluate

Pitfalls of NSM(North Star Metric)

  1. Short-term growth: When a company focuses only on NSM, it can lose sight of the short-term development and strategy of the company.
  2. Wrong destination: If you as a brand choose the wrong North Star and pour all the efforts into the wrong goal, it would be tough to reevaluate the scenario.
  3. Less creativity: When the focus paradigm is shited to only one perspective, it can also mean not trying something that is innovative.

What is Retention?

Retention is the concept of user engagement with your products or services. A 5% increase in your retention can boost your profits by 25%-95%. Retention can be the right marketing strategies, incentives, and coupons to encourage people to convert to buyers.

What is a Winback?

Source: LinkedIn

This is the marketing tactics used by companies where win back has scored the highest

It’s a procedure of reactivating the clientele who stopped purchasing from you or moved to your competition. Winbacks can be Customer feedback, identifying churn rates, and making appropriate changes. Reactivating an old customer can get you 60% more profit than onboarding a new user!

 

However, most companies focus on retention because winbacks usually cost more in revenue since familiarity with the brand and switch can make them have lower expectations of your product.

How can you measure winback and retention?

There are multiple KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) we can use to understand your audience like retention rate, churn rate, winback rate where each metric analyses customer behaviour and lets a brand know its place in the market.

As a brand, answer each of these questions in the funnel as a North Star metric such as “How many people more should be aware of my brand by the end of this month?”

  • Media-84%
  • Professional services: 84%
  • IT services: 81%
  • Insurance: 83%
  • Software: 86%
  • E-commerce: 38%
  • Fintech: 78%

Source: ExplodingTopics

Source: ExplodingTopics

Conclusion:

Experts have said that the North Star metrics focus only on more retention than win back due to which it’s important as a brand you review your products and services by taking as much customer feedback as possible and make proactive changes to the brand. Old and new clients, everyone are key in a company’s growth! Fostering them is not easy and we at Retention10 can help you with Retention as well as Winback! Book a demo call with us right away!

Why Retention10?

Through the entire article, we figured out about North Star metrics and how many KPIs can help you with retention and winback but the secret to customer retention and too many! Join us at Retention10 so we can unravel marketing mysteries together!

Thanks for reading.

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Vanshitha Munipally
( Research & Content Marketer )

To get your customized High Retention or Low Winback solutions, Do write to us :

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