What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?

What is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)?

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a crucial indicator for companies that want to understand the long-term value provided by a customer. The definition of CLV enables the profitability of customers to be assessed over the long term. It measures the total revenue that a company can expect from a single customer account throughout their relationship. Customer lifetime value is essential for marketing budgets, as it helps to optimise investments on the basis of the estimated gains that a customer can generate. By calculating CLV, businesses can make informed decisions about marketing strategy, customer service and overall growth initiatives, ensuring that they are investing wisely in customer acquisition and retention. It also helps to estimate the cost of customer acquisition.

How do you calculate Customer Lifetime Value?

To effectively calculate Customer Lifetime Value, companies need to consider a few key elements: average basket, purchase frequency and customer lifetime. The formula can be simplified as follows:

CLV = (average purchase value) x (purchase frequency) x (customer lifetime).

For example, if a customer spends an average of $100 per purchase, makes purchases four times a year and remains a customer for five years, their average purchase value will be $100 x 4 x 5 = $2,000.

Sales are directly influenced by CLV, because an increase in the lifetime value of customers translates into an increase in the company’s overall revenues.

Understanding these metrics enables organisations to improve their marketing efforts by identifying high-value customers and tailoring strategies to cultivate loyalty and increase retention rates. It is essential to focus not only on acquiring new customers, but also on maintaining existing ones, as it is often more profitable to retain a customer than to acquire new ones.

Why is CLV important?

1. Optimising resources

The CLV enables the company to determine how much it can afford to spend to acquire and retain a customer. The ability to reduce the cost of customer acquisition can optimise resources and increase the lifetime of customers. By knowing the average value a customer generates over the lifetime of their relationship with the company, it can allocate its resources more efficiently and maximise its return on investment (ROI). This requires precise calculation to optimise expenditure and improve sales.

2. Customer loyalty

CLV highlights the importance of customer retention. Ensuring that the cost of customer acquisition does not exceed the CLV is crucial to maintaining a profitable business. It is often cheaper to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Increasing the lifetime of a customer also increases its CLV, which can have a significant impact on a company’s profitability. Precise calculation of the CLV makes it possible to measure this impact, and thus to strengthen sales to the most loyal customers.

3. Targeted marketing strategies

By understanding CLV, companies can segment their customer base according to their value and develop specific marketing strategies for each segment. Attracting prospects is crucial to increasing revenue, as these prospects can be converted into loyal customers through marketing automation and loyalty strategies. For example, a company could put extra effort into retaining high CLV customers while optimising costs for less profitable segments. This segmentation is often based on a CLV calculation for each customer segment, enabling marketing efforts to be targeted at the segments most likely to increase sales.

4. Informed decision-making

CLV is a valuable indicator for making strategic decisions, particularly in terms of pricing, product and service development, and market expansion. Taking into account the costs associated with customer acquisition and retention strategies is essential for assessing the profitability of customers throughout their life cycle. It enables managers to understand the long-term profitability of different customer categories and to adjust their strategies accordingly. The CLV calculation thus becomes a crucial decision-making tool, particularly for forecasting future sales.

5. Revenue forecasting

By assessing the CLV of its customers, a company can better forecast future revenues, which is crucial for financial planning and cash management. Customer lifetime, or life cycle, directly impacts this revenue forecast by linking customer lifetime to specific financial formulas and retention rates. This forecast relies on the precise calculation of the CLV to establish reliable financial projections and thus anticipate future sales.

Application of CLV

To further illustrate the importance of CLV, let’s imagine that we have a company that divides its spending into several departments, each of which contributes to the retention and generation of revenue from existing customers. Here’s a simple example of how the departments could be structured and their spend allocated:

Departments and Spend

• Marketing
  • Annual expenditure: USD 200,000
  • Main objective: Acquisition of new customers, re-engagement campaigns.
• Customer service
  • Annual expenditure: USD 150,000
  • Main objective: Improve customer satisfaction, manage returns and complaints.
• Loyalty programmes
  • Annual expenditure: USD 100,000
  • Primary objective: Encourage repeat purchases, offer rewards and incentives.
• Product Development
  • Annual expenditure: USD 250,000
  • Main objective: To innovate and adapt products to meet changing customer needs.
• Technical support
  • Annual expenditure: USD 100,000
  • Main objective: To ensure the smooth operation of products/services and reduce churn due to technical problems.

