The more you know about your customers, the better experience you can provide for them and ensure repeat business. You don’t have to be a fortune teller to predict customer behavior when owning or managing a restaurant. The Analytics Dashboard provided by Bloom Intelligence can collect several business metrics while offering free Wi-Fi for guests. One important component to understand is the customer lifetime value.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) refers to how much time and money a customer is projected to spend at your business. A formula analyzes the Projected Customer Lifetime Visits and the Average Value of a Customer to get a CLV number, and the Bloom dashboard generates this number for you.
How can you use this value? Several ways.
1. Identify Best Customers
Instead of guessing at the demographics you connect with most, this metric assesses more customers and finds those that typically spend the most time and money at your business. Knowing this helps focus your marketing efforts so that when you do offer surveys and loyalty programs, you know who to target.
The CLV can also help you adapt to your customer’s preferences to connect with them. If a restaurant finds that senior citizens have the highest CLV among their customers, this shapes marketing and feedback efforts differently than with younger clients, as older generations are less likely to use social media. You might still collect emails but place more focus on face to face interactions instead of trying to create a large social media presence.
Knowing your best clients not only allows you to cater to them better but gives you the opportunity to improve your business by capitalizing on the benefits of high CLV clients. These customers are most likely to try new products, tell others about a company and offer reviews and feedback.
Those with high CLVs are the ones you want your email promotions going to and whose feedback will provide the most benefit. For example, the Bloom Analytics Dashboard gauges averages for daily traffic and dwell time along with identifying popular visit times. When noticing a drop in visitors at certain days or times, or a short dwell time compared to other periods, you can use your clients with high CLVs to improve these slow periods. Instead of sending promotions or offers to everyone, you can focus on those who already like and frequent your business. Plus, doing this is made easier with Bloom's automated marketing services.
There are several ways to improve CLV numbers, including running promotions, providing perks and loyalty programs and creating a bigger presence online. What if you're already doing some of these things but your CLV scores are still low? You may need to target your efforts towards one group. Family friendly restaurants, for example, cater to a broad range of people, and other traffic analytic tools could indicate the kinds of families to target.
Bloom Intelligence captures data from electronic devices when they stay in your establishment for a certain amount of time. You can track customer age, gender, new and repeat customers and more, but these four metrics give you a general idea of who visits your establishment. Tracking the demographics of return customers identifies the people to target when building loyalty and boosting your CLV.
When generating new business, you want to reach those who will turn into repeat customers. You already know who to target as you want more people like your high CLV clients. The CLV metric also helps estimate the success of future endeavors like expanding or adding new products. As you can see, the customer lifetime value ties into many areas of your business.