Customer Lifetime Value: How to Calculate It for Your Business

Want to measure the financial value of your customer’s loyalty? Most organizations bank on the customer lifetime value (CLV) metric. However, there’s a catch.

Mapping a customer’s lifetime value is hardly one-dimensional; it requires aligning organizational metrics and customer minds.

Over 90% of US consumers plan to switch brands. Assessing CLV is important to understanding revenue generation from customers throughout their relationship with the brand. In this guide, we will explore why CLV is important and how to calculate it correctly.

What Is Customer Lifetime Value?

Let’s start with the customer lifetime value definition. Customer lifetime value tracks how valuable (read: profitable) a customer is to your company.

Why Customer Lifetime Value Matters

Customer lifetime value offers four-fold benefits for businesses:

  • Increased revenue: It provides a long-term picture of who your brand’s most profitable customers are. This way, you can pursue ideal customers with targeted selling and boost revenues.
  • Prompt issue identification: CLV leverages real-time customer data (think spending behavior, likes and dislikes, etc.) to identify where your brand is falling short in terms of product features, service quality, and more. These insights and trends help drive contextual action items and keep the teams moving in the right direction.
  • Targeted customer segmentation: The way to brand-building and converting a first-time prospect into a brand loyalist lies in a data-driven approach. It entails assessing customers based on needs, profitability, and specific behavior. Analyzing CLV helps you to understand which customer is spending more on your brand, create a personalized customer acquisition strategy, and target said customers with relevant messaging.
  • Reduced customer acquisition costs: It’s a given fact that retaining existing customers is more profitable than acquiring new ones. CLV leverages word-of-mouth publicity and customer loyalty to lower marketing costs. As your brand focuses on retaining loyal customers, you can improve the value long-term customers bring to your business.

How to Calculate Customer Lifetime Value? Key Metrics + Tips

Strategic customer lifetime value analysis rests on two customer lifetime value models. The basic difference between the two lies in what your end goals are:

  • Machine Learning-based Predictive CLV: Looks at current (existing and new) customer data to predict their future behavior, understand your most profitable product/service, and figure out your most valuable customers.
  • Historic CLV: Evaluates past data such as average order value to predict the value of a customer but does not factor in future purchasing behavior, potential growth, or changes in customer preferences over time.

Customer Lifetime Value Formula

Customer Lifetime Value Formula

Source

To calculate CLV, you need first to calculate the customer value. Here’s how to do it:

Step 1: Determine the Average Purchase Value by dividing the total amount of money received by the total number of purchases made within a given time frame.

Step 2: Divide the total number of purchases made in the same period by the total number of unique customers to get the Average Purchase Frequency Rate.

Step 3: Multiply the average purchase value by the average purchase frequency rate to determine the customer value in step three.

Step 4: After you have the customer value, multiply it by the typical customer lifespan to get the customer lifetime value or CLV.

This gives you an estimate of the total revenue you can expect from a customer over their entire relationship with your business.

Four Customer Lifetime Value Metrics Worth Measuring

You can calculate CLV in multiple ways:

1. Average Purchase Value (APV)

Formula: APV = Total Revenue/Number of Orders

This metric is useful for understanding:

  • Average revenue a customer generates within a timeframe (usually one year)
  • Opportunities for upselling, cross-selling, and increasing each transaction’s value
  • The effectiveness of your product, as well as pricing strategies

Average Purchase Value Challenges and Tips

2. Average Customer Lifespan (ACL)

Formula: Sum of customer lifespans/Number of customers

Where customer lifespan is the average duration a customer continues to make purchases from your business. It’s the period from their first purchase to their last.

This metric helps:

  • Gauge how long a customer’s relationship will last with your brand and build strategies around lowering churn
  • Drive data-backed costing and resourcing decisions while informing your marketing strategy
  • Analyze the ROI of your customer acquisition efforts and identify profitable acquisition channels

Average Customer Lifespan Challenges And tips

3. Customer Value (CV)

Formula: CV = Average purchase value/Average purchase frequency rate

This metric is essential for understanding:

  • What each customer brings to your business
  • Which customers have the highest impact on your bottom line
  • How to segment customers based on their spending habit

Customer Value Challenges and Tips

4. Average Purchase Frequency Rate (APFR)

Formula: APFR = Number of purchases/Number of customers

This metric offers insights into the following:

  • How frequently customers buy from your brand
  • Level of customer loyalty and engagement
  • Churn rate and future opportunities for revenue

Average Purche Frequency Rate

5. Tips to Increase Customer Lifetime Value

With a solid understanding of what customer lifetime value is, let’s look at how you can improve it:

Tip #1: Revisit Your Welcome Strategy: Perfect Your Onboarding Experience

Your onboarding process must help customers get up to speed on:

  • What your product offers
  • Why they should choose your offering

Ideally, your onboarding process should kickstart within the first few days of the customer’s purchase. Use these tips to deliver a seamless onboarding experience:

  • Personalize your onboarding workflow using customer data to:
  • Offer custom deals
  • Suggest curated product bundles
  • Send follow-up emails and gather feedback via surveys
  • Set up a live chat or knowledge base to empower customers with quick support
  • Track important onboarding KPIs such as time to first interaction, customer activation rate, and so on

Tip #2: Level Up Sales: Personalize for Higher Order Values

Upselling and cross-selling are the best ways to boost the customer’s average order value. And the secret sauce of this is to personalize the customer’s shopping experiences with:

  • Customized complementary product suggestions on checkout
  • Group products with similar pricing to entice the customer
  • Provide tiered pricing options to new and existing customers and help them upgrade easily
  • Roll out personalized promotions with incentives aligned to specific customer segments, such as high discounts for returning customers

Case-Study: How Spencers Used Insights-led Personalization to Drive 30% Conversion Across Cart Abandonment Campaigns

Spencers Personalization - Cart Abandonment Campaign

Source

The Challenge:

  • Lack of an intelligent engagement platform to resolve issues related to deliverability and cross-channel communication
  • Low data transparency as a result of the current martech solution’s limitations

