All the successful brands you see around, be it Amazon, Best Buy, McDonald’s, Beachbody, or others, they all have their own strategies to grow their business. But what is common in all of them is that they all work on the same system, that is customer value optimization or CVO. Now, why do these big brands dedicatedly follow CVO?
Take a look at these facts.
A Forrester study proves that brands who lead in customer experience outperform their competitors by around 80%.
Another study by Microsoft suggests that 96% of consumers say that customer service is a crucial factor in brand loyalty.
Hence, it is clear that customer value optimization is a deciding factor for the success of businesses.
In this article, we will learn what CVO is and discuss the top 12 strategies to upgrade the value that your brand offers to the customers.
Let’s begin by understanding the concept of customer value optimization.
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What is Customer Value Optimization (CVO)?
Customer value optimization or CVO, is the framework in which companies focus on raising the value of their customers to grow their businesses.
The aim of the framework is to create an incredible customer journey and increase the ROI for entire digital marketing activities. The optimization continues throughout the customer lifecycle, resulting in improved brand loyalty, as well as creating customers for life.
The process is constant as the customer behaviour changes over time. Some of the example offers that are vital for CVO are:
- Lead Magnet Offer: Taking valuable pieces of information in exchange for contact information, which is usually an email address.
- Tripwire Offer: Offering low price products for quick and volume conversion.
- Core Offer: Selling flagship product of high price under attractive offers.
- Profit Maximizer: Using side products to maximize the transaction value of each new customer.
- Return Path: Bring existing customers and new customers back into the sales funnel who left in between the purchase process.
What Does CVO Process Consists Of?
- pointing out who’s your ideal customer
- magnifying their value
It’s tightly connected to another metric: customer lifetime value, or CLV. Increasing CLV can offer some of the best ROI in business, ensuring both company growth and long-term profits.
Amazon.com trades with the lowest margins knowing that acquiring new customers, selling them more items, and selling them more often is how you get unstoppable.
Steps to Define Your Ideal Customer
Defining your ideal customer is the very first step to understanding how to communicate with your audience, how to better solve their problems, and how to establish a long-term relationship. Here are 3 main steps that would help a business to create the ideal customer profile.
Determine the Value of Your Product From the Customers’ Point of View
What can your product give to a client? The thing is, we don’t buy things, but we purchase the impact it has on our lives. This before-after process is the reason all purchases are made. Once we start to understand that we are selling not products, but solutions to human problems, then we can really understand the customers’ needs.
Define the Ideal Customer for Whom You Sell or Offer
One of the most important things that you need to define is your customers’ gender, age, occupation, marital status, education, level of income, financial situation, and etc. In general, you need to collect all possible information about your client while creating a product or service.
Collecting this information could also help you define how, where, and when you can connect with your potential customers and what to do to attract their attention. By creating a strong online and offline based on the information about how your customer spends their time, constantly getting new customers and retaining the old ones would not be a problem anymore.
Determine the Uniqueness of Your Product
What are the most important benefits you offer for a potential customer? What should a customer buy from you rather than from your rivals, what particular needs does your product satisfy?
The Nord VPN apps set a great example on how you should determine and focus on the unique sides of your product, as some of them are being so popular because of affordable pricing, the other – because of the speed that is much faster than one of their competitors, and another because of great compatibility with your operating system. Any product or service should develop its uniqueness and then capitalize on it. The current market is being highly competitive, so you need to stand out from the mass of similar products.
Determine the Geographical Location of Your Customer
Define when and where they buy your product or service? People in various geographical locations differ in mentality and purchasing habits, so you need to craft your marketing strategy accordingly. If your company is multilingual and offers product / services in different languages, it is very important to track this. For example, the Preply company constantly analyzes how many clients choose English classes and how many in all other languages.
Determine Your Customer’s Buying Strategy
How has your customer bought similar products or services in the past if they did any? F.e, a customer decided to purchase a pair of nice kitchen towels on your site and is about to complete the purchase. You can offer them teacups that beautifully match the towels so they also add them to a card and double your profit.
CVO vs. CRO
According to MOZ, a conversion is a general term for a visitor to complete a site goal. There are two generally accepted forms of conversion-micro and macro. For example, if your online business is specialized in clothes trading, then the macro ( or primary goal ) is that a visitor makes a purchase. Micro conversions ( or smaller conversions) are actions that a user makes before achieving a primary goal ( f.i. signs up to receive emails).
