Category Archives: Newsletters

Customer Value in the Freemium Model

DataBase Marketing, Driller Q & A, Newsletters, Web Analytics

Jim answers questions from fellow Drillers
(More questions with answers here, Work Overview here, Index of concepts here)

Q: You kindly clarified a few issues when I was reading Drilling Down earlier this year – so I hope you don’t mind the direct email.

A: Yes, I remember!

I am working for www.XYZ.com, a social networking / virtual world site based abroad but visitors are 85% US.

Our growth up to now has been mainly viral and in the summer we hit 1.2M UVs operating on the Freemium model with only 5% of our registered users converting to paying customers and a significant portion of our revenue coming from ads.  On average our customers are active on the site for something like 4 months making their first purchase around day 28. 

But to take us to the next stage we are embarking on some marketing for the first time using AdWords and various revenue share campaigns, and of course to do this sensibly we need to arrive at a reasonable estimate of LTV.

A: Makes sense!

Q: To calculate an adjusted LTV I removed all customers with a lifetime of less than 4 months but this gives a low estimate as this calculation ignores the bumper summer months and the extra paid for features put in place earlier this year.  Calculating LTV using ARPU and monthly churn (not sure how to calculate this in our environment) gives another different estimate.  Is there any help or advice you could perhaps give us?  If not in the US then perhaps you could recommend somebody abroad – can’t find anything in the literature relevant for start-up like us.

A:  It sounds to me like you’re trying to make this too complicated, at least for the place you are at this time.  Monthly churn and the “28 day” threshold are nice to know on a tactical level, but LTV is more of a Strategic idea that does not necessarily benefit from analysis at that level.  And you may not really want LTV, but a derivative that might be more helpful.

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Member Retention in Professional Orgs

DataBase Marketing, Driller Q & A, Marketing thru Operations, Newsletters

Jim answers questions from fellow Drillers
(More questions with answers here, Work Overview here, Index of concepts here)

Q: I have recently purchased your book Drilling Down and going through the many interesting concepts.

A: Thanks for that!

Q:  I work for a membership Organization and we would like to conduct some analysis into who we may lose and approach them even before their membership lapses.  But the only problem here is that we carry data only on the purchases made (though many of our members do not purchase our products and stay a member) and web site visits.

A:  Are you *sure* that’s all the data you collect?  I once worked with a professional membership org that thought they only had one data source, but turns out they had 8 – from 8 different areas of the org – that nobody really knew about.

Q:  How do I know if a particular member is going to resign and lapse soon with this limited amount of behavioral data?  Recently it’s been a concern that we are losing members who have been with us for more than 10 years and who are in their mid career profession (aged between 30 to 45) and indicated no specific reason for resignation. 

This has been going on for the last few months and now we would like to strategically target these customers and approach them even before they react negative.  What concepts could help me to do this? Your guidance would be much appreciated.

A:  OK, my answer will be in two sections: if you (hopefully) find you have more data than you think, and if you really don’t have any other data to fall back on.

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Relational vs. Transactional

Analytical Culture, Customer Experience, DataBase Marketing, Driller Q & A, Marketing thru Operations, Measuring Engagement, Newsletters

Jim answers questions from fellow Drillers
(More questions with answers here, Work Overview here, Index of concepts here)

Q: I am hoping you can help answer a question for our team. By way of introduction, I am the CEO of XXXX. We are a specialty retailer / restaurant of gourmet pizza, salads and sandwiches. We would like to know restaurant industry averages (pizza industry if possible) for customer retention – What percentage of customers that have ordered once from a particular restaurant order from them a second time?  I am hoping with your years of expertise and harnessing data you may be able to assist us with this question. Look forward to hearing from you.

A:  Unfortunately, in those said years of experience, I have found little hard information on customer retention rates in QSR and restaurants in general (if anyone has data, please leave in Comments).  It’s just the nature of the business that little hard data, if collected, is stored in such a way that one can aggregate at the customer level. The high percentage of cash transactions doesn’t help matters much; there’s a lot of data missing.

Over the years, sometimes you see data leak out for tests of loyalty programs, and of course clients sometimes have anecdotal or survey data, but this isnot much help in getting to a “true” retention rate. More often than not you discover serious biases in the way the data was collected so at best, you have a biased view of a narrow segment. Often what you get is a notion of retention among best customers, or customers willing to sign up for a loyalty card, but not all customers. And the large “middle” group of customers is where all the Marketing leverage is.

What to do about this predicament?

There are really two issues in your question; the idea of using industry benchmarks when analyzing customer performance, and the measurement of retention in restaurants.

Continue reading Relational vs. Transactional →