Calculating and using CLV

Let’s take your example where a customer spends an average of USD 100 per purchase, makes purchases four times a year, and remains a customer for five years, giving an LTV of USD 2,000. LTV is an essential metric for assessing a company’s performance.

Lifetime value plays a crucial role in determining acquisition and loyalty budgets.

Identifying high-value customers

By calculating CLV, companies can determine which customers are above average (those who make more purchases per year or who have been following a loyalty programme for a long time) and allocate more resources in the marketing department to individualised campaigns. This can also include analysing the total amount spent by these customers over a given period.

Loyalty programmes

The loyalty programmes department can identify their customer base by offering interesting offers, which will make it easier for them to generate purchases on a regular basis and therefore increase the customer lifetime in a company. This is based on calculating the profitability of these programmes as a function of the CLV and the amount spent by loyal customers.

Customer Service and Technical Support

By offering quality customer service and technical support, a company can reduce churn caused by negative experiences, thereby improving the average CLV. This improvement can be measured by calculating the impact of these services on CLV, in particular by analysing the amount of revenue retained thanks to improved customer retention.

This system shows us that CLV can guide us towards an overall business strategy and the allocation of resources across different departments to optimise and amortise expenditure over the long term, maximising the total amount generated by each customer.

Conclusion: CLV as a lever for sustainable growth

In conclusion, CLV is essential because it enables companies to better understand the importance of their customers over the long term, which in turn will help them to improve their loyalty and marketing initiatives. This will help to make informed decisions based on the amount of revenue expected over the lifetime of customers.

In summary, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a key issue that can really change the way a company develops, installs and implements its strategies. By designing and cultivating CLV, companies can derive revenue in a more practical way by focusing on the most profitable customer fractions and modifying their marketing and customer service efforts to maximise total revenue over the long term.

This not only optimises marketing investments, but also increases customer loyalty, reduces churn, increases overall satisfaction and, as a result, boosts the company’s turnover. By integrating CLV into their decision-making processes, companies can develop stronger, longer-lasting relationships with their customers, fostering sustainable growth and increased competitiveness in the marketplace.

In this way, customer lifetime value is not limited to a simple financial metric, but becomes an essential strategic lever for guiding all business operations towards increased and sustainable profitability. Companies that succeed in mastering this approach are better positioned to anticipate their customers’ needs, personalise their offerings, increase their sales and build a brand that lasts over time.

1. What is Customer Life Value (CLV)?

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a measure of the total revenue a company can expect from a customer over the lifetime of their relationship. It is a crucial indicator for understanding the long-term value of a customer.

2. Why is CLV important for businesses?

CLV is essential because it helps companies optimise their resources by determining how much they can afford to spend to acquire and retain a customer. It also enables informed decisions to be made about marketing, customer service and overall growth initiatives.

3. How is Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) calculated?

To calculate CLV, you need to take into account the average purchase value, frequency of purchase and customer lifetime. The simplified formula is: CLV = (average purchase value) x (purchase frequency) x (customer lifetime).

4. What key factors influence CLV?

The key elements that influence CLV are the average purchase value per transaction, the frequency of purchases made by the customer, and the length of the relationship between the customer and the company.

5. How can CLV help to segment customers?

By calculating CLV, businesses can identify high-value customers (those who spend more or stay longer) and tailor their marketing strategies to these specific segments, increasing the chances of building loyalty and maximising revenue.

6. How can CLV guide strategic decisions?

CLV provides valuable insights that can guide strategic decisions, such as resource allocation, pricing, product development, and targeted marketing efforts, focusing on the most profitable customers.

7. Why is retaining customers often more profitable than acquiring new ones?

Retaining existing customers is often more profitable because these customers already have a relationship with the company, which reduces acquisition costs and increases the customer’s lifetime, and therefore their CLV.

8. How do loyalty programmes influence CLV?

Loyalty programmes encourage customers to make regular purchases, thereby increasing their lifetime and CLV. By offering attractive rewards, these programmes can also increase the total amount spent by each customer.

9. What impact do customer service and technical support have on CLV?

Quality customer service and effective technical support can reduce churn caused by negative experiences, increasing average CLV by improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

10. How does CLV help predict a company’s future revenues?

By assessing CLV, a business can more accurately estimate its future revenues, which is essential for financial planning and cash management, based on expected customer revenues over the duration of their relationship.