We also differentiate between conversion rate optimization (CRO) and customer value optimization (CVO). So what do these two terms mean and what role do they play in online marketing?
So, Neil Patel gave the following definition of CRO “In internet marketing, conversion optimization, or conversion rate optimization is a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that converts into customers, or more generally, takes any desired action on a webpage”.
Customer Value Optimization, in its turn, is a process that combines all three ways of growing the business offered by legendary J.Abraham:
- Increasing the number of customers
- Increasing the number of transactions per customer
- Increasing the average transaction value per customer.
Its main goal is to create a sales funnel that allows you to outspend your competition to acquire and keep customers.
Optimize your Customer Lifetime Value strategy
Get more valuable customers for a more profitable e-store.
CRO Won’t Help Your Online Business Grow in Long Term Perspective
CRO is vital for your eCommerce. It is seen as a silver bullet that can solve all e-Commerce problems. However, CRO won’t make people purchase more often. What’s the point of attracting more visitors and turning them into buyers, but don’t turn more customers into admired repeat customers?
The whole CVO process is all client-oriented. Any online company must first understand its customers and their needs before investing resources in customer acquisition.
Drive meaningful change in your ecommerce
Monitor & improve what matters.
There are several strategies to implement CVO in your business strategy.
Let’s start.
Grab the Right Audience
Targeting the right audience is the first thing you need to do when you are planning to market your product or services. This doesn’t involve targeting bulk traffic.
The reason is that acquiring more customers will not be profitable for you if more customers cause higher losses to your company. Therefore, focus always should be on the quality of the customers.
The Pareto Principle holds true in terms of customer acquisition and revenue generation because 80% of business revenue is brought by 20% of customers.
Now, imagine if you can pinpoint the 20% of customers and increase the percentage of them. You will start increasing your business revenue pretty easily.
We will begin to understand the process of analyzing the customer. But before that, let us know the types of customers first.
Every business has three categories of customers:
- Low-value: This group of customers waste your resources like buying products on excessive discounts or continue to talk to customer support on petty issues. They bring little to no profit.
- Medium value: This group of customers form a majority of buyers. They do not bring significant profits, but they are high in numbers.
- High-value: These are the customers who are really worth approaching because they bring the highest profits.
With CVO, you can identify high-value customers and optimize their overall experiences with your brand.
The way to analyze your audience is based on the product’s selling performance. Take a look at these different product categories that can be categorized based on products performance:
- High Value & High Volume: Some product categories show high-volume first-time purchases and provide high-value customers. For example, a particular product is mostly the first-time purchase, and those buyers later become a regular customer.
- High Value & Low Volume: There is another category that shows low-volume first-time purchase, but provides high-value customers. Most of the time, these products are high-priced and therefore, could manage to have a lower number of buyers. However, customers are lifetime repeat customers.
- Low Value & High Volume: The next product category is often the first purchase by the customer in high-volume, but they never return. This category is capable of attracting customers but unable to provide repeat customers.
- Low Value & Low Volume: The last category is the one that neither performs well in sales, nor do they bring quality customers. It is better to avoid this category for customer acquisition.
Use the Right Advertisements
Once you have identified the right audience, you can select different channels of advertisement to promote your products, while valuing your customers. Here are some of the best ways you can try to grab the leads:
- Branded Search Ads: Advertise on Google ads or other ads networks. Make your ads appear when people search using your brand name or phrases associated with your brand name or business. This is how you will help your audience to find your business.
- Google Shopping Ads: This form of ad is another great way to value your customers as you are providing them with what they are looking for. As these ads are well-targeted, you get a higher rate of conversion. You can use Bing or Yahoo as well for shopping ads. Start with google first. If it works, you can go for the rest.
- Affiliate Marketing: Connect with business owners of your industry who are not your competitors, but have a common audience. These businesses can be your affiliate partners who can help you get clicks to your site through their tactics, and in return, you do the same. This is a win-win for both businesses. This form of marketing is often useful when you are out of budget or want to try something different when other ads are not giving desirable results.
Offer Additional Value with Products
The market is full of the same product or services as yours. So, the question is, why should customers choose you over others?
The answer is they will choose you only if you offer something like no one else.
Your ad should have a clear CVP (Customer Value Proposition). Include texts that describe the added value offered with the product.
Take an example of this ad of Pizza Hut.
It has a clear CVP – “double the fun on every delivery”. The texts are conveying the message that there is an offer. At the same time, it is raising curiosity in customers. They ask how?