The Strategy: The brand invested in robust customer journey orchestration tool to:

  • Segment customers based on frequency, recency, and monetary value of customer transactions
  • Reach the right customer with the right offers meaningfully
  • Promote an insights-driven strategy and raise the conversion rate for campaigns that are installed, registered, and cart-abandoned
  • Promote in-app messaging with personalized mobile campaigns
  • Use AI-powered targeted push notifications to get more customers to buy from the brand

The Result:

  • Reduction in the first order date from 7 to 5 days
  • 30% conversion rates across cart abandonment campaigns with personalization
  • 10% uplift in conversion rates on cross-sell campaigns
  • 15% increase in LTV
  • 10% improvement in repeat purchases using WhatsApp as a channel

Tip #3: Build Bonds: Cultivate Strong Customer Relationships

Transactional relationships will only take your brand so far. The secret lies in building an emotional connection with the customer while making them feel good about their recent purchase—a strategy that Kitsch masters gracefully.

In the first half of the email, the brand applauds the customer for going “bottle-free,” making them feel good about being environmentally conscious:

Kitsch Email Marketing

Source: Screenshot from Gmail

In the middle part, the brand recommends relevant products:

Kitsch Email Marketing strategy

Source: Screenshot from Gmail

The brand ends the email with insights into its environment-first initiatives to gain customer trust:

Kitsch Email Marketing strategy communication

Source: Screenshot from Gmail

You can also connect with customers on your brand’s social media handles by addressing their queries promptly, sending freebies and giveaways, tagging loyal customers and thanking them for their loyalty, and more.

If you want to elevate your customer-brand connection, engage in powerful storytelling as Nike does with its posts—rarely will you see a product promotion on its Instagram handle:

Nike Customer Engagement

Source

Tip #4: Hear and Act: Respond to Real-Time Feedback

To get an insider’s perspective into how customers truly feel about your brand, you need information from the horse’s mouth.
Get real-time feedback from customers immediately after their purchase to get authentic answers, as Lazada demonstrates below:

Customer Feedback Lazada

Source: Screenshot from Gmail

Active listening will demonstrate your brand’s genuine interest in hearing your customers out. It will paint an empathetic impression and tell your customers you value their opinions.

Tune into your customer’s advice, loop in key stakeholders, rank the feedback based on priority, improve your marketing, communicate to customers about your action, and boost your brand’s CLV.

Tip #5: Empower with Tech: Enhance Self-Service Options

Want customers to connect with your brand? Make it easy for them.

Take, for instance, Nordstrom’s live chat service. The brand lists common questions customers may have and allows them to search and self-serve instantly:

NordStrom live chat service

Source

In addition to setting up live chat, you can create a comprehensive knowledge base with how-to tutorials and FAQs.

In terms of action, if customers send an email with a query, respond as quickly as possible. If they’ve called the brand’s customer care number, don’t put them on hold endlessly. If they’ve tagged your brand on social media with a complaint, respond within minutes with actionable next steps.

You must leverage the power of technology and human agents to give customers the best of both worlds.

Customer Lifetime Value: The Compass for Your CX

There needs to be a change in mindset if marketers want to transform the customer experience, says Tom Fishburne, of Marketoonist fame.

This starts with keeping a pulse of your customer’s needs in real time. If your brand is not in tune with your customer’s requirements when it happens, it can lead to a breakdown in CX.

One sure-footed way to monitor your ideal customer base is to evaluate their lifetime value (CLV). Use CLV to your advantage and drive meaningful customer engagement throughout their lifecycle.

#GROWTH Summit Singapore: Ushers New Chapter in Customer Engagement

It was Ni Hao, Namaste, and Selamat Pagi, Singapore as we kickstarted the latest chapter of the #GROWTH Summits for 2022.

Held at the Shangri-La Singapore on June 02, there was plenty of excitement to go around as an overwhelming 330+ growth marketers, CRM managers, and product experts, among others gathered to talk about what’s new, what’s big, and what’s bold in customer engagement in 2022.

So, let’s dive right into the highlights of the event.

At MoEngage, we believe that deeper insights into customer behavior, affinity, needs, and even apprehensions are vital for brands to deliver an engaging customer experience. And so, Insights-led Customer Engagement was the pivotal focus area at the conference, around which conversations flowed during the fireside chats and panel discussions.

Future-Proofing Customer Engagement Strategy

Anjali Kalia - Future-Proof Customer Engagement Strategy (IHH Healthcare)

Would customer experience in 2030 be very different from what it was in 1930? Well, the answer is both yes and no, because the customer’s need to be heard and understood would remain the same but what would need to change is the servicing of it. Anjali Kalia, AVP – Digital Marketing at IHH Healthcare in her session on future-proofing customer engagement strategy emphasized the need to adopt technology enablers, such an AI-based app or assistant that delivers a hyper-personalized customer experience by foreseeing customer needs. For organizations and individuals to be future-ready, this would also mean building a culture of learning, listening, and slowly building capabilities.

Keynote Session

Keynote speaker - Roshni Mahtani Cheung - TheAsianParent, Tickled Media

As the keynote speaker, Roshni Mahtani Cheung, founder and CEO of theAsianParent and TickledMedia, said that meaningful customer engagement will come with collecting and analysing the right type of user information. A big part of such meaningful engagement also involves figuring out if your “business purpose resonates with the customer”. “Meaningful growth is all about building a purposeful business which is socially responsible. Figure out the higher purpose of your business and how it adds social value in the larger context,” she said. The era of growth at any cost was no longer acceptable, she emphasised.

Shaun Heng - Spartan Labs

This was followed by a session on Decoding the current market trends in Web 3.0 presented by Shaun Heng of Spartan Labs. “The Web3 space moves very fast and there’s something new to be learned everyday from the people you interact with in the space,” said Heng.

Panel Discussions

Get Personal!

