How much of your growth marketing tactics based around acquisition, and how much are they based around retention?

Each quarter, our team is generally proposing helping with KPIs around:

- acquisition of new users

- activating those new users

- expanding or upgrading users (using their credit card to buy something more)

- retaining those users month over month, and year over year

- talking to sales about our Enterprise plan

How much effort we put it into each really depends on the needs of the business, but we’re generally doing something for each.

This is going to depend entirely on the growth stage of your business and the health of your customer base.

If you're a startup, you'll need to focus on getting new customers in the door. But, if those prospects or trialers aren't converting into paying customers, or are churning out rapidly in the first few months, then there's no point in adding more into a leaky bucket. You'll need to patch up the bucket first.

In reality, balancing customer lifecycle initiatives will be an evolving and fluid activity. In order to maintain the right balance, you'll need insight into your lifecyle metrics. This means everything from setup and activation rate to churn and retention rate. (I'm a huge fan of the Reforge lifecycle model that they teach in their Growth Series.)

This data is even better if it's at a cohorted level. You might find that for one of your segments you need to focus on retention, but for another segment, the focus should be on acquisition. 

At my current company, Clockwise, we’re focused on acquisition and monetization mostly. We’re a new product and there’s still lots of room for growth at the top of the funnel so we’re prioritizing efforts like nailing paid acquisition strategy, driving demand for the sales team with events and content launches, and experimenting on the user lifecycle to improve monetization.

We have incredible net revenue retention organically, so there's not a need for us to focus on retention at the moment.

It really depends on the lifecycle stage of the product and the goals/OKRs set up each quarter. But it is very common for growth-focused initiatives to be organized around the audience lifecycle. I often organize my teams, strategies, and tactics around some version of the following but adapted to fit my product needs: acquisition, onboarding, retention, resurrection. 

That way you will empower different team members to be accountable for each part of the customer journey and be able to measure where your product is excelling and struggling.