How Healthy Is Your Subscription Business?

Business metrics matter for a number of reasons. They give an indication of the overall health of the business. Specific ‘cuts’ tell you how different parts of the business are doing, for instance, by geography, product, or even campaign. As a subscription business, you can learn much about your customers’ behavior and preferences through certain metrics. ‘What is measured, improves, Peter Drucker, the father of modern business management, famously said. Provided, of course, that one acts on the insights garnered from data.

This action could be to understand what is not working and do course correction or to focus energy and resources on the right projects and initiatives. Subscription businesses are especially data-rich and while this is generally good news, it makes measurement trickier. When you can measure everything from customer lifetime value (CLV) to customer acquisition cost (CAC), what should you measure? All of it? Some of it? Which ones?