Customer Profitability

This technical note defines, describes, and illustrates the most common metrics marketers used to monitor and manage customer relationships. Among the metrics covered are customer counts, recency, retention rates, customer profitability, and customer lifetime value. Excerpt UVA-M-0718 Rev. Apr. 27, 2018 Customer Profitability This note covers metrics that measure the performance of individual customer relationships. Just as some brands are more profitable than others, so too are some customer relationships more profitable than others. Customer profit is a metric that summarizes the past financial performance of a customer relationship. Customer lifetime value (CLV) looks forward in an attempt to put a dollar figure on existing customer relationships. One of the more important uses of CLV is to inform prospecting decisions. This note also considers acquisition and retention spending—spending designed to acquire new customers and spending designed to retain and profit from existing customers. . . .