Customer Lifetime Value: a Better Compass to Guide Your Marketing Automation

Customer Lifetime Value: A Better Compass to Guide Your Marketing Automation The most powerful marketing aligns machines, metrics and minds. By Laura Beaudin, Brian Dennehy and John Grudnowski Laura Beaudin is a partner in Bain & Company’s Customer Strategy & Marketing practice and leads Bain’s global marketing excellence work. Brian Dennehy is an expert vice president in the Customer Strategy & Marketing practice. John Grudnowski is the founder and CEO of digital agency FRWD. Beaudin and Dennehy are based in San Francisco, and Grudnowski is based in Minneapolis. The authors thank colleagues John Campbell, Francine Gierak, Wendy Grad, Anjali Joy and Jared Sisk for their help in developing this brief. Copyright © 2017 Bain & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Customer Lifetime Value: A Better Compass to Guide Your Marketing Automation With marketing technologies growing ever more pow- • 1.9 times more likely to scrutinize customer lifetime erful, many companies are deploying the latest tools value in addition to more traditional last-touch met- to personalize marketing or make ad spending more rics such as ROI, customer acquisition cost and efficient. There’s no question that new digital technolo- click-through rate (see Figure 1). gies allow marketers to approach customers with surgical precision, unlike the blunter instruments of just five Shifting to a customer focus leads to better economics. years ago. But the rush to invest in new technologies That financial benefit flows largely from creating more designed to boost the return on investment (ROI) of a promoters among the customer base—people who single purchase or channel often misses the founda- spend more with the company, stay longer and generate tional goal of knowing who your target customers are, more referrals. what they’re worth to the firm and how they behave. If a customer has a high potential lifetime value, it’s Marketing leaders break down the challenge of this shift worth pulling out the spending stops to persuade him into manageable pieces, and hone skills in three key steps: or her to make a first purchase with the brand, which, 1. Build smart, targeted segmentation based on a cus- of course, would likely hurt short-term ROI. Without tomer’s overall value. that perspective, companies might waste money acquir- ing low-value customers or targeting prospects who 2. Use technology to develop a deeper understand- are unlikely to make a purchase. ing of customers’ priorities and experience at each step of their relationship with the company. What marketing leaders do differently 3. Make data-informed hypotheses about which technol- Marketers who train their machines, metrics and minds ogies to use in order to acquire and retain the customer. to improve customer lifetime value emphasize enduring customer relationships over immediate channel results or a single transaction’s value. As marketers adopt increas- Figure 1: Marketing leaders put their customers’ ingly powerful artificial intelligence tools—whether for priorities first one-to-one or segment marketing—they will want to direct those tools and related ROI metrics to deepening customer relationships. Compared with the bottom 25% of companies, leaders are… more likely to have talent Marketing leaders today do more than acknowledge that focused on customer feed- customer lifetime value matters; they actually focus their back and developing 3.5 times maps of the end-to-end spending and staff resources accordingly. A Bain & customer experience Company survey of roughly 500 companies found that marketing leaders exhibit a few characteristics that set them apart from the bottom 25% of companies. The more likely to align their marketing strategy with leaders are: 1.9 times customer priorities • 3.5 times more likely to embed employees in marketing who specifically focus on understanding the more likely to focus on customer’s end-to-end experience; customer lifetime value, not just traditional last- times 1.9 touch metrics • 1.9 times more likely to align their strategy with customer needs rather than channel needs; and Notes: Priorities refer to those set by the customer; leaders (the top 20% of companies) and the bottom 25% are ranked according to a composite index of market share percentage change and revenue percentage change from 2014 through 2015 Source: Bain & Company 2016 marketing survey (n=487) 1 Customer Lifetime Value: A Better Compass to Guide Your Marketing Automation 1. Learn who your customers are and what 2. Once you know your high-value customers, they are worth to you learn how to connect with them Not all customers are created equal, and gaining a thor- After a company has built a smart segmentation scheme, ough understanding of the variations among customers the next task is determining how best to connect with tar- allows marketers to gauge how much to invest in each get customers at a personal level. Before consumers buy, one. Fortunately, marketers don’t need a complete view they typically have hundreds of touchpoints, online and in of a customer to reach her effectively, just some mini- the physical world, across many channels, devices and mum viable data such as demographic and location data, situations (see Figure 2). Marketers must under- frequency of purchase and average purchase size. stand an individual’s needs and wants throughout the episodes that make up his experience—where he shops, Even that basic level of knowledge allows marketers to what products he buys, what moments and interactions explore how target segments behave, and where to in- annoy or delight him. crease or decrease spending in order to influence behav- ior. The Carlson School of Management at the University Technologies can help marketers fill out the picture of of Minnesota wanted to improve the number and quality how people behave before they make a purchase. For of applications. It began projecting application numbers example, Google Analytics shows whether people redeem and choosing marketing investments based on segment discounts that increase their loyalty, or whether mobile sizes and conversion rates at each stage of the market- or desktop searches result in more conversions for a ing funnel, from awareness to consideration to action. particular product. Marketers can choose billboard or Previously, Carlson used a set cost-per-lead metric, with radio advertising by mining smartphone location data no calculation for projecting which of the potential stu- to see where and when people drive before they enter dents actually applied. Now, Carlson uses the lifetime a grocery store. value metric to know the effectiveness of each early-stage campaign in creating applications, and has realized a 28% When consumer engagements are complex enough lift in applications with the same level of spending. that it’s difficult to manually optimize marketing, some companies have deployed machine learning in a Applying a lifetime value lens also helps to identify the more automated approach (see sidebar, “Questions to individual customers who merit the highest and lowest consider when evaluating automation”). Sam’s Club, a levels of investment. For years, a major clothing retailer retail warehouse club, has learned that people who had considered all customers as essentially having equal download its mobile application and start browsing potential, and it spread its marketing dollars too thin. consumables will probably become regular members. By turning a value lens on its department, channel and Using a machine learning tool from Liftoff, Sam’s demographic data, the company learned that women Club has been targeting “lookalikes”—prospects who whose first purchase was a handbag frequently returned have characteristics matching current customers—to to buy goods in other departments. Women who started identify users most likely to sign up for membership. through lower-priced, more impulse-based departments Now it’s raising the average revenue per member by rarely returned. Likewise, first-time shoppers who then reminding them to complete half-completed tasks shopped in a new channel such as online had a higher within the app. lifetime value than those who shopped only in a single channel. Armed with this new knowledge, the retailer 3. Use informed hypotheses to identify which steered its marketing communications to women with marketing levers to pull the highest potential value, and realized a threefold annual increase in its return on spending for three Having identified which high-value customers to address, years running. defined their lifetime value and drawn a profile of their 2 Customer Lifetime Value: A Better Compass to Guide Your Marketing Automation Figure 2: Consumers use many devices and physical locations before making a purchase US consumers access their mobile phones about 200 times per day, and 69% make weekly purchases on mobile 40% …and 87% …yet almost 90% of smartphone users who of consumers do research of sales happen in research on mobile go online before stores rather than online on to buy on a desktop… entering a store… Sources: Bain & Company US consumer survey, September 2016 (n=5,853); Google Micro-Moments report; US Census Bureau Questions to consider when evaluating automation Succeeding with a customer-centered approach entails integrating the strands of technology that may be scattered inside an organization, such as first-party data, the customer relationship management (CRM) system and the programmatic ad-buying system. To assess whether their technology is customer- worthy, marketers can

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