Then, what is the offer and related details are clearly mentioned in the texts below – “buy 2 pizzas at 50% off…”.
The CVP does not necessarily have to be an offer. It can be simply about your product.
With this CVP above – “two oranges squeezed into every glass”, the customers are easily getting the point that what the product has to offer. So, they know why this is different from others and why they should choose it.
Adopt a Security-First Approach
As per the 2020 Data Breach Investigations Report, organized cybercrime groups undertook two-thirds of breaches, and 86% of breaches were financially motivated. It is estimated that by 2026, the job growth in the information security industry is expected to grow at the rate of 28%.
Customers ask for responsive applications, fast network performance, and secure experience when providing personal data and payment information to eCommerce websites.
Therefore, it is crucial to gain customers’ trust to continue building relationships. eCommerce businesses must use security as a differentiator to build trust and loyalty with customers in an increasingly insecure world.
For example, eCommerce stores like Amazon and Mercato offer complete website security and privacy by offering strong encryption to user data.
Moreover, hackers can easily hack simple passwords and four-digit PINs. Therefore, companies should encourage customers to keep their login credentials safe and secure.
Tools like the username generator from NordPass vault can help to keep the login credential safe by keeping them in an encrypted format.
Ecommerce websites should encourage customers to set longer passwords with a combination of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters.
Besides, switch to HTTPS and be PCI DSS compliant to ensure that your website is safe for money transactions. Taking measures like these will help to improve the UX resulting in higher sales.
Offer Low-Ticket Items to Initiate Buying
Valuing customers also means giving them choices. By displaying or advertising low-ticket items, you are giving them options and inviting them to initiate buying.
Low-ticket items could be anything between $1 to $30. However, low or high-ticket products vary with industry.
It is essential to understand that creating such offers might not always be profitable for you. In fact, in many cases, you may have to go through the losses. Even then, it is worthwhile as:
- You earned new customers
- They had an experience with you
- Now they know you
- There is a high possibility that they will refer you
Take this one as an example. Here is the offer by Flipkart that offers lowest priced products on its home page. The soft toys are offered at a price as low as $10!
Of course, this is not a profitable deal for the company, but attractive enough to get customers.
So, the goal is to convert prospects into customers by offering products at the price they can’t resist. Once they have a business with you, they will be comfortable to buy your core products or high-priced products.
This opens the door to sell the products with a better profit margin.
Sound Like a Human
Describing product details is fine as long as it is easy to understand for customers. Be it any product the technical details make a product unique. But telling them all is not helpful for customers if they don’t get it.
This ad of an air-purifier clearly says what it can do, and therefore it goes straight in the customer’s mind. This is far easier to understand than understanding the technicalities behind how it can remove 99.97% air pollutants in 6 minutes.
Your message should be about how your product can practically help your customers. Therefore, try to make your ad sound more like a human.
Incite the Audience to Action
Every visitor visiting your site will not necessarily start buying right after registering. Most of the prospects will add items to their cart but leave in the middle without purchasing.
The reasons could be anything like too many product choices or waiting for discounts. Therefore, cases of bounced traffic and abandoned carts are common.
So, how to handle this? Create a sense of urgency.
You can do this in many ways. For example, you can show messages like:
- Only a few left!
- Limited offer!
- Number of people looking for this deal.
- Number of hours left for this offer.
By creating urgency, you are giving them less time to decide and converting cold traffic into lead magnets. This idea has worked for many big ecommerce sites like Amazon and Flipkart.
Highlight Top Selling Items
Display items that are high in demand. When you are telling about the products that are in demand, you are actually passing many messages, like:
- You are suggesting for the best product
- People trust your site
- You are selling quality products
- Your site is popular
This single action of yours is targeting many goals at a time. You are helping them, earning their trust, and encouraging them to persist on your site. This is an apt way to value your customer.
Amazon practices this strategy to optimize customer values. It displays the list of best-selling items that compiles a real-time selection of top products in each category. The top-selling items are updated on an hourly basis.
This helps customers in finding the best items, and they keep coming to check out what is next in the list that might interest them.
Optimize your Customer Lifetime Value strategy
Get more valuable customers for a more profitable e-store.
Use Profit Maximizer
In most of the cases, core products are high-priced, which might not interest the buyers. This is where the role of profit maximizer comes into play.
Profit maximizers are the other products that are sold with the core product to create interest in buyers.
