Many common retention metrics are fundamentally flawed and provide an inaccurate picture of customer engagement and loyalty, leading to misguided business decisions. This episode reveals 10 broken KPIs, why they lie to you, and what to track instead to make budget decisions, carry out performance reviews, or make strategy calls based on accurate data. Operators will learn to identify vanity metrics and implement more reliable data-driven approaches to truly understand the health of their retention programs.
Key takeaways
Rethink ESP attribution: Recognize that email and SMS platforms often overcredit their own channels; use more sophisticated attribution models to understand true channel impact.
Scrutinize LTV calculations: Audit your Lifetime Value (LTV) math for common errors that lead to inaccurate projections and strategies, focusing on predictive metrics that indicate long-term program health.
Beware of bot traffic: Account for bot-driven clicks and inflated open rates that skew engagement data, especially given recent privacy changes that make traditional open rate tracking unreliable.
Create your own benchmarks: Disregard generic industry benchmarks for retention KPIs, as they rarely reflect your specific business context or current market dynamics; instead, focus on internal trends and predictive metrics.
Prioritize data integrity: Regularly evaluate your data sources and collection methods to ensure accuracy, particularly for financial and strategic decisions that rely on retention performance.
Is your dashboard lying to you? Download our free vanity metrics cheat sheet: https://ecomemailmarketer.com/sendit-vanitymetricsThe metrics every retention team reports up to the CFO might be quietly making the company worse.Jimmy and Chase break down 10 hot takes on retention KPIs, why most of them are broken, and what to track instead. From inflated opens and bot-driven clicks to fake attribution, vanity list sizes, and the metrics leadership doesn't even know to ask for, this one's worth forwarding to your team and your founder. If you're making budget decisions, performance reviews, or strategy calls on numbers built before iOS privacy and bot click farms, you're probably operating on data that's lying to you.EP 87: We pulled the data on every retention metric brands track, here are the 10 broken onesHere's what they get into:- The bot click problem nobody is correcting for- How ESP attribution overcredits email and SMS- Why revenue per recipient hides what actually drove the win- Why industry benchmarks are mostly useless- The LTV math almost every brand is doing wrong- The metrics that predict program health (and nobody tracks)Thank you our friends at Omnisend, Superscale and eCom Email Certified for sponsoring the podcast!Omnisend is an all in one eCommerce email and SMS marketing automation platform that enables marketers to engage customers and drive sales through personalized experiences. https://www.omnisend.com/sendit/Superscale is the first AI agent built for social marketing. It connects to your Meta, TikTok, and Google ad accounts, researches your competitors, and turns a single prompt into hundreds of high-converting creatives built on real performance data. Trusted by Taxfix, SumUp, and backed by Creandum. https://superscale.ai/?utm_source=Sendit<
What does this episode say about customer retention?
Rethink ESP attribution: Recognize that email and SMS platforms often overcredit their own channels; use more sophisticated attribution models to understand true channel impact.
What does this episode say about analytics & attribution?
Scrutinize LTV calculations: Audit your Lifetime Value (LTV) math for common errors that lead to inaccurate projections and strategies, focusing on predictive metrics that indicate long-term program health.
What does this episode say about email & sms?
Beware of bot traffic: Account for bot-driven clicks and inflated open rates that skew engagement data, especially given recent privacy changes that make traditional open rate tracking unreliable.
What does this episode say about ai & automation?
Create your own benchmarks: Disregard generic industry benchmarks for retention KPIs, as they rarely reflect your specific business context or current market dynamics; instead, focus on internal trends and predictive metrics.
What does this episode say about customer retention?
Prioritize data integrity: Regularly evaluate your data sources and collection methods to ensure accuracy, particularly for financial and strategic decisions that rely on retention performance.
