From Patrick's course to articles like these, it's great to see the growth in interest in this. The challenge with LTV (as with all analysis) is making sure that you can translate it into action. For many companies, the barrier is just getting started.<p>On a broader note, it's great to see how many companies are tackling customer lifecycle management (though with very different approaches and different end markets). It's time people stopped building one-offs for this.<p>A few companies I know of (the first of which I'm a co-founder of):<p>- Klaviyo<p>- Vero<p>- Customer.io<p>- Reamaze<p>- Intercom<p>- Totango<p>- Mixpanel
I've been meaning to give Vero a try for awhile, it comes highly recommended from some friends, and we have a lot of users who're using it along with Zenbox as well. Awesome to see them providing good material - I especially like the examples.<p>A question though - at what point is your product developed enough to differentiate on plans? When should you focus on tracking LTV - MVP? 0 customers? 1? 10? 100?<p>I'd like to see a "Ok, you're just getting started, here's what you're going to need to put in place immediately, and here are the signs that you <i>need</i> to look at the next steps after that."<p>Any chance of that Chexton? :)
I think that it is an atrocity that most companies do such a bad job of tracking from ad spend to clicks to leads to sales to recurring sales.<p>If you know the LTV of a customer and the acquisition cost, you can scale a profitable marketing campaign basically to the limit of the channel or your cash depending on how fast you turn over money.<p>Also tracking the lifetime value of clients, you could find that what is an unprofitable channel in the short-mid term becomes profitable after some point down the road, or not at all.<p>Knowing is half the battle!
We just hooked up our KISSmetrics events to start tracking "billed" events in order to use its revenue tab, which I believe includes customer LTV estimations.<p>However, it takes a week before it has enough data to start showing anything, so I'm just sitting here eagerly waiting.<p>Anyone have any experience using that particular feature of KISSmetrics? Is it any good?
I'm in the test prep industry, where customers only stay active for 2-6 months (3 is typical).<p>This radically changes LTV, as we don't have multi-year timeframes. We currently sell a course as a one-off purchase. We could move to a monthly model, but there are fairly fixed licensing costs.<p>How would you increase LTV in an industry with quick turnover?
It never ceases to amaze me how many organizations don't make a meaningful effort to accurately measure and focus on LTV.<p>This lack of focus means that opportunities are missed as those organizations fail to identify and address high-value segments, while also overpaying to acquire customers from low-value segments.<p>It's great to see some actionable tactical advice on using a specific tactic to increase LTV, not just because it's a good advice, but because it's a clear reminder about the importance of LTV as a key metric.