
Pump up your customer lifetime value with email remarketing - chexton
http://blog.getvero.com/pump-up-your-customer-ltv-with-email-remarketing/
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edhallen
From Patrick's course to articles like these, it's great to see the growth in
interest in this. The challenge with LTV (as with all analysis) is making sure
that you can translate it into action. For many companies, the barrier is just
getting started.

On a broader note, it's great to see how many companies are tackling customer
lifecycle management (though with very different approaches and different end
markets). It's time people stopped building one-offs for this.

A few companies I know of (the first of which I'm a co-founder of):

\- Klaviyo

\- Vero

\- Customer.io

\- Reamaze

\- Intercom

\- Totango

\- Mixpanel

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sudonim
Hi Ed, Colin, co-founder of Customer.io here. We haven't chatted yet, but I
totally agree about the growing interest in this space helping all of us.

I'm thrilled to be working with you all as peers. I met Des from Intercom
recently -- stellar guy. And from what I know of Chris and James at Vero, they
seem great too.

Haven't met the rest of you guys yet, but if you'll be at the "Inbox Love"
conference next week in SF, I'd love to chat there.

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patio11
This article is _really_ worth your time.

~~~
chexton
Thanks Patrick :).

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sgrove
I've been meaning to give Vero a try for awhile, it comes highly recommended
from some friends, and we have a lot of users who're using it along with
Zenbox as well. Awesome to see them providing good material - I especially
like the examples.

A question though - at what point is your product developed enough to
differentiate on plans? When should you focus on tracking LTV - MVP? 0
customers? 1? 10? 100?

I'd like to see a "Ok, you're just getting started, here's what you're going
to need to put in place immediately, and here are the signs that you _need_ to
look at the next steps after that."

Any chance of that Chexton? :)

~~~
chexton
Always great to hear that we've been recommended by some friends!

Absolutely a relevant question. I was going to put a few disclaimer paragraphs
at the top but took them out at the eleventh hour because this post was
already pretty long.

For the sorts of tactics in this post I'd say you definitely need
product/market fit and a steady stream of incoming customers. Depending on the
price of your products, the product mix and your target market this could be
50, 500 or 5000 customers/potential customers. It's more likely to be the
upper two, in this case as you need a good sample size to get see any change
and know that it's statistically relevant.

After I get through this series of post (or in the meantime, if I get a
chance) I'll put together a post that addresses exactly what you've asked for:
what 3-5 lifecycle emails should you _ABSOLUTELY_ be sending from the word go
and at what point should you implement new strategies like those mentioned
here.

It'd be my pleasure :). chris AT getvero.com if you ever want to get in touch
and chat directly too.

~~~
wikwocket
If anyone wants a good primer for a "top 4 lifecycle emails to send," I found
patio11's post on the customer.io blog to be very helpful:
[http://customer.io/blog/What-are-Lifecycle-emails-
patio11-pa...](http://customer.io/blog/What-are-Lifecycle-emails-
patio11-patrick-mckenzie.html)

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programminggeek
I think that it is an atrocity that most companies do such a bad job of
tracking from ad spend to clicks to leads to sales to recurring sales.

If you know the LTV of a customer and the acquisition cost, you can scale a
profitable marketing campaign basically to the limit of the channel or your
cash depending on how fast you turn over money.

Also tracking the lifetime value of clients, you could find that what is an
unprofitable channel in the short-mid term becomes profitable after some point
down the road, or not at all.

Knowing is half the battle!

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losvedir
We just hooked up our KISSmetrics events to start tracking "billed" events in
order to use its revenue tab, which I believe includes customer LTV
estimations.

However, it takes a week before it has enough data to start showing anything,
so I'm just sitting here eagerly waiting.

Anyone have any experience using that particular feature of KISSmetrics? Is it
any good?

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graeme
I'm in the test prep industry, where customers only stay active for 2-6 months
(3 is typical).

This radically changes LTV, as we don't have multi-year timeframes. We
currently sell a course as a one-off purchase. We could move to a monthly
model, but there are fairly fixed licensing costs.

How would you increase LTV in an industry with quick turnover?

~~~
btilly
Send your past customers an email series starting about 11 months after their
initial signup offering them money if they get a friend to sign up.

You might not get another sale from the same person, but what is that word of
mouth worth to you?

~~~
chexton
A great suggestion too!

Do you have any details on having used something like this yourself btilly?

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btilly
Not exactly like this, but one of the challenges that I had with A/B testing
at Pictage was trying to account for the value that was generated through
referrals. Maybe a bridesmaid would see a picture, and the mother-in-law would
buy.

So certainly part of the value of a customer is the value of the referrals
that they generate.

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tocomment
I'm curious if any of these strategies can be applied to real-world service
businesses, for example a pre-school?

~~~
loumf
Automating email to anyone with email addresses is the easy part, and of
course, that can be done.

The hard parts are:

1\. Getting email addresses -- for SaaS businesses, it makes sense to ask and
get the address -- it's work for most any other business.

2\. Getting engagement or other usage information -- these systems usually try
to tie the messages to behavior.

It would make sense to make as much of the experience of being a parent
manageable via a web site where they would register and engage.

A pre-school is perfect for this because parents think about them all day long
and consider it important. It's harder for services that people use, but
aren't core to their lives (so aren't going to engage with it).

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TOGoS
How about you don't?

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rscale
It never ceases to amaze me how many organizations don't make a meaningful
effort to accurately measure and focus on LTV.

This lack of focus means that opportunities are missed as those organizations
fail to identify and address high-value segments, while also overpaying to
acquire customers from low-value segments.

It's great to see some actionable tactical advice on using a specific tactic
to increase LTV, not just because it's a good advice, but because it's a clear
reminder about the importance of LTV as a key metric.

~~~
chexton
I definitely thought this as I was writing these posts. There is a fair amount
of quality analysis out there when it comes to LTV but not as much as you'd
expect.

The truly quality information comes from thought leaders like Jason Cohen and
you can understand why he (or anyone with a rigorous scientific approach to
customer acquisition) does so well.

There is definitely lots of room for people to focus more heavily on LTV. It's
an extremely interesting, complicated and powerful number.

