Where are you on the LTV Maturity Curve?
I've seen this play out a 100 times. And you're probably immature.
But getting to a good LTV calc is a journey.
Here's how it generally plays out:
1?? COHORTS
Your company knows LTV is important. Maybe the board asks for quarterly updates to prove the economics are sound.
The finance team is tasked with owning the LTV calculation.
They open an Excel workbook, record the number of new and returning customers every month since inception, throw in a pivot table, and voila!
You're calculating the avg historical LTV per cohort per month after first purchase.
Want predictions? Look at other older cohorts and use those numbers to guess.
2?? RFM
Profitability is becoming more important across the org.
The marketing team would like to use the LTV calculations for marketing actions.
But the cohort-level calculations aren't actionable.
The marketing team proposes using an RFM (Recency of last purchase, Frequency of repurchases, average/total Monetary value) model. They say it's more actionable.
To make segmentation easier, the marketer decides to use only Recency and Frequency.
Eight segments are created based on each customer's combination of RF. Names for each segment are created to make it easier to remember.
It's been six months since implementation and no one can remember the difference between a Loyalist and a Champion.
3?? PREDICTIVE
The data science team steps in.
They predict LTV for each customer individually based on the customer's buying pattern, traits, and behaviors.
Now that only one metric (predicted LTV) is being reported, it's easier for marketers to take action. And because there's only one metric to segment (LTV vs RF), they can create fewer segments.
The DS team reports cohorted and aggregated LTV predictions to the finance team to be used for forecasting and reporting to the board. The DS team also measures model accuracy over time to increase trust.
Now you have a true North Star Metric. Everyone in every org can look at the same metric and know exactly what they need to do.
This stage is the most complex to calculate, but results in the most value created.
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TL;DR
- Calculating LTV is a journey, keep iterating
- Ownership of the calculation will probably change a few times
- The most mature stage is being able to predict customer-level LTV
(If you don't have a data science team, you'll need software or a consultant)