What Tactics Increase Customer Lifetime Value for a Marketing Manager?

Foster a Customer Community

Building a customer community environment is a great way to increase customer lifetime value. By bringing your customers together and letting them interact with one another, you enable them to have valuable discussions about your product or service, as well as about common practices and day-to-day activities. The value that they get from these discussions, whether it's support-related or niche-related, will be attributed to the brand that is facilitating these conversations through its community—which is you!

All in all, a customer community environment improves the customer experience through better customer support and a community feeling created by being exposed to peers in the same space, with the same issues and daily activities. Launching a customer community environment can reduce churn by up to 35%.

Launch an Affiliate Program

We implemented a referral and affiliate program, and since most of our customers are entrepreneurs and independent contractors, many of them appreciate the opportunity to earn additional income. This way, our clients not only stay with us for future similar purchases, but they also become promoters of our products.

However, this method only works because it is based on our customer profile and the data our actual customers provided. To design any marketing strategy to increase customer lifetime value, it's important to consider what your clients' needs are beyond what you can currently offer them, and how you can fulfill those needs.

Tailor Marketing to Customer Preferences

In the past, we've tried loyalty programs. What we found was that most of our highest-spending and most frequent buyers didn't participate. The people who tended to participate were those who rarely ordered or had never ordered, and they'd always be finding loopholes and ways of exploiting the program for extra points, so we did away with loyalty programs.

One thing that has worked for us is tailoring marketing messages based on our customers' preferences, i.e., how frequently they buy, what they buy, and sending VIP offers and coupons to our most frequent buyers and highest spenders to foster a strong connection with our brand.

Implement a Customer-Referral Program

A successful tactic I used to increase customer lifetime value was implementing a customer-referral program. For every new customer they referred who made a purchase, I rewarded the referring customer with store credit proportional to the new customer's purchase amount.

Since existing customers already trust the brand and have a positive experience, their referrals tend to convert at higher rates. The program became quite popular and a meaningful source of new customers, motivating repeat purchases from existing customers to earn more referrals. The referrals also demonstrated higher long-term value since they came from a trusted source.

The average customer lifetime value increased approximately 15% within the first year of the program by acquiring these higher-value referrals and motivating repeat purchases from participating referrals. Customer-referral programs can be implemented with minimal cost and effort but can make a meaningful impact if structured properly and promoted to customers.

Leverage Automated Email Flows

Employing personalized marketing strategies through the analysis of customer data remains a cornerstone of my approach to increasing customer lifetime value (LTV). By leveraging insights from customer data, I can tailor marketing efforts to specific customers, ensuring that the messaging resonates with distinct customer segments.

One crucial element within this strategy is the implementation of automated email flows, including post-purchase engagement. These automated workflows enable me to deliver personalized messages and offerings based on customers' past interactions, purchases, or preferences.

This tailored engagement not only enhances customer satisfaction but also significantly contributes to an increase in long-term customer loyalty and the overall lifetime value each customer brings to the business.