Customer Lifetime Value Helper

Calculate the Customer Lifetime Value of your contacts, automating your workflow!

Overview

Infusionsoft does have a report for calculating the LCV (Lifetime Customer Value) of a contact. The problem is that it's just a static report.

Our Customer Lifetime Value Helper goes beyond this and allows you to calculate and maintain these data metrics realtime and save them into custom fields. This way you can automate on them, make decisions based upon customer value and much more.​

Highlighted Features

  • Calculates Four Key Metrics
  • Optionally Store the Data You Need

Calculates Four Key Metrics

Our Helper calculates and optionally stores the following four metrics:

  • ​Total Number of Orders
  • Average Order Amount
  • Total of all Purchases Made
  • Total Balance Due

Optionally Store the Data You Need

You do not have to use all four of these metrics. You can optionally choose which of them you need and map them to custom fields. This way if you only need one, there's no reason to burn up four custom fields.

The Toolbar

Above is the toolbar options you'll see for the Customer Lifetime Value Helper. Here are the Toolbar button options from left to right:

  • ​Copy Link for Infusionsoft - This first blue copy link button copy the URL used for the http post snippet inside of the Infusionsoft Campaign Builder.
  • Configure Button - The last button on the far right is the start configuration button which allows you to View, Edit, Copy, Delete, view the Usage Report and the Usage Log.

Tips, Tricks and Shortcuts

Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to MyFusion Helper. In this video I’m going to show you how to use a Customer Lifetime Value Helper. More than just using it and the how-to guide, we’re also going to focus on why you would use it and some different scenarios so that you can see it at work.

First, let’s dive in and see how it works with a live demo inside of MyFusion Helper. Let’s take a look inside the app as to how we set this up. The first thing we do is select it. Remember, you can just speed type and go right to it. I’ll pull that up and then we give it a Helper name, so we’ll call it “Update LCV,” that’s fine. The next thing we do is we scroll down here and select the options that we want to use. These are put in order of most commonly used. Total orders, some people that’s all they want to track is just the total number of orders and that’s fine. Others want to track the total spend, which I recommend, and the average order size, which I also recommend. These are the three most common.

We also allow you to track the total due. If you deal with customers that have issues with outstanding balances and want to easily be able to report or automate based on those outstanding balances, you can track that as well. Okay? After we select the fields we want to track, we simply come in and select where we want to store them. I’ve just created some test fields here, but we can just type in again and store them wherever we want. Okay, we’ve got those fields set up. Then we simply go ahead and create the Helper.

If you don’t have the custom field already set up, then you need to create the field in Infusionsoft and in the future we’ll probably be adding the ability to create them on the fly. For right now it’s done through Infusionsoft. Then we create the Helper and this will take just a second. Then we’ll have the link where we can put that Helper into the system. As the screen refreshes here, we’ve got “copy link for Infusionsoft.” You see that it’s got the Helper here. We also could go back and edit and modify this if we wanted to, or delete it.

Let’s go ahead and copy that link, very simply just click on there. That will copy it into the clipboard. Then if you’re inside of your campaigns here and we have a test campaign that we want to play with, and we want to create a purchase anything, for example. Here this is set up when any purchase is made.

We want to update the customer value statistics, so we would drag and drop an API post command on here. We just drag and drop this on like such. Okay. I already did that. I recommend using labels, I like to always label it “MyFusion Helper” and then I do this dash greater than to kind of point to the function name. It’s a customer lifetime value. We can come in here and the merely just paste in that link. Okay? There’s no need to worry about any of these fields, don’t delete this, but you don’t need to add anything or do anything here. Merely paste in the link, mark it as “ready” and you’re good to go.

Now that we’ve seen how it works and how to set it up, let’s talk about some examples of when you would want to use this Helper in your business. The first thing that comes to mind is using the lifetime customer value for when you’re purging opt outs and balances. If you have logic that purges people after they have a hard balance or when they opt out and removes them out of your Infusionsoft, you need to know which of those people are customers and which of those people are prospects. If they’re prospects, they’ve just been freebie seekers, you can delete them off of your list without any concern.

However, if they’re customers, you need to retain that information. You need that billing history and you need to keep them, even though they’ve opted out of your marketing list you still need to retain that data. Having the logic in the Campaign Builder to be able to differentiate between those two is important. Right?

The best way to do this is with the Customer Lifetime Value Helper. The reason is that many people use tags. The problem with tags is that they get out of sync. Lots of things happen between refunds, billing errors and other things that throw tags out of sync. If you’re just relying on a customer or a prospect tag, the likelihood is that you’re going to have a high degree of errors. Using this Helper instead you’re able to first update all of your customer fields so that you know the total spend amount. Then you can make your decision branching logic on what you want to do with those clients.

Another thing you want to do is use it for determining customers versus prospects. This is just an extension of what we just said, but by calculating those average and total spends, we know immediately who is a customer and who is a prospect. It’s very easy to tie that in and automate it so that you don’t have to worry about trying to put that logic into all of your different campaigns and tagging.

Another thing that we like to do is create custom rewards based on spenditure. Right? If somebody spends a lot with you, let’s reward them. Let’s give that customer something special. Maybe a hand written card, maybe send out some brownies to them, whatever you want to do. The way to do this is, every time they make a purchase, calculate and update the customer lifetime value statistics. Then, based on their total spend, you can throw them into a reward based campaign. It’s a very powerful way of marketing to the right person at the right time.

Lastly is using them to tie into the purchases anything action. There’s a simple way of doing this with either the action of purchases anything or purchases anything through a purchase goal. You can also use it through the ecommerce actions. However you do this, what happens is every time a purchase is made you’re updating the statistics just for that individual contact. This way you never have to worry about batch running this for thousands of contacts all at once. The system maintains itself, cleaning in an optimal state all along. That’s the best way to do it, self-maintaining automation.

All right. That is a wrap for today. I hope you enjoyed this quick video and it gave you some ideas of how to use MyFusion Helper in your business.

If you have any questions, hit us at the Helpdesk at help@myfusionsolutions.com.

Nick Kulavic
 

Nick Kulavic is the Co-Founder of MyFusion Solutions and the Lead Developer. Basically he's the wizard behind the curtain of all things MyFusion! :-)