Metrics for Measuring Launch Success

By David Ronald

One of our clients recently asked for suggestions what metrics they should be using to measure the efficacy of their product launches.

We addressed this question by considering the various stages of their buyer’s journey—the path that a buyer takes, starting from the recognition of a problem or need, followed by the evaluation process, all the way to a purchase and beyond

(See my post on Mapping Content to Your Buyer's Journey for more information about this interesting topics.)

In this blog post I'm going to share the shortlist that we came up with. 

Awareness

• Downloads / Invitation Signups—a lead magnet on your website (such as an eBook) can be used as an early signal of interest in your product. You can also consider using an invitation to preview the upcoming product during the pre-launch phase as early indicator of awareness. 
• Website Traffic—measure traffic to your website throughout the launch timeframe to learn which specific launch activities “move the needle”. 
• Promotional Channel Metrics—look at promotional channels metrics, such as click-through-rate in your advertising, email, and social campaigns, to gain an idea of the effectiveness of your positioning and messaging. 
• News Coverage—news coverage can be an indicator of awareness but be mindful that this is a signal of the effectiveness of your public relations, not necessarily an increase in awareness of your potential buyers.

Marketers refer to this stage of the buyer's journey as Top of Funnel

Consideration

• Free Trial Signups—a free trial is a great way to assess interest in your product and provide opportunities for prospects to discover value. It can also be the beginning of a nurture campaign that exposes prospects to more functionality in the product and offer opportunities for in-person engagement.
• Product Demos—a product trial that involves engaging with someone in your sales or sales team is a strong indicator of interest and intent.
• Community Involvement—tracking the participation in your community be prospects can be a good signal, if a strong and active community is a component of your go-to-market motion.

Marketers refer to this stage of the buyer's journey as Middle of Funnel

Decision

• Conversion Rate—the ratio of leads that convert to customers is one of the most important metrics to track as it provides insight into the efficacy of the entire product marketing effort.
• Time to Close—the average time that it takes a deal to close can be a valuable metric to track, even if isn’t truly an indicator of the success of a product launch.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)—the amount of money that it takes to acquire a typical customer is an important metric and indicates how challenging it is for your business to acquire new customers.

Marketers refer to this stage of the buyer's journey as Bottom of Funnel.

It’s crucial, however, to proactively define a timeframe for the launch. Why? Because it’s not a level playing field if, for example, a previous launch ran for 120 days, while your more recent launch only lasted 90 days. 

The buyer's journey doesn't end once a purchase has been made. Once a buyer has converted to a paying customer, the following metrics are relevant:

Retention

• Customer Usage—tracking customer usage over time, such as monthly active users, is a is a good signal of how much customers perceive value in your value. Some companies excel at acquiring new customers but do a less excellent job of keeping them coming back.

Referrals

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)—determining evaluating how many customers are likely to recommend your product to others is a valuable metric for product markets to track. Although it doesn’t measure the efficacy of the launch itself it does signal the effectiveness of your product marketing overall

Last, but not least, another good way to assess the efficacy of your product launch is with qualitative feedback that can be obtained through surveys, one-on-one interviews, and focus groups. 

This should be both internal and external:

• External feedback—collect feedback from customers and prospects to get reactions and constructive notes about the positioning, channels, and other launch elements.
• Internal feedback—collect feedback from internal audiences, including sales reps, marketers, executives, and product managers.

You can use this feedback to identify opportunities for improvement. You could even consider using these as KPIs for our next launch.

Conclusion

Launching a product successfully can be challenging, as the high failure rates described earlier demonstrate.

By setting clear goals around launches, aligning your product, sales and marketing teams around these objectives, and ultimately measuring performance against these metrics will help increase the probability that your next product launch will be your best ever.

Did we leave anything out? If so, leave us a comment.

Thanks for reading.