A new marketing metric: ELTV (Extended Lifetime Value)
In a webinar we recorded in Sep 2022, I met with Kat Wray, Head of Partnerships at Mention Me (an SAP partner), and Nils Siméon, Key Account Executive at SAP Customer Experience, to discuss how brands should better evaluate the value of their customers and how they can even extend it.
It’s not a secret that brands today are facing real challenges with their customer acquisition. The main reasons as of now are:
1. The sunset of third-party data, with Apple iOS updates and recent regulation changes, is causing brands to take a step back in analyzing their acquisition channels.
2. Customer acquisition costs have increased dramatically and are not sustainable. With no or less past data, marketing channels must work a lot harder to get the same results.
3. On the customer side, there is a growing distrust amongst customers on how brands are using their data to target them.
For these main reasons, brands must diversify the acquisition channels they’re using, and prioritized channels that are trusted, authentic and such that capture first party data can used to scale growth. Referral marketing is a great example for such a channel. This is where customers recommend brands to their friends, and when you think about it, it’s the most trusted acquisition channel. According to Mention Me, referral marketing is now a $1 billion market, and will be a $50 billion market by 2040.
Watch the full webinar:
“We know that brands are investing referral, they know referral needs to be a core part of their acquisition strategy,” says Kat Wray, Head of Partnerships at Mention Me. “But while brands know this is super important, they find it really difficult to make it successful. In most cases referral isn’t given the expertise or attention it deserves to really make it a success in terms of driving new customer acquisition, and that’s where Mention Me comes in”.
Mention Me, an SAP partner, a graduate of the SAP.iO Foundry Tel Aviv program and currently part of SAP.iO Rising Stars program, is providing a tailored referral programs for over 500 brands across the world. According to Mention Me, they’ve delivered over 4,000,000 referrals by now, which generates over 1.6 billion in revenue for their clients, an 10X average ROI, and up to 30% of new customer acquisition. Did you know that referred customers have an 11% higher average order value? And up to twice the lifetime value as other customers? They are also 5 times more likely to refer their friends as well! This is an acquisition channel that can scale!
The extended lifetime value of a customer, or ELTV, is the total worth to a business of a customer over the whole period of their relationship, plus all the revenue they bring by referring their friends. Let’s say for example that I spend $200 a year on a specific brand. And let’s assume that in terms of average order value and the number of times I’m buying per year, I’m not particularly valuable for that brand. But, if in addition to purchasing I’m also recommending the brand to my friends, and they purchase as well, my real lifetime value for that brand is much more than 200$. By really managing referrals and by knowing the ELTV of a customer, brands will be able to retain such customers by giving them early access to content or deals, putting them into a VIP or loyalty programs etc. But most brands do not have access to any of this data, so they are missing out.
This is exactly why we created the SAP Mention Me partnership. Together with Mention Me, SAP clients can now harness the exponential power of fans, identify who the advocates are, who those best customers are, to ensure they double down. Mention Me is integrated with SAP CDP, Commerce, Cloud marketing, and Emarsys, and got key use cases across these different solutions.
It starts by helping SAP clients acquire those advocates and helps them grow the customer database in the SAP marketing cloud. Mention Me also helps SAP clients to increase and optimize the success of referral by integrating to SAP commerce cloud, which allows promotion the referral program on the client’s website. On top of that, Mention Me’s solution also integrates with Emarsys and can promote the referral program across different channels, including SMS and e-mail. Once we’ve acquired those advocates, the focus is about engaging them in the best way. Mention Me are passing some referral metrics over to SAP Sales, Service and Marketing Cloud to make sure we’re giving customers a seamless customer experience. To ensure ELTV, Mention Me are passing that metric into SAP in real time to enhance clients’ segmentation and engagement strategy across both the first and third-party channels. Finally, Mention Me are bringing this all back to acquisition by passing the data into the SAP CDP.
One case study that was highlighted in the webinar is the one with Charlotte Tilbury. According to Mention Me, Charlotte Tilbury found that referred customers spent 39% more in their first six months and are also 6 times more likely to refer their friends as well.