Companies often lower the price of the core product and earn their profit by selling other products at a price that covers the loss while selling the core product. The additional products aim to maximize the profit.
For instance, a pizza can be a core product for Pizza Hut, but this is not the one they earn the entire profit from. It is the fries, nuggets, sodas, and other items that increase their profit.
So, the customers build a long term relationship not just for the core product but the secondary items as well that keep their interest alive.
Share Product Reviews
Sharing product reviews is an incredible way to value your customers. When a customer gets the reviews of a product, it gives them a clear understanding of the products.
With product reviews, you also help them with:
- Comparing products
- Making a decision
- Proving your authenticity
The review could be in text form, rating, or both. You can ask your customers to provide feedback for the products they bought. This is an effective way to sound authentic.
For example, Forever21 is a relatively new band but is one of the leading fashion brands today. This brand allows its customer to sort the products by ratings from high to low. If you go to product pages, you will find a list of reviews.
Besides, all the major ecommerce platforms like Amazon, Walmart, eBay, Best Buy, etc. display ratings and reviews for individual products for comparison.
Offer Live Chat to Assist Customers
People often choose to leave the site when they are confused. The reason could be anything, such as the hundreds of options to choose from or non-satisfying product descriptions.
You can easily avoid this by providing online assistance. A live chat option can be a great help for your prospects.
A simple ping “Hi there! How may I help you?” can be a friendly step to help them make the right decision.
How?
Consider the fact that more than 87% of average customers are satisfied with live chat service.
Also, 75% of people prefer to live chat over any other channel.
After all, why not? There is no wait time, they get 24/7 assistance, they can chat while multitasking, and they get step by step assistance to complete the task.
Today, several brands are using live chat as a major customer service tool. Many of them are using live chats in innovative ways.
Keep fashion brands aside. There are brands from different industries using live chat support extensively.
The Bulb is an energy supplier that offers live chat support with a human approach. Customers can see the names and profile photos of the agents they are chatting with.
Even Nikon, a technology brand, uses it to drive the path to purchase and speed up the customer care process.
Canyon Bikes, Warby Parker, Toy R Us, Goldsmiths, and a lot more brands are using this technique as CVO.
Follow-up for Abandoned Carts
As discussed above, abandoned carts are common. People show their interest in buying then suddenly drop their plan. Similarly, many create their wish list but never come back to purchase.
This would not have been a concern for businesses if the global cart abandonment rate did not have touched 75.52%. In fact, the cases of cart abandonment are higher on weekends when nearly 9 out of 10 carts get abandoned.
Therefore, companies remind their customers about what they were looking for a while ago. A simple reminder can bring them back to their site and encourage them to complete their action.
There are various ways to initiate follow-ups for abandoned carts:
- Email Marketing
- Facebook Dynamic Product Ads
- Outbound Sales Calling
- Exit Time Offers
- Loyalty Programmes
- Retargeting Ads
Different companies use different methods of following-up as per their business or effectiveness.
With this method of CVO, you are telling your customer that you care for them and still remember them.
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Join the CVO Academy
More than your basic knowledge-base, in the CVO Academy you get the opportunity to learn advanced CVO tactics from world-class experts.
Bob Moesta, Valentin Radu, Dennis Yu, Val Geisler, and 5 other fantastic people joined forces to bring you the ultimate Master Class on Customer Value Optimization.
When you don’t get results, when you run out of ideas, when you’re tired of small wins and need a steady and reliable source of revenue, the CVO Academy is where you can find the tactics to grow.
Click here and check out all classes. See you on the other side!
5 other Tips to Optimize Customer Value in Marketing
1. Create a Strong Research Team
One of the great options to start with is to create a research team, which will be focused on building a strong customer value model. The team should include the people who know the product, who possess digital marketing experience, as well as some creative and progressive salespeople. The salespeople are especially crucial for the customer value optimization (CVO) process, as they know the customers, their needs, and preferences. Additionally, they are more likely to generate some innovative and successful ideas for the sales-boosting.
Furthermore, before working with a customer, the team has to think over the product targets and the potential consumers’ gains. This will give you a better understanding of how to form the offer to your audience to increase customer value.
2. Collect the Important Data
Also, it is crucial to generate a list of value elements, which affect the costs and benefits of the products or services offered to the customers. By analyzing the quantitative and qualitative customer data, your research team will have the correct numbers and relevant statistics to create and implement the important changes.
