The ability to model and score customers down to an individual level using customer lifetime value (CLV) is an incredible power. But the question marketers must ask themselves is: “What am I going to do with this power?” Leveraging CLV modeling is a great start, but real customer-centricity is in the ability to apply the modeling to execute truly relevant, 1:1 messaging.

The Factors Driving a Customer-Centric Marketing Approach

Moments are the new atomic unit

Moments are the currency in which this can happen. With funnels becoming shorter, brands need to shift to an orientation where customer experiences are built around a collection of interchangeable, contextual, non-sequential moments. These moments can be as monumental as getting married or as small as abandoning your cart on an ecommerce site.

Regardless of the context, there are always three elements to a moment-oriented experience:

• Goal: What’s the intended measurable outcome?
• Trigger: When does someone experience this moment?
• Audience: Who is experiencing this moment?

Moment-oriented marketing means moving from one aggregated customer journey to thousands of individual journeys. Doing so requires a different approach to strategic planning, including shifting campaign briefs and content creation. Brands have to move past the traditional campaign-based execution models and focus on cross-channel journeys with messages delivered at the right time and in the right channel. This moment-journey approach not only increases the value of every customer interaction but also improves CLV over time.

Bringing moments together for 1:1 experiences

Download our free ebook on customer-centric marketing

The moments that influence and shape customers’ behaviors and habits are continuous—24 hours a day, seven days a week. The ability to align and be able to capitalize on these moments requires a unified analytical approach. Not only do you need an integrated collection of first-party data, but CLV is the model in which you can manage these moments. Have those, and the orchestration of a customer journey becomes much simpler and more effective.

Here’s how that plays out in reality. In analyzing the buying patterns of your customers on a singular level, you see the model predicts a customer set that includes John Doe is about to decrease in value. He and the others are likely about to disengage. To proactively counteract this, you enter John into a cross-channel retention journey with relevant content that boosts John’s engagement and lifts sales.

It’s true 1:1 marketing. This individual dynamic scoring and marketing is then activated across all of your cohorts. The result? Cumulative growth of your customer asset over time, leading to a higher overall customer lifetime value.

Personalized journeys in action

DEG built a model for a national restaurant chain to predict the future customer lifetime value of individual customers in order to anticipate declines in CLV. The model highlighted approximately 140,000 customers who had been regular visitors of the chain but were beginning to slow in frequency.

Understanding the Power of Customer Lifetime Value

We placed this group of customers in a retention journey to entice them to continue visiting the restaurant. This single journey resulted in an additional 3,200 visits, more than $25,000 in revenue, and an average CLV increase of $12 per person out of this one 140,000-customer group.

Your guide to embracing customer-centric marketing

Gain more insights into why and how brands are shifting focus toward their customers by downloading a free copy of our customer-centricity guide.