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In marketing, customer lifetime value (CLV) (or often CLTV), lifetime customer value (LCV), oruser lifetime value (LTV) is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. The prediction model can have varying levels of sophistication and accuracy, ranging from a crude heuristic to the use of complex predictive analytics techniques.
Origins
One of the first accounts of it is in the 1988 book Database Marketing, and includes detailed worked examples.
Segment Inaccuracy
Opponents often cite the inaccuracy of a CLV prediction to argue they should not be used to drive significant business decisions. For example, major drivers to the value of a customer such as the nature of the relationship are often not available as appropriately structured data and thus not included in the formula.
Predictive Models
Simple Ecommerce Example
(Avg Monthly Revenue per Customer * Gross Margin per Customer) / Monthly Churn Rate For example: $100 avg monthly spend * 25% margin / 5% monthly churn = $500 LTV
A Retention Example
4 Steps
1. forecasting of remaining customer lifetime in years 2. forecasting of future revenues year-by-year, based on estimation about future products purchased and price paid 3. estimation of costs for delivering those products 4. calculation of the net present value of these future amounts Forecasting accuracy and difficulty in tracking customers over time may affect CLV calculation process.
Inputs
Churn rate, the percentage of customers who end their relationship with a company in a given period. One minus the churn rate is the retention rate. Most models can be written using either churn rate or retention rate. If the model uses only one churn rate, the assumption is that the churn rate is constant across the life of the customer relationship. Discount rate, the cost of capital used to discount future revenue from a customer. Discounting is an advanced topic that is frequently ignored in customer lifetime value calculations. The currentinterest rate is sometimes used as a simple (but incorrect) proxy for discount rate. Contribution margin. Retention cost, the amount of money a company has to spend in a given period to retain an existing customer. Retention costs include customer support, billing, promotional incentives, etc. Period, the unit of time into which a customer relationship is divided for analysis. A year is the most commonly used period. Customer lifetime value is a multi-period calculation, usually stretching 37 years into the future. In practice, analysis beyond this point is viewed as too speculative to be reliable. The number of periods used in the calculation is sometimes referred to as the model horizon.
Model
, where is yearly gross contribution per customer, is the (relevant) retention costs per customer per year (this formula assumes the retention activities are paid for each mid year and they only affect those who were retained in the previous year), is the horizon (in years), is the yearly retention rate, is the yearly discount rate.
Simplified Models
It is often helpful to estimate customer lifetime value with a simple model to make initial assessments of customer segments and targeting. Possibly the simplest way to estimate CLV is to assume constant and long-lasting values for contribution margin, retention rate, and discount rates, as follows: