6 Tips to Increase the Lifetime Value (LTV) of Your Small Business Customers

There’s nothing like the power of building long-lasting, meaningful relationships with your customers. While obtaining new customers is important, deepening your relationships with your existing ones is crucial to long-term profitability. In other words, increasing the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers is vital to your business’ success.

When you have a high LTV, it’s a sign that your business shows up for its customers and shares tremendous value, consistently.

From providing exceptional customer service to delivering high product and service quality to offering the right price, you give customers every reason to stay loyal to your brand.

But what if you’re struggling to maintain a high LTV? Or, what if you’re happy with your LTV, but you’d still love to see it improve?

In either case, we’ve got you covered with six top tips that can help you increase your customer LTV.

Ready to learn more?

Let’s begin.

1. Add value to their lives with customer-centric content

Widen the value you offer customers by creating customer-centric content designed to help them answer their burning questions and solve their unique pain points.

Whether you’re looking to nurture customers you’ve had for a short time, or whether you’re looking to nurture clients you’ve had for years, creating personalized content can carry them through every stage in the customer journey.

Here’s what we mean:

• How-to articles and FAQ pages can help customers alleviate any concerns or questions about how your product or service works — for instance, this article discusses how to pay for college to help students and parents find the best way to finance their college education. It’s the type of on-brand content for this company that helps move potential customers along their sales funnel.

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• Listicles can help your customers walk away with a list of hot tips that can help answer key questions about your product, service, or industry (like the article you’re currently reading does).
• Case studies and customer reviews can help remind customers why your products or services are worth keeping around.
• Blog articles on advanced topics can help customers further their education and derive more value from the products and services they’re investing in. For instance, an article describing what a colocation data center can help customers understand what it’d be like to invest in a more advanced solution.

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Another pro tip here: When crafting your blog content, it’s important to work on establishing authority by staying consistent across the board.

That means sticking with a posting schedule and topic themes, following a style guide, and keeping your aesthetics congruent with the help of a graphic designer or an online photo editor.

2. Create a marketing strategy in line with your goals and your customers’ needs

To encourage existing customers to invest more, set up marketing campaigns designed to help you reach your goals and fulfill your customers’ needs.

For instance, if you sell skincare sets, and your goal is to get as many customers as you can to invest in one of your monthly subscription plans, you’ll need to find out what they’ll need from you to make the investment worth it.

Consider a few scenarios.

For example, what if some customers use small amounts of product and therefore only need to buy a new skincare set every two to three months?

Or, what if some customers go through your product so quickly, they need to purchase a set every two weeks? How can your subscription plans accommodate both customer segments?

Remember, every customer is a valuable opportunity, especially considering the average revenue per eCommerce customer in the United States is $1,952. Therefore, prioritizing customer retention and maximizing their lifetime value is crucial.

It’s also important to consider price-sensitive shoppers and customers with unique purchasing needs. How can you adapt your monthly subscription plans to meet their needs, too?

In any case, creating a product-led growth strategy can help automate the process and allow customers to test-drive your subscription plans before officially investing in one.

When leading with a product-led growth strategy, be sure to offer tiered packages that are crafted with your audience segments in mind.

3. Offer products and services you know they’ll love

Encouraging customers to stick around and continuously invest in your brand is a lot simpler when you focus on offering products and services you know they’ll love.

The same is true for when you buy something, too, isn’t it?

Consider any time you’ve visited a restaurant that knew you well.

When they offered you the tiramisu that you always order for dessert, did you say yes?

As a force of habit — and because you just love their oh so delectable cream filling — you probably agreed to purchase the tiramisu.

If they offered you an ice cold lemonade at the start of your meal, but you usually order a coke, did you say yes? Maybe. But since that’s not your usual drink order, you likely declined the lemonade and asked for a coke.

The same is true for your customers, too.

Offering your customers chances to buy a product or service you know they’ll love can help inspire them to continuously buy from you.

For instance, if you own an online gaming store, and your young adult customers love specific games, consider offering them deals on popular games, like Resident Evil games.

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Or, if you’re a career coach and your coaching clients eat up your career development e-books, consider inviting them to join your book club so they always get an alert when you release a new e-book.

Whatever the case may be, always put the spotlight back on your customers.

4. Offer creative ways to help them save money, consistently

It’s no secret that the rising costs of inflation have led customers to become price-conscious and savings-hungry.

To keep customers from jumping to a more affordable competitor, it’s crucial to offer them creative ways to save money, consistently.

For instance, creating an affiliate marketing program and encouraging your customers to join can not only help them earn commissions for selling your products, but it can also help them get access to exclusive discounts and free merch.

Offering a rewards program or VIP program is another effective solution as it can help customers track and see their savings stack up over time.

Other things like discounted shipping or express shipping are definite crowd-pleasers and are easy to arrange by partnering with a reliable courier service.

You can also offer:

• Membership packages with members-only deals
• Loyalty cards meant to help customers redeem a free service or product after a certain number of purchases
• Holiday and seasonal BOGOs, promos, and generous discounts
• Weekend specials
• Credit toward a product or service any time they refer a friend

5. Stay in touch with a personalized email newsletter

Stay in constant communication, strengthen connections, and build trust with customers by keeping in touch via personalized email newsletters.

Email marketing should play an integral role in your customer nurturing plan as it’s one of the only channels that allows you to get up close and personal with your customers.

By sharing meaningful customer experiences and stories, highlighting your brand’s back story and behind-the-scenes gems, and sharing insights, value, and discounts, you can build a strong rapport with your customers over time.

Take this tip up a notch by automating your newsletters! You can do this by batching your newsletter content months in advance, and by triggering segmented drip campaigns to automatically send emails to your audience at the right time, every time.

6. Continue to remind them why you’re worth it (and why they should choose you over a competitor)

We wish we could say that you only have to win a customer over once in order to keep them for the long haul.

But due to countless competitors, price sensitivities, and everyday distractions, customers may start to forget about you or wonder if you’re still worth investing in.

To help remind customers that you’re more than worth it — and why they should choose you over a competitor — it’s important to understand what their potential objections and pain points are so you can nurture them back toward investing.

Creating and publishing an Instagram Reel that breaks down the top five ways your business improves customers’ lives can help remind your customers why they chose you in the first place (and why they should keep choosing you).

Wrap up

Building long-lasting, meaningful relationships with your customers has the power to transform your business.

While aiming to broaden your customer base is important, focusing on keeping your existing customers is key to creating a consistently profitable business.

That’s why increasing the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers is crucial to your success as a small business.

If you’ve been struggling to maintain a high LTV, or, if you’re happy with your LTV, but you’re still on a mission to see it improve, we hope today’s article has inspired you to take action toward your goals.

For good measure, here’s a quick recap of the six tips we shared today:

1. Add value to their lives with customer-centric content
2. Create a marketing strategy in line with your goals and your customers’ needs
3. Offer products and services you know they’ll love
4. Offer creative ways to help them save money, consistently
5. Stay in touch with a personalized email newsletter
6. Continue to remind them why you’re worth it (and why they should choose you over a competitor)

And that’s it for now.

Here’s to a high LTV and to your success!

This blog post has also appeared in a MarketingPlatform Newsletter.