Customer Lifetime Value Academy
Learn how to calculate, use, and apply Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) in your business. Welcome to the academy, click below to start your CLV journey!
- 5 courses
- 17 lessons
- Customer stories
Start with the basics, then dive into how-to lessons, coding workshops, and practical applications.
The Academy courses provide you with the knowledge and skills to start using customer lifetime value to optimize your marketing, sales, product, supply chain, and customer service strategies.
Course 1
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4 Lessons
Introduction to Customer Lifetime Value
Let’s start at the beginning. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric that estimates how much value (usually revenue or profit margin) any given customer will bring to your business over the course of the total time they interact with your brand—past, present, and future.
This course is an introduction to CLV for business analysts, c-suite executives, growth marketers, data scientists, and anyone in between.
Lesson 1
10 min
10 min
What Is Customer Lifetime Value?
Lesson 2
8 min
8 min
Why Calculate CLV at the Individual Level
Lesson 3
15 min
15 min
How to Collect, Organize, and Use Complex Customer Data
Lesson 4
12 min
12 min
Visualizations for Customer Lifetime Value
Course 2
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7 Lessons
CLV Business Applications
Customer Lifetime Value demonstrates who your best customers are and what they have in common. How would your strategies change if you could predict which audiences will remain loyal to your brand for years to come?
This course provides business applications of CLV for acquisition, retention, product management, customer service, and more.
Lesson 1
8 min
8 min
Cross-Functional CLV Use Cases
Lesson 2
17 min
17 min
Lookalike Strategies Powered by CLV
Lesson 3
6 min
6 min
Optimize Your Marketing Budget
Lesson 4
9 min
9 min
CLV Migration Over Time
Lesson 5
8 min
8 min
Lifecycle Marketing Strategies
Lesson 6
11 min
11 min
CLV-Driven Product Insights
Lesson 7
9 min
9 min
Revamp Your Customer Service
Course 3
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5 Lessons
Customer Lifetime Value Models
Let’s get into the data science behind customer lifetime value. There are several ways to calculate CLV, with models differing in accuracy at the aggregate and individual levels. Some models require historical data, while others can predict CLV early in the customer journey.
This course begins with the basics of customer lifetime value, then it dives deeper into various models for calculating and predicting CLV.
Lesson 1
6 min
6 min
CLV Basics
Lesson 2
18 min
18 min
Ways to Predict CLV
Lesson 3
6 min
6 min
History of Buy Til You Die (BTYD) Models
Lesson 4
6 min
6 min
Calculating CLV with R
Lesson 5
9 min
9 min
Supervised Machine Learning vs Bayesian Statistical Models
Course 4
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5 Lessons
Success with CLV
After calculating or predicting customer lifetime value, the next step is to share your findings with internal teams, stakeholders, or clients.
This course includes tips for data science teams to measure model performance, share results, and improve decision making in the organization. Plus, learn how to use CLV for incrementality measurement.
Lesson 1
7 min
7 min
Strategies for Stakeholder Management
Lesson 2
10 min
10 min
A Framework for Marketing Decision Making
Lesson 3
9 min
9 min
Building Data Science Teams
Lesson 4
4 min
4 min
Incrementality Testing Basics
Lesson 5
7 min
7 min
Incrementality and Customer Lifetime Value
Course 5
/
2 Lessons
Beyond CLV
You made it to the last course! By now, you know what customer lifetime value means and how to use it to solve problems in your business. What’s next? Let’s go beyond CLV and explore other areas of customer data science.
In this course, you’ll learn about CLV-adjacent topics like time series, attribution, and customer segmentation.
Lesson 1
13 min
13 min
Customer Segmentation by Goal
Lesson 2
8 min
8 min
Cluster Messy Time Series
Let’s start at the beginning. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a metric that estimates how much value (usually revenue or profit margin) any given customer will bring to your business over the course of the total time they interact with your brand—past, present, and future.
This course is an introduction to CLV for business analysts, c-suite executives, growth marketers, data scientists, and anyone in between.
Lesson 1
10 min
10 min
What Is Customer Lifetime Value?
The very first course in the CLV Academy provides an overview of customer lifetime value. What is it? Why is it important? What problems can CLV solve for your business? You can dive deeper into many of these ideas in later lessons.
Lesson 2
8 min
8 min
Why Calculate CLV at the Individual Level
The most commonly used customer lifetime value models benchmark their strengths on aggregate statistics. Yet, most business use cases for CLV require accuracy at the individual level. You can see the problem.
Lesson 3
15 min
15 min
How to Collect, Organize, and Use Complex Customer Data
Are you ready to start using customer lifetime value metrics in your business? Start here. This lesson walks you through a useful checklist to start building a data platform to handle customer-level data and models.
Lesson 4
12 min
12 min
Visualizations for Customer Lifetime Value
You can use customer lifetime value metrics across the organization, from marketing and sales to product and customer service. For cross-functional alignment, visualizations are a helpful tool to share customer data science with other teams.
Customer Lifetime Value demonstrates who your best customers are and what they have in common. How would your strategies change if you could predict which audiences will remain loyal to your brand for years to come?
This course provides business applications of CLV for acquisition, retention, product management, customer service, and more.
