I can’t tell you what your growth levers should be - even if you ask really, really nicely. But what I can do is give you some more inspiration and guidance to get you thinking in the right direction.

If we look at the customer journey, there are various key metrics per stage:

These are all potential starting points for growth levers. Let’s walk through two examples, one around acquisition and the other around retention.

D2C examples of growth levers

First, let’s say you are struggling to acquire enough new customers. You might decide you want to focus this quarter on your Meta Ads acquisition. The starting place for this is traffic, CTR, conversions and conversion rate. 

Now if your website is converting well, you might choose traffic or conversions as the goal. The risk with traffic is quality, as we don’t want bad traffic for the sake of it. So we might focus on engaged sessions from paid, or say a certain number of conversions through paid. My preference is usually the latter: it encourages better behaviour, e.g. not driving traffic for the sake of it or through clickbait content. 

I would also get more specific:

• Which platform do we use to measure the conversions?

• Will you count only conversions from prospect campaigns or also retargeting? 

• What is the max cost of acquisition?

• What is the max discount allowed?

Does that mean traffic is a bad lever? No, maybe less ideal for paid, but for organic growth it could be a great measure, the number of engaged sessions through organic. Again, it’s important to get specific:

• What is the definition of engaged?

• Will you look at branded and non-branded?

• Is it blog traffic or the whole website? 

• Are there rules on the type of content to ensure it is relevant?

As you can see, I try to be really critical of what drives good behaviour and clarity. As much as we have the best intentions, we don’t want the pressure to tempt people to ‘game’ the metrics.

Now let’s try a second example. Let’s say we want to focus on retention, as not enough people are coming back. From our data, we’ve analysed the areas of impact and seen that we are losing the most people in the first three months of a subscription product that is bought monthly. So we define our growth lever as % retained after three months. 

Again, we need to define:

• How do we calculate the benchmark to compare it to?

• What is a long enough timeframe to see an impact on a lagging metric like this?

• Do we include one-time purchases in this calculation?

• Is there a minimum volume of sales we are striving for while improving this metric?

Smaller brands might opt to use the overarching KPIs listed above as their focus. But most of the time, it’s worth getting more specific to drive focus to the root cause of the issue and the outcome you’d like to achieve. Ask critical questions to ensure there is no way to game the metric or have a lack of clarity about what ‘better’ looks like.