Topic: The Personalization Problem: Segmentation, Context, and Timing

The Personalisation Problem

Speakers: 

  • Diane Low, Head of Growth Marketing, Nas Academy
  • Ravi Shankar, Chief Marketing Officer, Carsome Group
  • Bibaswan Banerjee, Head, Demand Gen. & Growth, PropertyGuru
  • Anmol Arora, Regional Director – SEA & ANZ , MoEngage [Moderator]

This discussion started on the premise that personalisation was the answer to higher customer engagement and retention, but the struggle was in avoiding the pitfalls of it. To keep personalisation from feeling like encroachment, Banerjee said that one of the ways was to get the timing of the communication right. “[It is] very important to understand the decision-making stage of the customer, and personalize the communication accordingly.” Centring the business around trust, transparency, and choice was important, added Shankar. “Understanding the customer and the user behavior is very important in scaling up.”

Segmentation of the customer needs to be followed up with an effective communication strategy. Low said that curated content and industry perspectives are only shared with the relevant user buckets. “We believe in giving value upfront, starting with understanding what the customer wants and needs,” said Low.

(Tech) Stacking the Right Way Up

Topic:  Building the right tech stack for delivering a winning customer experience

Building Right Tech Stack

Speakers:

  • Sophie Jokelson, Co-founder & CMO, Cove
  • Vasu Venkataraman, Head of Platform Growth, NTUC Fairprice
  • Rajesh Sangati, SVP of Product, 99 Group
  • Arijeet Rana, Associate Director – Sales, SEA & ANZ, MoEngage [Moderator]

This session focused on the importance of leveraging technology to build a seamless digital customer experience. The need of the hour is to reimagine and deliver a unique customer experience by building the right tech stack. 

Analysing insights across a customer’s journey is essential to delivering a smooth customer experience. Enabling a modern-day tech-stack is essential to this growth process.

The right tech stack with the capability to meet the demands of an evolving customer engagement strategy will help in rapid and successful scaling up of growth. 

We’ve dissected the need for better martech stacks for organizations across verticals in our recently released The State of ILE Report where we surveyed over 2000+ marketers to understand their pulse around customer engagement.

Khairold Safri Ibrahim - Telekom Malaysia Growth Story

Then we had Telekom Malaysia (TM)’s Khairold Safri Ibrahim telling us how a multi-channel approach was key to acquiring new users and cementing TM’s position as a leading player in the space. “To achieve our goal to build a single view of customer across online and offline and grow revenue and stickiness, we chose MoEngage as it works as an multichannel CRM tool, offers a solution for CDP, and supports real-time communications & analytics,” Ibrahim said.

Banking on Digital

Topic: Digital innovation in banking and finance: Turning the tide in your favor

Digital Innovation - Banking and Finance

Speakers:

  • Anna Green, Head of SMB, Asia Pacific and Japan, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  • David Harling, Managing Director, MoneySmart
  • Julio Bermúdez, VP, APAC and LATAM, Amplitude
  • Saurabh Madan, VP – SEA, ANZ & Japan, MoEngage [Moderator]

What do you do when people prefer getting their tooth pulled out to visiting the nearest bank branch? You go digital! Green pointed out an interesting statistic while explaining the potential for digital banking. “Market research shows folks rated going to dentist over going to the bank (physically). That just speaks about the reduced tolerance towards the physical transaction process, and the scope for digital banking.” 

This session explored the need for BFSI brands to stay ahead of the competition by adopting large-scale digitisation of services, especially in the post-COVID world. “Covid has fast-tracked digital transformation in banking. It was the perfect storm forcing customers to come online and transact,” said Harling. 

Further, this digitisation could well pave the way towards a more inclusive and future-ready financial landscape in the region, such as the use of cryptocurrencies. “There are applications of cryptocurrencies which are important, especially blockchain. It provides ways to utilize blockchain to automate and remove inefficiency in the capital market.”

People Power

Topic: Founders Panel: Building the right team to enable growth at different stages of scale

Founders Panel - Building the Right Team

Speakers:

  • Julian Tan, Founder & CEO, FastJobs
  • Joel Leong, Co-founder, ShopBack
  • Race Wong, Co-founder & CPO, Ohmyhome
  • Agnes Lie, Co-founder, Stealth Startup
  • Patrick Tang, Associate Director – Inside Sales, MoEngage [Moderator]

Building the right team from scratch and empowering them at every level is vital for successful realisation of your vision and mission statements. The post-COVID world has definitely rewritten the rules of employee engagement, with hybrid work culture slowly becoming the norm. Keeping up productivity in such an environment is a challenge. On the other hand, it is important to protect a highly-productive team from an early burnout.

The session took a deep dive into why employers need to look at progressive methods and metrics rather than conventional ones when building a future-proof and dynamic team in today’s fast-paced economy.

Parting Note

At MoEngage, we believe a customer-centric insights-led approach is the key to building a highly engaging and satisfying customer experience across segments and brands. We endeavour to deliver various actionable insights on how to better engage with your customers and build a lifetime of customer value through various events in the future.

Broaden your network and deepen your understanding of insights-led customer engagement through peer-to-peer learning by becoming a part of our ever-growing community of growth marketers, product owners, entrepreneurs, and other experts. 

#GROWTHMixer 2022 Highlights: Expert Opinions on Insights Driven Engagement and Personalization to create Unique Brand Experiences

As consumers’ expectations for smoother brand experiences increase, brands must start thinking about how marketing data can be utilized to break down customer engagement barriers. To explore the premise of how insights-led customer engagement is the future of growth, we recently hosted two panels for our #GROWTHMixer 2022, inviting leaders from different industries to ruminate further on this topic. The discussion also converged towards how brands need to stop making marketing decisions based on instinct and gut feeling. Instead, they shifted their focus to big data and analytics with greater seriousness. Analyzing relevant customer data will enable marketers to understand customers better, plan engaging campaigns, execute, measure the success in real-time, and course-correct immediately. The expert panels also discussed how personalization would be the prime driver of marketing and business success and initiatives needed to stay ahead of the curve.

