Final answer:
Factors influencing business metrics like sales revenue and profit margins include marketing effectiveness, product quality, customer service, pricing strategy, and cost structures that encapsulate accounting profit, average profit, and average total and variable costs.
Step-by-step explanation:
The factors that contribute to key metrics like average sales revenue per customer, average profit margin contribution per customer, average number of sales annually by customer, duration a customer remains active, and the cost of acquiring a new customer are multifaceted. These factors include the effectiveness of a firm's marketing strategies, quality of products or services offered, customer service experiences, pricing strategies, competitive dynamics in the market, frequency of purchase, and customer loyalty programs. A firm's internal cost structure also plays a critical role, including accounting profit, which is the total revenues minus explicit costs, such as wages and rent. Profit margin is key in understanding profitability, defined as average profit—which is profit divided by the quantity of output produced. This is connected to various costs such as average total cost and average variable cost, which affect the overall profitability and efficiency of a firm. Moreover, understanding whether the firm experiences economies of scale, which occur when the long-run average cost of production decreases as total output increases, or diseconomies of scale, where this cost increases, is crucial for long-term strategic planning.