About Customer Lifetime Value and Purchase Likelihood

To help you market to your customers and drive e-commerce sales, we compare each individual’s purchase history and patterns to what’s normal for your store. Then, we estimate their customer lifetime value (CLV) and likelihood to purchase again.

In this article, you’ll learn about customer lifetime value and purchase likelihood, and how to use this information to create targeted emails.

Things to know

Here's something to know about customer lifetime value and purchase likelihood.

• These metrics are available for users with Mailchimp Standard or above, and require a connected store with enough e-commerce data to generate accurate predictions.

About the categories

Customer lifetime value and purchase likelihood are predictive insights about contacts who have made at least one purchase in your connected online store. While both tools forecast future buying behavior, how you think about them from a marketing perspective may differ.

• Customer lifetime value
  Looks at overall value and may help predict who's likely to bring you the most value over time.
• Purchase likelihood
  Looks at patterns in return customer behavior and may help you retain business.

A contact’s customer lifetime value and purchase likelihood can fall into one of three general categories: low, moderate, or high. We’ll also identify first-time customers as new while we gather enough data to classify them.

Here’s an overview of what each category indicates about your customers.

How it works

To determine a customer’s CLV and likelihood to purchase again, we do some advanced mathematical modeling on our end to compare averages for your connected store to a few customer-specific variables.

• Customer age
  How long a contact has been a customer, or the amount of time since their first purchase.
• Time between first and last purchase The time between a customer’s first purchase and their most recent, or last, purchase.
• Time since most recent purchase
  The time since a customer last made a purchase from your store.
• Frequency
  How many times a customer made a purchase.
• Spend amount (CLV only)
  Measures how much money a contact has spent in your connected online store.

Over time, customers can move between categories based on these different variables. For example, one customer may be moved into the Low purchase likelihood category after 8 weeks without buying anything, while another may remain in the High purchase likelihood category even though more time has passed since they last purchased.

View CLV and purchase likelihood

When you’re ready to view CLV and purchase likelihood data for an audience, check the audience dashboard, contact profile, and segment builder.

Audience dashboard

Click Audience, then choose Audience dashboard. Scroll to the E-commerce section. Click any category, and we'll help you start a targeted email for that segment of contacts.

Contact profile

Click Audience, then choose All contacts. Click a contact's email address to open their contact profile. On the Overview tab, scroll to the Predictive Analytics section of the contact profile page.

Segmentation criteria

Use CLV or purchase likelihood in custom segments to organize your audience and send targeted emails.

You can create a custom segment from the contact table or various campaign builders.

Troubleshooting

I have an eligible Mailchimp plan and connected online store, but I still don’t see customer lifetime value or purchase likelihood for my contacts.

Customer lifetime value and purchase likelihood are personalized store metrics. We take data integrity and accuracy seriously, so we’ll only show you CLV and purchase likelihood when we’re confident your store has enough relevant and consistent data for valid predictions.