There are several metrics that business owners track to monitor the growth of their businesses. You may be looking into conversion rate, sales, and other metrics to keep track of the growth of the business. Factors such as customer satisfaction and user engagement can give you a clearer picture of the business too.
The one metric that is now among the most popular ways to measure business performance is customer lifetime value. What is customer lifetime value and how does it affect your business? That is what we are going to find out in this article.
Understanding Customer Lifetime Value
As the name suggests, customer lifetime value or CLV is the value of a customer throughout that customer’s engagement with your business. A customer that makes regular purchases of $10 every month has a higher lifetime value than another customer with a one-time $40 purchase after only five months.
CLV measures customers’ interactions with the business and the purchases they make over a longer period of time. As a result of using CLV as a metric for business growth, business owners can now keep track of potential customers and implement strategies to keep them happy.
CLV is also a great metric for measuring customer satisfaction and identifying loyal customers. Both of these details are useful for making the necessary adjustments to the business and the products and services you offer.
Growing Customer Lifetime Value
Many businesses are now focusing their energy on boosting their customers’ lifetime value. The strategy is an effective one to use in a market as volatile as today since you will be able to capitalize on market growth in a more gradual way.
There are several approaches you can take to boost customer lifetime value too. For instance, you can focus your efforts on building customer loyalty by rewarding customers with the highest lifetime values. You can also create fully-featured loyalty programs to continue rewarding those customers.
At the same time, CLV can be used to identify issues with one-time customers. Through follow-up emails and other communications, you can learn more about the reasoning behind one-time purchases, and then use the insights to further improve the user experience.
CLV and Marketing
There is another growing trend surrounding the use of customer lifetime value as a metric for growth, and that is using CLV – instead of user acquisition value – to measure the success of marketing campaigns. In the old days, businesses who allocate $10 towards user acquisition aimed at making at least the same amount in sales with every user.
Today, business owners can choose to allocate more towards user acquisition with the expectation of higher lifetime value to cover the extra costs. Using the previous example, allocating $20 to acquire a customer who makes $10 monthly purchase regularly is considered profitable since the customer can potentially bring $30 in gross profits after five months.
It is clear that customer lifetime value or CLV is the metric of the future. Businesses, particularly online businesses, need to start investing in the long-term value of their customers to further capitalize on market growth.
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