For this purpose, make a detailed research about the product’s actual value, analyze its benefits and advantages compared with other brands, learn how this product may be helpful for your audience. Keep in mind that your customers won’t buy your product because you like it, they make a purchase if they like or need it. And, make sure the offering can perfectly fit these criteria.
So, these important data will definitely help you to understand the consumers and study their preferences as well while optimizing your customer value.
3. Know Your Target Audience
It is almost impossible to create a universal business model that meets every customer’s expectations and needs. Different people have different goals, mindsets, and individual views on how to solve various problems. Needless to say, all these points have a direct influence on the“value” definition.
That is why, you can segment your audience due to some common points they have, like their purchasing behavior or personal data, etc. Then, it becomes much easier to set up different values, which are both acceptable for the groups and efficient enough for your company, brand, or business.
Customer value can be easily optimized if you add some special offers for your consumers, for instance, to celebrate a birthday. Sephora’s birthday message is one of the best examples to show the focus made on the consumers’ targeting. Additionally, that method can certainly strengthen the connection between your brand and its consumers and significantly improve their interaction.
Taken from: https://www.sephora.com
4. Focus on Loyal Consumers
Most market experts constantly stress the point of getting more loyal customers for your business, and this tactic does make sense. According to Forbes, 50% of consumers claim the major reason for joining a loyalty program is to get the rewards on everyday purchases.
However, getting a loyal customer is not the final point you have to target. By providing the additional benefits using the brand loyalty programs your business can greatly optimize the customer value and increase brand recognition as well.
Furthermore, this point can be useful for encouraging new consumers to purchase your product or service. For instance, let your consumers share their experiences or positive feedback about your brand. It will greatly benefit your customer value as over 90% of consumers review the comments of others while considering the purchase decision.
For example, the REI sporting goods constantly offer different awards. The loyalty program costs $20, but it opens up different benefits for its members like discounts, event invitations, special deals on classes and trips.
Taken from: https://www.rei.com
That feature helps them not only upgrade the customer experience but also improve the customer retention.
5. Stress on the Product’s Value
The item price is an important factor of your successful marketing strategy, but not the only one. So, instead of competing through the price with the products or services of the same area, try to emphasize its strong sides for your consumers.
In fact, the value proposition provided can be a winning strategy. You have to demonstrate all the points that make your product or service different and superior to convince your customer about the purchase. Why? Let’s study a simple example.
For instance, you want to eat outside but haven’t decided the place to go. You start thinking over the restaurants and cafes you remember and compare their cuisine, the atmosphere you liked the most, etc. The final decision strongly depends on your subjective impression about it, isn’t it?
That is why it is important to influence the customers’ opinion by focusing on the brand’s strong sides and providing the product value with real statistics. Additionally, you can demonstrate the benefits your customer can get from your product and issues which can be easily resolved with its purchase.
Drive meaningful change in your ecommerce
Monitor & improve what matters.
Conclusion
As already discussed in the beginning, customer value optimization is a continuous process due to dynamic customer behaviour. It might appear to be an exhausting process, yet, it is highly effective, as it doesn’t just focus on gaining traffic sources like advertisements, but helps in gaining right and long term customers.
The CVO strategies I described in the above article are to help you to build a more robust and life-long relationship with your customers. Remember, business growth is not determined by a huge number of customers, but with high-value customers.
Frequently asked questions on Customer value optimization strategies
What is customer value optimization (CVO)?
Customer value optimization is a strategic approach that focuses on maximizing the long-term value of each customer by optimizing their experiences, engagement, and overall lifetime profitability. It involves implementing various strategies to increase customer loyalty, retention, and average order value, ultimately driving business growth and profitability.
How can businesses enhance customer value over time?
Businesses can enhance customer value over time by continuously improving customer experiences: Regularly assess and enhance the customer journey, from initial engagement to post-purchase interactions. Identify pain points and address them to provide seamless experiences.
Building strong customer relationships: Foster meaningful connections with customers through personalized communication, active engagement, and personalized support. Build trust and rapport to encourage long-term loyalty.
Why is customer value optimization important for businesses?
Customer value optimization is important for businesses due to increased profitability: By maximizing the value of each customer, businesses can generate higher revenue and profitability. Repeat purchases, increased average order value, and reduced customer churn contribute to improved financial performance. Sustainable growth: Focusing on customer value optimization helps businesses build a loyal customer base, which forms a solid foundation for sustainable growth. Loyal customers provide a stable revenue stream, refer new customers, and often become brand advocates.
