A Quick Guide to Choosing Tools (Sponsor)
Published on by Eric L. Barnes
What separates the wrong analytics tool from the right one? It’s easy enough to figure out — if you understand the job you’re trying to get done.
That’s how you need to think about your tools: in terms of the jobs to be done. Your tools are a means to an end, not an end unto themselves. Think about the job you want to get done right now. Are you trying to drive users to your site? Increase your conversion rate? Well, if you ARRRen’t sure, you can use Pirate Metrics to break down the different steps of a customer lifecycle.
Pirate Metrics is an acrostic developed by 500 Startups to help companies have a clear list of jobs that drive growth.
- Acquisition: Drive users to your site through various channels and get them to sign up.
- Activation: Engage users early on by having them participate with your most important feature(s).
- Retention: Get users to come back, visit and use your product multiple times.
- Referral: Leverage users who are jazzed about your product to refer others.
- Revenue: Convert users to pay you money for your services.
If you’re trying to figure out market fit, you’re probably focused on retention and understanding what makes people stick around. This will take a combination of analytics and customer feedback tools.
If you’ve achieved fast growth, you’re likely working on maintaining your growth rate and managing your customer success workflow. This is where optimizing behavioral email campaigns and choosing sustainable ticket systems becomes important.
No matter where you choose to focus, there are a lot of tools out there that can help you get these jobs done. There are tools out there that can help you optimize your conversion and advertise more effectively to acquire customers; tools that can help you analyze your funnel to drive activation; tools that can help you send push notifications and NPS surveys to retain customers; tools that help you manage customer relationships to help you drive revenue; and tools to manage referrals to encourage word of mouth conversions.
The important thing is to start small and be realistic. You can’t focus on every area of growth at the same time. Start by choosing your goals, and work backwards from there to narrow down on which area to focus. You can then concentrate on using tools to achieve one or two goals instead of introducing a bunch of tools at once.
Implementing tools takes time, and sometimes, the tool that helped you achieve a goal a year ago is no longer a tool your business needs. Changing tools can be tricky, since it takes a lot of engineering hours to implement a tool, and different teams might be competing for engineering time to prioritize the new tool they need.
That’s where Segment comes in. Use Segment to try several tools, with demos using with your actual customer data, and with minimal loss of engineering time turning tools on and off. Try Segment today.
Many thanks to Segment for sponsoring the site this week. Sponsored via Syndicate Ads.
Eric is the creator of Laravel News and has been covering Laravel since 2012.