Here’s an overview of the two panels covered during the #GROWTHMixer 2022 sessions:

Panel 1: How Insights-led Engagement is paving the Way towards Effective Customer Engagement

This session of #GROWTHMixer 2022 was moderated by Sagnik Ghosh (Sales Manager IN and ME, MoEngage) with Ashish Mishra (EVP Marketing, ACKO), Vedanarayanan Vedantham (SME and Startup Business Head, Razorpay), Priyank Agarwal (Director Marketing and Growth, Tata 1MG), and Jinnal Gori (Manager – Digital Marketing, Wellness Forever) attending as the panelists. Here is the link to the full video.

Brands across verticals and geographies are becoming increasingly customer-centric. They’re now doing away with the spray and pray kind of an approach and adopting a more analytics-driven and insights-led approach into their entire engagement strategy-  whether singular or omnichannel. 

Generally, insights-led engagement has three stages – analysis and segmentation, engagement, and optimization. The idea is to explore the market demand for real-time insights by monitoring customer behavior and buyer patterns across various channels. Inspecting this type of data helps brands predict customer behavior and craft bespoke customer engagement strategies that deliver results.

EXPERTS’ TAKE ON INSIGHTS-LED ENGAGEMENT AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE IN CUSTOMER BUYER JOURNEY 

Panel 2: Utilizing Insights-led Personalization to Create Unique Brand Experiences for Customers 

This session of #GROWTHMixer 2022 was moderated by Gaurav Taparia (Enterprise Sales Manager, MoEngage) with Ritesh Bhatnagar (CMO, WOO), Rajesh Kamra (Head of Innovation Labs, RUPIFI), and Manikanta Yadavalli (VP Growth, Trell) attending as the panelists.  

Modern consumers expect brands to anticipate their needs and personalize their experiences with tailor-made, contextual recommendations. Multiple reports show that as much as 90% of consumers are likely to shop with brands that recognize, remember, and provide relevant offers and recommendations. Personalization, thus, has become a vital investment. 

In this session, subject matter experts discussed the shift from ‘one to many’ engagement models to ‘one to one’ brand interactions, powered by insights-led communication that helps brands create unique experiences for each customer. Here is the link for the full video.

EXPERT ADVICE ON LEVERAGING INSIGHTS-LED PERSONALIZATION TO CRAFT UNIQUE BRAND EXPERIENCES 

Conclusion

With the abundance of data that brands collect on an everyday basis, there are endless opportunities to optimize customers’ experiences. But to do so, brands need to understand their customers and know their likes and dislikes well. As rightly pointed out by one of our panelists, “You can build a castle, but if your customer doesn’t want to live in it, then your efforts are pointless” don’t lose focus on your customers. 

With #GROWTH mixers and panel discussions, we aim to spark conversations between industry experts and leaders so the audience can learn from their discourse and interaction. 

What Investors Look for While Investing in Consumer Internet Companies [#GROWTH19 Wrap-up]

A recent KPMG report showed a seven-fold increase in the number of startups in India in the last decade. With eight startups entering the unicorn club last year and a few startups like OLA tapping the global markets, the landscape of startup has become stronger and more interesting. We invited Tarun Davda, Managing Director of Matrix Partners; and Ashish Kumar, Partner at Fundamentum Partnership, to tell us what they look for in a consumer internet company while investing. The panel was moderated by Narsimha Reddy, CFO at MoEngage.

We bring you excerpts from the discussion.

To begin with, we would like to know what are the exact growth prospects you look at? Where do you focus on your investments?

Tarun: We invest from seed to Series B. At seed, there is team and idea as there are hardly any metrics available in these cases. At Series A, when you are looking to invest, we typically look at early PMF. Early PMF depends upon the vertical you are present in and what business you are doing. The definition of early PMF changes from company to company. For an enterprise company it would be – do you have 5 to 10 sticky customers who are willing to pay you, who like your product, and are likely to renew?

For an early stage consumer company, it could be, do you have a few thousand users who are hooked on to your platform? At Series B, you move on to scalable PMF. The question then changes to, can these 5-10 customers become hundreds of customers? Not that you need to have them that day, but you need to foresee the scalability in the go-to-market and the sales engine that the team has built to be able to get to that stage. For a consumer company, we look at cohorts, retention and a bunch of other metrics. The series C is very simple – we check if the PMF is profitable, i.e., is the business model finally working? Is the contribution positive? Are you able to scale?

So, at a macro level, we start with the team plus idea and think all the way up to profitable PMF. For series A and B, let’s take an example of a content media company; a lot of people look at DAU. DAU is a good metric, but it can be bought or faked. One thing that can’t be fake is engagement. Engagement is defined by the amount of time spent on the app, and the retention, i.e., how frequently does one come back to the app. This is much harder to buy. So as an inventor when I look at the metrics of a company, the question I ask myself is which of these can be bought vs. cannot be bought.

When you look at the headline metric such as vanity, you also look at the sanity metrics, which defines the true stickiness on the platform.

Ashish: When we enter, we check if the product has attained a product market, for us to look at it. We call it Series B and Series C. We have typically identified two types of companies – one is where we see the company reaching near profitability. When I say near profitability, I mean that I anticipate the company to become profitable in the next 2-5 years. Usually, in a country like ours, these will be in domains and business models where it is not a winner-take-all business. The second type of business is the winner-take-all business because of the type of market or product they have.

The metrics for both businesses are very different. As an investor and an entrepreneur, it is important to know which market and which classification are you chasing. When I talk about potential winner-take-all businesses, I look at two large metrics. One is whether the market share is increasing or not. For example, let’s take the online retail or transportation business. You know online retail will be an x percent of the total market, which is growing at a particular pace. It could be 10%, 12%, or 15%. Now, when you look at an online retailer, you will know what your growth in market share is and is that growth faster against your competitors or not. Fundamentally, if it is a winner-take-all business, it should be on the positive side.

The second metric I look at is, is your unit economics improving? I am not saying it has to be positive unit economics. That’s a rarity in a country like ours. However, if you are growing your market share and if the unit economics is improving, that is a business that will ultimately win. It is just a matter of time. That is how we look at companies which can be a winner-take-all business. The market share becomes a growth metric when the market and segment to which the business belongs allows you to have multiple companies in that segment. The growth will be measured by how much you are growing per year.

