Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value: Strategies for CMOs

Referred customers are more likely to be loyal and will buy more products and services from you. To maximize customer loyalty, it is important to offer incentives for customers to shop more frequently. Another effective strategy for increasing customer lifetime value (CLV) is to provide omnichannel customer support. To meet customer expectations in today's digital world, companies need to be visible on as many platforms as possible.

Examine all the channels that your customers prefer and train your support team on how to use them effectively. At the end of the day, why do we do all this? What's the point of tracking LTV and developing all these initiatives to increase it? It all comes down to loyalty. One loyal customer can be more valuable than 10 new leads, so it's time for us to shift the conversation from constantly acquiring leads to retaining and nurturing existing customers. Give them value, even when your potential customers are no longer new or bright. These customers introduce themselves to you, so it's important that you introduce yourself to them as well. To get a 360-degree view, it's worth having comprehensive historical customer data, as well as regular updates to sales and cost data.

Some of this will be trial and error, but trust your sales and customer service teams to do what they do best and find a way forward with new customers. Ask a customer if they're happy that their prices are going up and they're likely to answer you with a resounding “no”.Customer lifetime value (CLV, CLTV or LTV) is a very important metric, and improving it is a main objective for many companies. At this level, CLV can also be used as a metric to measure and improve the performance of organizational units, such as country branches, or to obtain a more customer-focused perspective of the business (rather than a vision solely focused on sales and benefits). That's why your own data, the data you collect from customers and potential customers, is more important than ever.

Comparing a CLV with the cost of customer acquisition (CAC) can help determine which marketing strategies work and what hurts your profit margins. In addition to linking different data sources and formats, the customer data platform also allows the integration of appropriate external systems, as well as the segmentation of customers based on demographic and behavioral data. Today's digital technology-savvy CMOs use agile marketing software from independent third parties to activate CRM data in innovative ways that maximize customer lifetime value (LTV) across channels and devices. Onboarding is important for increasing customers' lifetime value, as it helps customers become familiar with the product and how to use it. In response to the increase in the cost of acquiring and retaining customers on the online channel in recent years, this trend takes advantage of the fact that it is often cheaper and more efficient to achieve the desired CLV/CAC ratio together with offline channels. It allows you to break the typical stereotype of an anonymous company that has no connection to its customer base.

The last and most important step is to evaluate the CLV and CAC calculations in such a way that the company can derive strategic and operational recommendations for action and decision-making from them. Gifts, benefits and incentives are everyday staples of the sales and customer success toolbox, and for good reason: they work. To maximize customer lifetime value, CMOs need to focus on strategies that will help them build loyalty among their existing customers. This includes offering incentives for frequent purchases, providing omnichannel customer support, collecting comprehensive historical customer data, onboarding new customers effectively, integrating external systems into their customer data platform, activating CRM data across channels, offering gifts or benefits for loyalty, evaluating CLV/CAC calculations regularly, and introducing themselves to their customers.