What is the lifetime value of a customer? How does that affect the way that you market your products and scale your business?

These are some of the questions that we had in mind when we went into our conversation with Jeremy Reeves on the Data Rich Podcast. Below is the video of the entire conversation, as well as a transcript of the highlights:

What does it mean to be data driven as it relates to customer LTV?

Being data driven boils down to being aware of the choices that you are making, and making the right choices by utilizing data.An example of this would be if you are looking to roll out a new product, you need to know exactly how much you can spend to acquire a new customer. If you don't have data to tell you that information, you are essentially guessing, and that can cause you to be limiting yourself in terms of growth if you're not paying enough for new customers, or it can be driving you out of business if you're spending too much to acquire those customers.If you don't know the metrics, you don't know what decisions to make.

How soon in a business should you worry about LTV?

This varies from business to business, but comes down to how quickly you want to scale your business. If you are looking for explosive growth, then LTV is THE metric that you need to worry about. This will help you determine the cost per acquisition that you are willing to pay. In the example above, they realized that if they set their break-even point per customer at 3 months rather than immediate, they were able to pay 30% more per acquisition, which allowed them to jump from making 15 sales per day to making 300-400 sales per day.By drilling into the numbers and truly understanding the value of their customers over time, their sales were able to increase by 2500%! When you view the true value of a customer over time, you can make decisions like this that help you to experience explosive growth as a company.

How do you maximize returns based off customer LTV?

The best way to maximize your returns is to get extremely granular with your data. Go beyond just looking at the generic LTV of all customers, and see the LTV of customers based off of their referral source, or check to see what other products they purchase after the initial purchase. The more that you can break down the data and individualize your targeting, the more you can glean insights into your consumers, and in turn maximize your returns.

What is the best way to track LTV?

This is the question that you really need to answer for your business. You need to determine how you want to define and track the value of your customers over time. This will be contingent on the systems that you are using, the types of products that you sell, and how you want to think about your products.Going back to the previous point about getting as granular as possible, you can break down the LTV of your clients based off what their initial purchase was, by referrer,

When should you make changes to your budget based off the LTV calculation?

Unfortunately, just like the last question, this depends on your business. If your company has a long buying cycle, you should probably wait to increase your budget until you see the results from your efforts. If you are able to make back your budget based off the initial purchase, you can increase your budget immediately. By understanding when people are able to hit that break-even point in your business, you can know exactly when you should increase your spend.

How can I set up tracking to make sure that I am getting good data?

You need to make sure that your attributions are set up properly in Google Analytics, so that you can break out customer behavior by traffic source in order to see exactly what your spend should be for each source. Past that, it is highly recommended that you break them out into funnels or campaigns that you are using so that you can properly attribute the LTV to each of the campaigns that you run, as well as the sources.This requires a great deal of work up front, but once you lay the foundation of good data it is much easier to continue down that path, and you know that you can trust your data.

What is the number one thing that all marketers should know about the LTV of their customers?

The obvious first thing that you need is to know the number. If you are not conscious of the LTV of your customers, you need to find out what that is. After you are aware of the average LTV across the company, you need to get more granular with it, and drill down into the LTV per product.Once you have those numbers, you need to determine your business goals. If you are in a growth stage of your business, where you are trying to scale, don't be afraid to break even up front. Be aware of how long it will take for you to start profiting, and make sure that you are comfortable with waiting for that; but once you have determined that, you need to move forward. The business that can afford to spend the most to acquire the customer wins every time.If you have any questions about dashboards, tracking, analytics, or if you want custom dashboards built for your business then talk to one of our Praxis Metrics data experts.