How To Increase Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

You’ve established your first-time customer order proposition. What’s next? How do you get them to come back and buy again? How do you increase customer lifetime value (LTV)?

Here are a few actionable steps 👇

Product journey

• A good place to start is to define the natural product journey for your brand
• What is the obvious next purchase for your customers to make? (E.g. they’ve bought the games console, now they need the games)
• Make it easy for customers to come back, know what that next purchase is and to buy it!

If purchased X, then purchase Y

• Dive into the data and review your customer’s purchasing behaviour – what are they buying?
• A simple framework I use is to:
• Find everyone who has purchased X and look at what else they typically buy. We call this Y.
• Find everyone who has purchased X but not Y
• Sell them Y
• You should take the time to optimise this further by creating content that explains to customers why they need Y to complement X

Review your LTV by cohort data

• Segment your LTV by cohorts – what do you see? Does it differ by cohort?
• By channel – e.g. what is the typical purchase journey for customers acquired by Facebook?
• By month – e.g. how are customers acquired during BFCM interacting with you vs a non-promo period?
• By first purchased product – e.g. is there a different journey for customers who purchased X first vs those who purchased Y first?
• By first purchased amount – e.g. does a high first order AOV lead to more subsequent purchases of a high value?
• Get into the weeds and unearth areas of opportunity – you use this data to create different user journeys for different types of customers
• Find those that will give you the biggest wins and prioritise!

Gather customer feedback

• Step out of your analytics and engage with your customers (or customer service team at least) and build a more rounded picture of your customers
• What do your customers want?
• What problems are your customers facing?
• What products do you have to help them to solve that problem?
• What products can you create to help them solve that problem?
• What products do your customers tell you that they want you to create?
• Refine your product journey based on your customer’s problems – be the solution

The key here is to dive into the quantitative and qualitative data you have available to optimise your key customer journeys.

Listen to what the data is telling you and build out high-quality product journeys that provide value to your customers and keep them coming back – helping you increase customer lifetime value.