It’s been said that it’s easier to drive revenue through existing customers, rather than acquiring new customers. Why? Existing customers have already purchased from you, are familiar with your brand, and have already shown a level of trust in you, so they’re far more likely to continue shopping with you because you’ve built that relationship with them. To attract new customers, you have to account for marketing and advertising costs, plus the resources you spend getting from the awareness stage to the consideration stage, and hopefully the purchase stage. More repeat purchases = higher lifetime value.
What exactly is lifetime value? LTV is the average cumulative dollar total of a customers’ purchases for the duration of the time that they’re purchasing from you. LTV is so important in fact that the top 1 percent of eCommerce customers that continuously spend with your company are worth 18 times more than the average customer.1
Growing your LTV is critical to scale your brand and company. We’ve put together the top 5 ways to start growing your customers’ LTV today:
1. Offer or Improve Your Onboarding Process
- Ensure you have an engaging Welcome Series in place. Your Welcome Series should contain 3-7 emails and encourage subscribers to make a purchase by including testimonials, product education, and a new shopper discount. You can read some of our recommended best practices here. This is where you start to nurture your relationship!
2. Ensure Your Content is Engaging
- Every email that is sent should provide value to your customers. Be sure to highlight your top-selling products, include customer testimonials, provide educational information, and share promotions as necessary. Build your credibility!
3. Create a Seamless Shopping Experience
- Your eCommerce site should be user-friendly, provide educational content and offer a seamless experience for customers to make a purchase. If a site is difficult to navigate, it makes it harder for customers to find what they are looking for, and therefore they most likely will not return to your site. PCR suggests conducting a UI/UX audit to determine how to increase conversion rate optimization (CRO). You’ve come this far, you don’t want to lose out on a purchase because someone is confused about how to check out!
4. Utilize Loyalty Programs
- Loyalty programs are a great way to build brand allegiance. Offer your customers points towards discounts, special access to shop sales, and/or special incentives for birthdays and shopping anniversaries. In fact, 75% of customers report they are more likely to make another purchase after receiving a loyalty reward.2
5. Offer Subscription Programs
- If a subscription makes sense for your business, consider building out a program to allow for easy repeat orders. We’re fans of Recharge and you can read some of their success stories here.
Now that you know how to increase your LTV, it’s important to understand your baseline LTV before and after you optimize to measure success.
Calculate your baseline by following these easy steps:
- Determine your average order value (AOV)
- Your AOV is calculated by your total revenue during a period of time and dividing it by your total number of orders.
- This is calculated by dividing your total number of orders during a given time period by the unique number of customers.
- Multiply your AOV by your average purchase frequency to get the estimated customer value.
- This is an estimate of how long a person remains a customer.
- Multiply your customer value by the customer average lifespan to get an estimated LTV.
Once you have your estimated LTV, continue to optimize to grow your revenue. Track your KPIs over time to see how far you’ve come, and be sure to test copy, marketing, and messaging from your customer’s perspective!
