This post will briefly describe an important marketing metric called “Customer Lifetime value”.

What is it?

It’s an important metric in the world of marketing. It helps businesses measure a customer’s worth to a business during the entire business relationship. In other words, it helps a business calculate net profit associated with a customers relationship starting from first purchase AND subsequent purchases along with expected future purchases.

How is it used?

It’s used to measure return on investment when formulating marketing strategies. Here’s an example: If your strategy costs $100 to acquire a customer and the average lifetime value of customer is $400 – then well, that’s a great thing, isn’t it?

It also helps business focus on making the most out of the existing customer relationships.

To extend these examples in the Internet marketing world, let’s take an example:

Suppose that the cost of acquiring a customer via Internet marketing is $25. The customer buys a $10 worth of goods. Is this good? Not from what we’ve seen so far. But the lifetime value of customer is $120 – see, now it does makes sense to spend $25 to acquire a customer.

Conclusion:

In this post, I wrote about a key Business Metric that should be of help when you work on your Marketing analytics project. Note that accurately measusring this metric is NOT an addition of couple of numbers and there is some thinking involved. To that end, I would leave you thinking about this critical business metrics that could be used in marketing analytics project! Your comments are very welcome!