The benchmark will be, are there multiple players, are you and your value determined by how fast you are growing, do you have something which could help you grow greater than the benchmark? The benchmark could be 50% Year-on-Year or 100% Year-on-Year, you should grow faster than that. The second clearly will be improving unit economics.

I would like to dig into it deeper. Could you please give examples of the companies you are associated with? What metrics do you see in successful companies?

Tarun: Let me give you two examples. One, I’ll take a consumer internet company like OLA. There’s a reason why we invested in OLA as opposed to other hyper-local delivery companies. Fundamentally, the first question anyone looks at is what is the total addressable market and is that a large opportunity. Let’s keep those aside. I think the metrics we looked for OLA were – first, the gross number of rides that are being fulfilled every day; second, in the early days we looked closely at stock-outs which is, how many times did a customer open the app and not see a cab available in their area. To us, that was a proxy to demand. When we invested in OLA, our thesis was that this is an unconstrained demand market.

The question is, how do we measure that on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis as an investor if the demand was unconstrained. Today, that metric is less relevant because there is more supply. However, what we were seeing is whether there is money to be made. Maybe that is not happening today, but if I go from Point A to Point B if I take out driver fee, fuel, and maintenance, it is still a contribution positive industry. Now what we start looking for in those businesses is the top-line metrics, what is the take rate you can charge, which is a very key metric in terms of net revenue.

Once you take that take rate and net revenue, from that essentially as a company, there were three large pools of cost. One pool of cost was how much you are spending on discounts because it is imperative to give discounts in the early days. Today a lot of people complain that the discounts aren’t as much as they used to be but what percentage of your take rate is being plowed back into the discounts? The second one is what percentage of your take rate is being plowed back in terms of your driver incentives. The third one was payment processing costs. Now, for an extended period, this number used to be negative for all the cab aggregator companies. Somehow, last year, we turned the contribution to positive at OLA. We took out all our incentives, discounts and payment processing costs from our take rate and found it to be contribution positive.

Today, the company is at a stage where we have started to look at much more mature company metrics like EBIDTA, break-even, and ROCE. That’s at the financial level. On the operating level, it’s very about how efficiently are the companies able to match demand-supply like, what is the average wait time. The biggest reason why OLA or UBER was successful globally was they cracked this golden metric, which is customers will stick if the average wait time is 4 to 5 minutes. Average wait time made a big difference in the customer retention cohort. If the app shows the cab to be 10-15 minutes away, there are fewer chances they would depend on an OLA the next time as compared to the customer who saw a wait time of 3-5 mins.

So, the average wait time was a critical metric. The last metric was cohorts- what percentage of customers acquired in month one are making a booking in month 2, 3 and 4. Within cohorts also, most smart investors will not look at only customer cohorts. They will look at ride cohort and revenue cohort. The last one is the pricing lever where we intelligently use data science to figure out who can pay a little more so we can charge them according to that. In investor parlance, what we typically look for is a ‘smiley.’ You may want to start with ‘x’ number of customers, and there will be some decay. However, eventually, the really sticky ones become so hooked on to your platform that the revenue cohort becomes like a smiley.

A SaaS company is slightly different. The most important is that what is your volume churn. What is your value? Are you able to make more money per customer? The golden rule for a SaaS company is if you have 100 customers that pay you $100, next year, maybe there is a churn of 10-15%, so there are 85-90 customers left. So out of those 85-90 customers are you able to make $85-90 and can you potentially make $120, which is your net revenue churn? The best SaaS companies that we have seen are those that continue to grow and end up having a negative net revenue churn. That means by doing nothing; they are able to grow 10, 20, 30% Year-on-Year. The next metric we look at is the customer payback period.

In every business, the enterprise sales cycle tend to be very long. It takes anywhere from four to nine months depending on which company you look at and the size of the deal. One thing we look at is that how much time, effort, energy, and dollars were taken to acquire this customer and based on your gross margins and based on your customer retention, which is the LTV cap, how long does it take for us to recover the investment that we have made in each customer. The benchmark is that the best companies have an LTV cap which is more than 5x. So, if you have a 70-75% growth margin in enterprise services, it will translate into customer payback within nine -12 months.

Not all companies get there, but that is generally what an investor will look for in a SaaS business. The last one would be T3D2, which is basically you want to see triple growth in the first three years and double growth for the year after that. So, if you start with million dollar revenue, can you grow 3x in those three years and then grow double after that? The most successful SaaS companies have shown all these growth trend lines and have shown net negative revenue churn and have shown short customer payback in less than 12 months, more than 5x, sometimes 10x LTV cap.

It all eventually boils down to capital efficiency. How many dollars you took to create x dollars. Unfortunately, in India, companies burn $1 to generate $1 in GMV whereas globally companies generate $10 in GMV by burning $1. Broadly, all these metrics are proxies and what you eventually look at is ROCE. At every point, we look at capital efficiency, that how much return am I likely to get as an investor.

Ashish: I agree with what Tarun has said. For us, it’s a slightly easy job. We come in when the company has been in existence for the last 3-4 years. The input metric that Tarun talks about has been played about, and there is information on what is working and what is not working and there are corrective steps already taken. A lot of times we think about these input metrics but what we have seen in case of good companies is that by the time they spend 3 to 4 years, they have figured out those things.

So what we instead focus on is derivative metrics. These are metrics I talked about such as market share, improving unit economics. The third is the capital element which is a combination of all of this. I will talk about the investments we made in the last few years. One is PharmEasy. When we looked at the entire online pharmacy market space, we were in a tricky situation. Typically, you will find one or two companies broken-out by then. You can make out that they have demonstrated by virtue of their execution that they will likely become the leader. In this case, it was not very clear.