Lesson 1
8 min
8 min
Cross-Functional CLV Use Cases
After calculating customer lifetime value at the individual level, what can you do with that information? This lesson provides an overview of cross-functional applications of CLV, from marketing and sales to product and customer service.
Lesson 2
17 min
17 min
Lookalike Strategies Powered by CLV
Ad platforms allow advertisers to target new users with lookalike audiences. However, the out-of-the-box solution falls short because all of your customers aren’t alike. With customer lifetime value, you can create more effective lookalike audiences for acquisition.
Lesson 3
6 min
6 min
Optimize Your Marketing Budget
Between acquisition and retention campaigns to content marketing and brand development, it’s difficult to know where to spend your limited marketing dollars. Individual customer lifetime value metrics take the guesswork out of budgeting so you can optimize your spend in real time.
Lesson 4
9 min
9 min
CLV Migration Over Time
Customer lifetime value is not a static metric. It changes over time—sometimes dramatically—as you observe new data about a customer. By tracking how CLV changes over time, you can determine what product features, retention campaigns, customer service practices, and more impact lifetime value.
Lesson 5
8 min
8 min
Lifecycle Marketing Strategies
Don’t over-optimize your retention strategy; rather, acquire the right customers in the first place. Design a marketing strategy for customers throughout their lifecycle, from acquisition to retention.
Lesson 6
11 min
11 min
CLV-Driven Product Insights
You can use customer lifetime value metrics to enrich and inform your product marketing strategy. What if you knew which products high-value customers bought first? Or which products you should offer as a bundle or upsell?
Lesson 7
9 min
9 min
Revamp Your Customer Service
Customer service and customer support teams are making the shift to focus on customer success or even customer experience. Instead of simply reacting to customer problems, customer success teams can use CLV to help identify and predict problems and offer potential solutions.
Let’s get into the data science behind customer lifetime value. There are several ways to calculate CLV, with models differing in accuracy at the aggregate and individual levels. Some models require historical data, while others can predict CLV early in the customer journey.
This course begins with the basics of customer lifetime value, then it dives deeper into various models for calculating and predicting CLV.
Lesson 1
6 min
6 min
CLV Basics
Customer lifetime value comes in many shapes and sizes. From the popular RFM approach at the cohort-level to predictive lifetime value, this lesson explores the various flavors of CLV.
Lesson 2
18 min
18 min
Ways to Predict CLV
There are several methods you can use to calculate customer lifetime value, from simple to complex. This lesson will explore how to predict CLV at the aggregate and individual level.
Lesson 3
6 min
6 min
History of Buy Til You Die (BTYD) Models
Let’s take a look back at the history of BTYD models, the staple in Bayesian CLV prediction. Lifetime value comes to life using probabilistic models to handle churn and transaction timing, rather than the relatively straightforward RFM models.
Lesson 4
6 min
6 min
Calculating CLV with R
In this lesson, we’ll share a popular method for calculating customer lifetime value using the R programming language.
Lesson 5
9 min
9 min
Supervised Machine Learning vs Bayesian Statistical Models
Most traditional BTYD models are Bayesian statistical. In this lesson, we’ll explore an alternative way of modeling short-term CLV using Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), which are a type of supervised machine learning that can handle time series well.
After calculating or predicting customer lifetime value, the next step is to share your findings with internal teams, stakeholders, or clients.
This course includes tips for data science teams to measure model performance, share results, and improve decision making in the organization. Plus, learn how to use CLV for incrementality measurement.
Lesson 1
7 min
7 min
Strategies for Stakeholder Management
Data scientists often evaluate their own work based upon model accuracy, completeness, or some other criterion. However, it’s even more important to demonstrate the business impact of your analysis to stakeholders within your organization.
Lesson 2
10 min
10 min
A Framework for Marketing Decision Making
If you’re a growth marketer that has started measuring customer lifetime value instead of just return on ad spend, this lesson is for you. The next step is to reframe your decision making to optimize your marketing based on CLV.
Lesson 3
9 min
9 min
Building Data Science Teams
Defining and rallying support for a vision of success for yourself and your team can help to not only invigorate your team and partners today, but it can also help to sustain momentum, celebrate wins, and structure learnings as you move forward.
Lesson 4
4 min
4 min
Incrementality Testing Basics
Incrementality helps marketers optimize media investments by determining how much each channel or tactic contributes to results.
Lesson 5
7 min
7 min
Incrementality and Customer Lifetime Value
Apply incrementality testing to customer lifetime value to guide high-quality budget allocation and optimization decisions.
You made it to the last course! By now, you know what customer lifetime value means and how to use it to solve problems in your business. What’s next? Let’s go beyond CLV and explore other areas of customer data science.
In this course, you’ll learn about CLV-adjacent topics like time series, attribution, and customer segmentation.
Lesson 1
13 min
13 min
Customer Segmentation by Goal
When it comes to segmenting your customers, you have plenty of options. The right method depends on your business objectives and goals. Do you want to simply understand your current customer base? Do you want to predict what your customers will do next?
Lesson 2
8 min
8 min
Cluster Messy Time Series
When clustering data, it can be challenging to handle time series data, especially when the series have differing lengths. Check out this lesson for the code and theory on how to cluster your own messy time series data.