Best Ways to Increase Customer Lifetime Value for Businesses

by Buana Sari Digital Marketer

For businesses, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is one of the most significant metrics. CLV represents the total spend with a business by customers during their lifetime. It shows how much net profit a business or a brand can make of one customer over a period of time. Most businesses today are trying their best to enhance the lifetime value metrics.

CLV improvement ensures greater revenue and higher ARPU at low cost. Surveys reveal that if done correctly/ it can be a pillar of sales and marketing success. Over the years the metric is providing brand marketers with a beneficial prediction of the total net profit a business earns from an individual customer. They are leveraging new marketing tools and technologies like moLotus, HubSpot, Acquire, LeadSquared, Retently, Crazy Egg, Zinrelo, etc. to boost customer lifetime value through better customer relationship transparency and management.

The following are the best ways to increase customer lifetime value in a competitive business scenario:

1. Enhance New Customer Onboarding

For ensuring CLV growth, customer onboarding is the process businesses should put more efforts on. It is already among the top priorities of global businesses keeping in view the fact that poor onboarding leads to churn and low CLV.

Through proper onboarding customers really engage with the product thus making the greatest positive impact. Brands should put together a strategic onboarding process so that newly acquired customers are retained, and thus increase their lifetime value for the brands. The onboarding process differs depending on industry, customer needs or desired outcomes.

In the era of digitization, brands have transformation technologies like moLotus in their disposal which have revolutionized the new customer onboarding processes. First and foremost, moLotus has made onboarding as easy and quick. The process has been simplified by creating interactive how-to mobile videos, FAQs, and other content that might help customers in achieving their goals. In early stages of the customer journey, moLotus mobile video customer interaction ensures that new leads interact with the brand, get to know it, and stick to it long enough. Many software-as-a-service (SaaS) players are also trying their hands in assisting brands in new customer onboarding via age-old email campaigns or interactive in-app walkthroughs.

2. Reward Loyal Customers

Customer Lifetime Value is often defined by the net profit contribution of any customer over a period of time. This mixed with the fact that customers get delighted by loyalty programmes means that businesses should focus more on customer loyalty as the best way in their arsenal for gaining higher CLV. A well-designed and well-managed loyalty & rewards campaign can favorably impact business, profit and CLV.

Observing the latest trends, customer loyalty cards and loyalty apps have proved quite effective in creating a loyal customer base adding to better lifetime value. Modern customers prefer moLotus mobile loyalty cards over plastic cards and loyalty apps like Shopkick, Loopy Loyalty, Smile.io, etc. They are bored of carrying plastic cards and using unsafe apps. Therefore, it is advisable for businesses to strategize around converting customers from plastic cards and loyalty apps to moLotus mobile cards. These cards are the exact digital mobile format of your plastic cards and also work the same way. The only difference is that moLotus mCards are cost-effective and more efficient.

New-age technologies like moLotus have disrupted loyalty marketing space adding to customer lifetime value. Innovative moLotus loyalty campaigns target special occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, reminders and festivals enhancing CLV. Interestingly, these campaigns are custom-branded with options for name, greeting, reward, call-to-action for each customer.

3. Customer Education

Using marketing ploys to lure their customers don’t work anymore. Research shows that educating customers is a significant way towards improving customers’ trust and consequently customer lifetime value. CLV tends to increase with customers’ understanding of the product, its capabilities & limitations, and having realistic expectations on what they can get from it.

Technologies are assisting brands to educate their customers about new services or features and their benefits. Brands have been earlier using social media advertising for educating customers. Scenario is fast changing! Interestingly, advertisers/brands have found a unique solution in moLotus. It supports a variety of rich media messaging formats including video, greeting, brochure, slideshow and showcase. Brand marketers are amalgamating these to create stories and educate their customers, adding product pictures, voice-over and music. The outcome is a steady increase in customer engagement and lifetime value.

4. Upsell and Cross-sell

A classic pair of upselling and cross-selling strategies have proven to increase customer lifetime value as they lead to more customer demand. If they have their product's lifecycle mapped out, they can keep a track of where the buyers are on that journey. Once they are coming to the end, promote the products which the buyers can take next and continue getting the value.

For instance, during the pandemic times several brands have been quite vigilant about the buying patterns of the customers. They have been prompt in running unique upselling and cross-selling campaigns via tools like moLotus, HubSpot, Zinrelo, etc. achieving higher lifetime value. The moLotus campaigns have been designed innovatively, targeting massive customer databases and generating instant sales.

Creation of new products and services has been on the agenda of modern businesses keeping in view the changing needs of customers. This further added to the scope of upselling and cross-selling models thus uplifting CLV.

5. Offer Personalized Customer Experience

Personalization has opened up new ways to boost customer lifetime value by acquiring and retaining customers. Studies reveal that new-age customers are keen on getting personalized experiences from brands. Impersonal experiences demotivate them and result in high churn rate. Therefore, businesses should be investing more in the creation of personalized experiences to build stronger customer relationships.

Big brands have made a headstart by embracing disruptive technologies like moLotus to run hyper-personalized campaigns to woo their customers boosting CLV. moLotus tailors campaigns using customer name and suitable customer data. moLotus targets customers via hyper-personalized recommendations, offers and other messages to bring in more revenues and lifetime value.

6. Actionable Feedback

Customer joy leads to customer lifetime value. Growing a business without knowing the customer's perception of the brand is almost impossible. Growing business with detailed, actionable feedback is invaluable for brands for increasing retention and lifetime value. Brands should adopt futuristic tools like moLotus, SurveyMonkey, SurveyGizmo, TrustRadius, etc. to get customer feedback. The collection of real-time ratings & feedback via mobile phones has become possible via moLotus. The capabilities exhibit robust success rates, enabling the businesses to know customer perception, analyze and improve upon it. Thus, listening to customers by seeking actionable feedback via technology is of primary importance to ensure growth in customer lifetime value.

7. Effective Brand-customer Interaction

Customer interactions deeply affect customers' perception of brands. Studies unveil that consistent positive interactions result in positive impressions and higher customer lifetime value. A Forrester Research study showcases that brand providing continuous positive customer experiences via better customer interaction outperformed their competitors. They also yielded a higher growth in lifetime value.

Many brands are creating interactive campaigns using marketing platforms like moLotus offering multiple customer response options like USSD, SMS, Call, Click URL, and more. Customers can initiate direct conversations with brands and get instant answers to their queries, get issues resolved in a short span of time, and more. All these contribute towards higher CLV.

8. Create Customer Convenience

More customer convenience means more lifetime value. Studies show that convenience is one of the most important elements of a positive customer experience. Therefore, digital marketing strategies of most brands are based on convenience and they are embracing technologies like moLotus - key enabler of customer convenience. Customers can watch moLotus delivered videos and multimedia messages as per their convenience to easily understand the products and services. The videos remain in the mobile inbox of the customer as long as they voluntarily don’t delete them.

Recent global consumer surveys indicate that more customers mostly expect at-home purchasing options from brands after the pandemic hit the world. With the help of moLotus customers can digitally access the product related information and buy in a click. The technology and platform have transformed the buying process for customers making it convenient and enjoyable. Customers no longer need to communicate with intrusive sales staff or visit retail stores.

Conclusion

The businesses that value customers, will experience revenue growth and a growth in customer lifetime value. Businesses should relentlessly show customers how much they mean to their business by various ways - asking feedback and acting on it, offering value they need, utmost convenience, top-notch support, amazing personalized customer experience, etc. All this is easily achievable by using marketing technologies and tools like moLotus. Customer centricity is the key!