We were looking at five or six companies out of which three of them were very comparable – PharmEasy, NetMeds, and 1mg. When we looked at the two metrics I talked about, we realized we had to look for more input metrics, the kind Tarun spoke about, and we were convinced that there was one company executing far better than others. The second thing we looked at, given that market share had not been fundamentally different at that point of time was, are there accelerators and inputs which can improve the market share for these companies substantially in the next 12 to 18 months? When you look at a country like ours, it is usually whether the customer gets some incentive in the form of a discount or a credit.

It depends upon the servicing customers or businesses, which is one lever for people to accelerate. The second lever we look at is the price element, and that gets in the play very early. So when we come in, given the capital we deploy, we don’t think that has to be a big differentiator. Then there are only two other accelerators we see. One is the brand, and the other one is the network effect. The point now is that if you have already established that your product has value, are there non-price values that you could think of and introduce in your product which can accelerate the growth of the company?

So, in the case of PharmEasy, we found that the network effect is the best accelerator that one can have. In a two-sided marketplace like OLA, if you look at OLA and Uber, they have 90-95% of market share, and if you look at all other existing they couldn’t really sustain that. However, the network effect is not that strong when there is not a strongly two-sided marketplace. Technically Flipkart is a two-sided marketplace, but in reality, it does not play out this way which is why their total market share will be smaller.

All of them put together will probably have 10-15% of it. However, what we saw for PharmEasy was that brand was one thing which could potentially accelerate growth. If you already have good customer experience and product, that is one accelerator which can work, and that was exactly what we used. The TV campaign that ran for the last 6-8 months has helped the company to grow 3x larger than the next competition in the last nine months. That is one testimonial to what we thought would play out and it did. We know that it wouldn’t always play out, but these are the things we consider while investing.

When we looked at TravelTriangle as a business, we spent time on that as well. For TravelTriangle, the competition was a lot trickier. There was a publicly listed very large company, MakeMyTrip. They also had a holiday business, and they invested in a business which was a competition to TravelTriangle. At the same time, there were other competitions which were independent, and they wanted to do something.

We spent time with them as well to find their marketing efficiency and operational efficiency. The third is productivity enhancement to your marketplace stakeholder, which is a travel agent in this case. Is that increasing over a period of time or not? If that is improving, ultimately network effect will start to play out. If the travel agent is becoming more productive because of you, he will start choosing you over anybody else. He will start giving preference and optimize your dealings more than anybody else’s.

That is exactly what we saw play out. We also saw that the competing companies have died except for a few like MakeMyTrip, which continues to be a very large player. We have also found that the market share that TravelTriangle had as compared to MakeMyTrip holiday business has improved. These are a couple of things which fortunately played out well for us.

You explained about product-market-fit and how it varies across segments and industries. For the audience here, can you tell us about one consumer-related sector like e-commerce or content or health and how do you determine if that sector has achieved the product-market-fit?

Ashish: We have publicly written on our website that we only invest in companies which have attained a post-product-market-fit. So, every time there is a conversation; naturally, an entrepreneur comes and asks me what is a product-market-fit. The technical definition of product-market-fit is that there is a market, and your go-to-market defines that there is a need for that market. If you have effectively managed that, you have established a product-market-fit. My understanding has been that these terms have all been coined in the US where the market is reasonably deep.

In a country like us, the market is not deep enough, except probably 2 or 3 industries. The standard definition of product-market-fit does not apply here. In fact, I worry less about product-market-fit and worry more about the market. In general, it is very easy for entrepreneurs to make a mistake- you always do a top-down estimate of the market, and you forget what your product is. At that moment when you do a bottom-up calculation of the market and compare that with the top-down, you will find a significant difference. Usually, we have observed that the bottom number is not more than 10% of the market. So that is one area where we spend a lot of time, primarily also because when we come in, these companies are already valued.

This is why we have to see a significantly larger impact. Any company which cannot become a potentially half a billion dollar company or more, definitely cannot give us a financial result and that is something we won’t participate in. We believe that India is at a place where potentially large companies can be created and there are markets and entrepreneurs which exist that can happen. However, when you talk about, say, a content company, we have been spending a little bit of time there, and I echo what Tarun talked about. There are metrics which can be bought or which can be easily faked such as the daily active and the monthly active. Engagement is a number that we also worry about.

Currently, we are observing two more content companies. One is the content company which is trying to get people like us, which are top 50 or 100 million users in the country. So if you project the country out, say next five or six years, the estimates are that almost 800 million of us will be on the internet doing something and content will be the first thing that people will be consuming. If you break this into the top 50, 100 million and the last 700 million, the GDP per capita for these customers will be fundamentally very different.

The estimate is that at an aggregate level there is 6 to 7-times difference, which means when I look at a company who targets top 50 or 100 million, I worry about the daily active, monthly active, engagement. As analytical people, you know that there is an opportunity to create anywhere between 200 million to 400 million of revenue in a 5-6 years period. So there the metrics for us is the engagement, customer love, and DAU, MAU, but when you talk about last 700 million users, the kind that Chinese usually focus upon, I don’t build a conviction just on engagement metric alone.

That’s when I start worrying about some early signs or direction about how this monetization will begin to happen. Because in the next 5-7 years, I don’t think even at 100-200 million MAU, you will be able to monetize enough to create a large business and a business we want to partner with. For those things, we actually want to see some monetization happening.

Tarun: This reminds me of a board meeting we were in. This is one of the consumer internet e-commerce companies, and this was four years ago. This company was between Series B and Series C, and the founder asked the question do we have the PMF? It was odd the company asked it considering they had already raised three rounds of funding and were growing well. Someone then said that if you are asking this question, you generally don’t have it. That is the way I generally define PMF. I think PMF is not a binary switch but a journey and vs. looking at PMF as this illusory pot of gold that no one can define, I prefer to look at it in three stages.

The first stage is the early PMF; the second is the scalable PMF, and the third is the profitable PMF. The answer becomes a lot more finite and concrete. The other thing I look at, which is more important than PMF, is founder market-fit. Some founders are uniquely more suited to building stop-of-the-stack businesses which have no logistics, no operation on the ground, but are very strong product-tech guys. Then there are others who are not going to belong to the top-of-the-stack businesses; they need to be part of the transaction flow, which are full stack businesses. So, forget the PMF, we spend a lot of time in understanding the founder market-fit.

