10 Proven Tactics To Improve Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Business lesson number one: it’s cheaper to retain good customers than it is to find new ones. And one of the most significant shifts a business makes for long term success is this basic principle. As companies grow and look to strategies for maintaining stable growth, learning to retain current customers and increase their lifetime value is a foundational move.

So how do you nurture your best customers, helping to improve their experience with your products and services while also bolstering your business’s bottom line? CleverTap is ready to help you build long-term, scalable success with these ten tactics.

10 Ways To Increase CLV

These tactics help you nurture your relationships with your existing customers, as well as direct future growth efforts for innovating and improving your products or services.

Improve Onboarding

Once you’ve got a new customer, getting them plugged into everything your company offers is a vital part of establishing repeat sales. Effective onboarding helps new customers immediately experience your product’s value and lays the foundation for long-term retention.

72% of customers point to onboarding experience as the primary driver behind their decision to keep an app or give it the boot. A great onboarding process creates that vital first impression, answers questions, and helps establish your offering in a customer’s life.

CleverTap facilitates customer experiences by allowing companies to personalize customer journeys, customize and app for different audience segments, and A/B test the versions to deliver smoother, richer experiences with each onboarding iteration. You communicate your product or service’s value and establish a great first impression.

Offer A Seamless Omnichannel Experience

98% of consumers switch between multiple devices daily. Most people own more than one device and expect to use different methods to reach out to a company. Companies that stand out will offer quality omnichannel support no matter what channel a customer uses, and that customer should have a great experience transitioning between communication methods.

There’s no room for error here. Look into which channels your customers use most and ensure your omnichannel offerings match that preference. Whether your team is trained on all channels or have dedicated teams per section, every customer communication should be consistent.

Monitor Social Media

Users expect responses quickly when they mention companies on social media. Without proper monitoring, that negative comment could drag down an entire brand’s reputation. Likewise, without a deep understanding of where and how users interact with social media, companies are leaving organic growth on the table.

Social media is rich in data, ripe for nurturing relationships, and excellent for providing your company’s organic growth — if you pay attention to it. Use this data to build your ad campaigns where your audience is and then monitor those campaigns — including user feedback — from start to finish.

Gather The Right Data (And Follow Through With Insights)

Data rules business. Data-driven decisions determine your marketing campaigns, your product roadmap, and most importantly, your customer experience. You must gather data from ads, social media, app activity, past and upcoming purchases, and a whole host of other data.

But it’s not enough to gather data only. Organizations must turn data into actionable insights. A good example is CleverTap’s RFM analysis, a segmentation method companies can use to automatically create user groups and understand their customer base.

Frequency and monetary value affect a customer’s CLV directly and quickly illustrates these values with an out of the box solution that helps companies engage with data. Recency determines potential customer churn, allowing organizations to course correct with differentiated campaigns.

Perfect Your Communication Strategies

If you can offer 24/7 customer support, this is a massive boost to keeping customers around. Even if you can’t, training your team to respond as quickly as possible to reduce time to a solution will go a long way to making you irreplaceable.

There are many ways you can manage this. Offer live chat support. Lean hard on omnichannel monitoring and support. Build dedicated teams for each channel and monitor closely. Build a push notification strategy that notifies customers of important information or sends reminders. Some companies are even turning to chatbots to make the process instant, no matter what time of day.

Make Personalization Priority #1

Customers expect a personalized experience with companies. Personalization helps deliver the right message at the right time and provides recommendations for products, services, and upgrades based on previous activity.

A study from Accenture in 2016 found that customers were more likely to buy from companies that recognized them and showed a full understanding of their purchase history to make recommendations — 75% of consumers, in fact.

Using something like CleverTap’s automated and predictive segmentation feature, you’ll capture data and use it to interact with key customer segments simultaneously. From there, personalize messages, monitor campaigns, and map unique customer journeys using CleverTap’s full suite of tools to give customers a reason to come back with their wallets in hand.

Leverage Exclusivity

Everyone loves an exclusive deal, so nurture your existing customers using special offers, loyalty points, and referral bonuses. For example, you might offer customers who’ve purchased something before a percentage off their next shopping experience.

You can also use the perk of saved info — logins, frequent purchases, shopping or wishlists, and recommendations — to drive a new layer of exclusivity into your app. If customers sign up with an account, they’ll have access to this rich layer of features. It draws them deeper into your ecosystem and provides value for them as registered members of the app.

Iterate And Innovate

Innovation helps increase customer lifetime value by using data-driven decisions to bring fresh, new products and services to your existing customers. Do you have a product your customers love? Offer it on a subscription model, so they never have to worry about reorders, for example. Your existing customers may be wild for that idea, giving you an increase in CLV just by altering how they shop.

Examine your data for patterns or gaps — think about solutions your customers may not even realize they need yet. Innovate and iterate based on that data, and then set up convenient A/B tests to ensure quality and performance.

Prioritize Convenience

Live chat. Omni-channel solutions. Saved information. Auto-billing. Push notification reminders — wherever you can offer convenience, do it. If customers spend as little time as possible trying to figure out how to interact with your company, they’ll spend more time enjoying their experience.

Online shopping took a considerable chunk of brick and mortar business because of sheer convenience. Dollar Shave Club cut into Gillette’s stronghold on the razor industry just by offering a subscription. Use your data to find out how to make engaging with your organization more convenient for your customers, and you could see improvements in CLV.

Check-In, Re-engage And Be There

The biggest thing you can do to improve CLV is to offer the type of service and attention that brings your customers back. They’re more than your bottom line; you’re helping them solve a problem they have or providing something they can’t get anywhere else.

This includes gathering feedback from your customers and listening to them. Nudge customers when they haven’t interacted with your app or service in a while. Use a recommendation engine to push personalized content in a valuable way. There’s a time and place for finding new customers, but building a relationship with existing ones builds CLV and is the secret to retaining customers.

Reimagining Your CLV

These ten methods will nurture existing relationships and help make you an irreplaceable part of your customers’ lives. CleverTap’s full suite of products and services facilitate data-driven decision making and help businesses create a fully personalized experience with omnichannel support and lifecycle optimization.