All these are established industries; I want to get some more sense on coming up in new segments which no one would have thought about before. When it comes to new industries, are there any insights which help you to decide on investing in these new categories?

Tarun: Let me give you an example of scooter-sharing in India, which is relatively a new segment. A lot of companies are starting up, and we have invested in one of them called VOGO. Globally, there is Bird and Lime, etc. The business model in these companies is very different from what an OLA or Uber has. These are aggregation businesses. The metric is the driver’s earning per hour to ensure that the driver remains loyal to a platform. In the case of businesses VOGO, these are self-driven. You basically go from point-to-point and end the ride. These are more of CAPEX, heavy businesses where you buy the hardware and invest in the scooter. Here, the most important metric at the stage we call early PMF is what percentage of your bikes are getting at least one booking a day.

The second metric is of the bikes that are getting one booking, what percentage of them are doing 5-6 rides per day, especially when it is a capex model where you have already invested in leasing that asset, you need to consider those metrics. All the other metrics will come over time example, what is your number of rides, riders, cohorts, gross margin, contribution margin, etc. All these metrics will be similar to other businesses. However, in the early days to know whether there is early PMF coming, these are the two metrics that I have narrowed down to track.

Ashish: I have been a big fan of first principle thinking, and this was before I knew what the term meant. I am extremely bullish in India of people looking at new industries and creating new businesses out of it, and there are macros that support it. One big macro that supports it is that if you look at the country, the number of organized businesses are very little and that is primarily because the effort of starting a business in India has been very difficult. As a result, in the last 40-50 years, organized businesses have not been created which means that for every customer pain, there are 10,000 people who are trying to solve that problem. However, none of them have solved it deep enough that they would be able to take the market share.

If you as an entrepreneur are actually looking at an industry, I will strongly recommend you to go to your customer and live like them and spend some time with them to understand their pain point. Understand it to an extent that you could write it down on one piece of paper rather than 30 pieces of paper. If you are particularly raising venture money, you have to think platform first- what is my go-to-market? What is the product that I can create which can take a higher market share than anybody else has been taking? You cannot be incrementally better.

You will have to think about the customer value proposition that I can create which will ensure that people will use my services more than anybody else’s and I see that opportunity everywhere. I don’t see a lot of people doing platform thinking, but the ones who are doing it will become very large in the coming years.

Thank you, Tarun and Ashish for taking out time to explain to us about the parameters that investors look into while investing in emerging and established consumer internet companies. We believe, everyone must have found these insights valuable for their business.

Here’s what you can read next:

Industry Impact and Business Disruption Due to COVID-19

Since the country went into a mandatory lockdown, a lot has changed in the way users interact with businesses across various verticals. Some industries like Health & Wellness and entertainment have seen a surge in user activity, while the online marketplaces have recorded substantial declines. In our attempt to better understand the business disruptions & industry impact caused by COVID-19, we have brought together a panel of experts.

  • Sunu Nair, VP Marketing & Products, Indiabulls
  • Rahul Mishra, Head of Marketing, Shemaroo
  • Sapna Arora, CMO, OLX
  • Anjan Bhojaraj, Vice President, Growth and Head of Product, HealthifyMe
  • Ketan Patel, CEO, CASHe
  • Karthik Raghupathy, VP, Strategy & Business Development, PhonePe

This panel included marketing and product leaders from India’s most popular brands across OTT, online marketplace, health & Wellness, e-commerce payment systems, credit lending, and finance verticals. Here are the key highlights and takeaways from our session on Business Disruption & Industry Impact Of COVID-19.

???? Coronavirus Business Impact: Data-driven insights for brands during COVID-19 – [Download Report]

Impact on industries and change in user behavior

The subscription-led entertainment industry is growing
  • Shemaroo.me, the OTT offering of Indian content powerhouse Shemaroo, has seen a massive surge in content consumption. Some categories have seen as much as 170% growth now.
  • With Ramayana and Mahabharata becoming the most-watched shows in the country, the consumption patterns have been better than ever
  • Bollywood movies and classics, in particular, has seen an increase in consumption across all generations and age demographics.
  • With increased demand and less supply, the brand is figuring out ways to deal with the shortage of new content
  • Shemaroo is also assessing user retention strategies to stay relevant once things return to normalcy.
Buying and selling online marketplace records substantial decline in traffic
  • OLX, the global online marketplace for buying and selling pre-owned goods, has seen a significant drop in usage.
  • This expected dip was due to the non-essential nature of the service.
  • The brand is currently recommending users to declutter and clean up once normalcy returns
  • OLX has extended the listings and is allowing users to wishlist during this downtime
  • With the crisis affecting user’s disposable income, OLX is expecting increased adoption of pre-owned products once business resumes
Credit lenders notice an uptick in loan applications
  • Leading credit lending platform, CASHe has recorded upswing in the number of loan applications of Rs 50,000 and upwards.
  • The increased demand can be explained as a result of the economic uncertainty and subsequent stockpiling of capital.
  • CASHe has seen an increase in the volume of prime customers in the absence of bigger lenders approving loans
  • The disbursements have dropped to 10%, according to CASHe
  • Micro-lenders like CASHe are now approving loans only for medical emergencies
Micro-loans are at a higher demand than personal loans
  • Personal Loan providers like Indiabulls have noticed an increase in women applicants now compared to predominantly male applicants
  • The assumption is while men of the household are borrowing elsewhere, the women are applying to spread the ownership of lending
  • Indiabulls noticed a drastic decrease in the acquisition, saving as much as 2.5X of their previous acquisition costs
  • The change is attributed to decreased competition and desperation among users to borrow money
  • The same line of reasoning holds for the renewed popularity of micro-loans over personal loans
UPI Payments and digital transaction platform gains 50% new users
  • PhonePe has noticed increased DoD, WoW, and MoM numbers hitting a 50% increase in the number of new users
  • This increase is on top of the 20 million DAUs which hasn’t changed pre and post COVID-19
  • With users doing recharge for themselves and their families, DTH recharge & bill payments are recording all-time highs
  • Brand new users who were paying bills and doing recharge offline are now coming into the digital fold
  • PhonePe is recording a spike in order value and volume for essential categories like pharmacy and grocery
  • The platform is now enjoying doubled average transaction values
  • There is however a decline in offline stores not selling essentials and online stores like e-commerce and food delivery

Health & wellness platform grows by 30% with a 20% increase in session duration

  • HealthifyMe has seen a 30% increase in organic growth & a 20% increase in session duration and number of sessions/user
  • The brand has identified users as frequent gym-goers and those who want to eat and stay healthy
  • HealthifyMe is providing home workout routines, diet planning, immunity tracker and hand sanitizer tracker to help users
  • It was done without thinking about business impact, more of a knee jerk reaction to help the users
  • The brand has noticed acquisition costs lowered due to lessened competition
  • HealthifyMe is now focusing on efforts to add value and stay relevant post COVID-19

The tone of Marketing communication during the current scenario

Start meaningful and positive conversations with the user
  • It is more essential to communicate now than ever before.
  • Look out for valid reasons to initiate meaningful conversations
  • The communication should be positive and focus on how to use the downtime
  • Many apps are hosting exercises & games that aren’t related to their vertical but help engage with the user
  • OLX was cautious in communicating initially and started off by communicating about social distancing norms
  • The communication gradually turned towards staying positive while at home and how decluttering can reduce stress
Change your communication strategy to be more humane; serve don't sell
  • CASHe changed their communication strategy from asking for loan repayments to caring about the user and educating him/her
  • They communicated about the wellbeing of the users, teaching about social distancing, and assuring them of CASHe’s support
  • As a result, 40% of people prepaid their EMIs compared to an average of 30% during previous months
  • Communicate with users without touching the pain areas viz. Money in this case
Focus on essentials and simplify the user journey
  • PhonePe reoriented the app home page to focus on essential services viz. recharge, DTH, grocery
  • They pushed rewards & offers down to make the platform more relevant to users right now
  • PhonePe started donation campaigns to PM Cares fund with over 15 Lakh people donating 40+ crores
  • Added a dedicated COVID-19 section consolidating information like stats, how to stay healthy, the location of testing centers, etc.
  • Launched COVID-19 health insurance in association with Bajaj Alliance by foregoing on all premium
  • Implemented filters on the Stores tab to display operational Kirana stores and those providing home delivery
  • Made buying gold easier as they noticed an organic increase in gold purchase*
  • The increase in the gold purchase is largely due to people moving their money from equities to safe assets like gold
Provide value adds through product offerings
  • HealthifyMe focused on helping users stay healthy by building immunity
  • Their in-house panel of doctors conducted extensive research to build sleep tracker, provide balanced diet recommendations and home workouts
  • All of these research-backed features are now provided for free under the immunity tab
  • As a result, there’s much user-generated content on social media
  • The brand has also made workout routines which were previously part of a paid subscription free of cost
  • HealthifyMe leveraged habit formation and built a ‘handwash tracker,’ which reminds users to sanitize/wash hands according to pre-set durations.
  • The app provides AI-backed insights on how often you’re washing your hands
  • The brand has changed its messaging from ‘weight loss’ to immunity building’ through free resources
  • HealthifyMe improved their reminder system to ensure no user is disturbed while working or spending time with family
  • Depending upon how often users want to workout, HealthifyMe prioritizes notifications
Dissect user behavior and solve user pain-points
  • Observing the reception of their content, Shemaroo is making more and more available for free
  • As a brand, they are communicating more and leveraging user-generated content like memes made from their movie collection
  • Shemaroo is spreading awareness by distributing memes and short videos from Bollywood movies as a means to educate the user
  • The brand recently launched ‘rumor nahi humor failega’ campaign by including a good section of comedy films on the platform
  • Shemaroo created a ‘work from home’ tray in response to the increase in family viewing communicating the same to users
  • The company went international with their content and made the library free for two weeks.
  • The message sent out through the Indian high commission
  • Shemaroo has noticed a surge in their email communication with an uptick in their click-through numbers
  • The brand’s social media handles have seen the high engagement of late with activities like virtual dumb charades being hugely successful

Adapting marketing strategy and changing marketing mix

  • Brands like OLX aren’t changing their marketing mix or strategy, rather gearing by being energetic in communication.
  • Their aim is to reenergize the consumers ensuring they start using the platform as before
  • Similarly, there isn’t any change in marketing communication or strategy for the credit-lending app, CASHe. The brand is using the downtime to improve processes and be ready once normalcy returns
  • For UPI payments platform PhonePe, the renewed focus is on driving adoption among the 250 million users still transacting offline. Their channels of communication remain unchanged (high volume ATL/BTL, performance marketing) with messaging varying according to use cases.
  • If lockdown gets extended beyond 2-3 months, HealthifyMe will change the pricing strategy to make the product more affordable. The focus will shift on looking towards the global market and other geographies to stay relevant. They will also look at what products need to be launched and how to go about that.
  • If lockdown ends within 2 months, the marketing costs will inevitably go up and HealthifyMe is wary of the spending. They’re currently building processes to bring efficiency to the system once regular business resumes
  • For Indiabulls, the focus is on getting the modules up and running, so they’re ready to be used by next quarter

Utilizing the downtime to build processes and to improve efficiency

  • Perfect time to brainstorm reimagine processes without having to chase quick wins
  • At HealthifyMe, teams are split into two: new initiative team working at a fast pace and second team to look at the long term goals and build efficiencies
  • For CASHe, there’s no change in productivity as the brand provided WFH provisions already. The brand is using this downtime to ensure all training is done. In fact, CASHe conducted appraisals and provided hikes to assure employees.
  • At Shemaroo, learning and upskilling is promoted along with engaging activities like virtual dress-up parties. The brand is also focusing on creating a cut off time post which no work communication is to be entertained.