Table of Contents
Key takeaways:
- Tracking your customer lifetime value (LTV) helps SaaS businesses understand how much the average customer throughout their relationship with your business
- Manual calculations for LTV can be difficult, as it involves enormous and complex data sets, but accurate LTV is essential for informed decision-making
- Tools like Baremetrics can calculate and track LTV for different customer segments from your Chargebee data, giving you more accurate metrics
To run a business online, you need a customer relationship management (CRM) and a payment processor to manage your customers and their invoices. This is because handling many customers across regions by hand is complex, and in a competitive market, there is no room for errors.
Chargebee is often the payment processor for SaaS businesses because it can handle recurring revenue streams, operate advanced pricing strategies, and integrate with many tools.
However, the rudimentary analytics dashboard included in Chargebee only offers some of the functionality needed to maximize growth. To get the most out of customer data, SaaS businesses often rely on a third-party analytics dashboard for everything from basic SaaS metrics to financial forecasting and customer segmentation.
Thankfully, when calculating LTV for Chargebee customers, along with all of the related metrics, Baremetrics excels. Baremetrics is a business metrics tool that provides 26 metrics about your business, such as MRR, ARR, LTV, ARPU, churn, total customers, and more.
Learn more about getting the most out of Chargebee with the best invoicing procedures.
Why LTV Matters
LTV is the average amount of money a customer pays you before churning.
One of the most important metrics is the customer lifetime value (LTV). The lifetime value of a customer is just what it says—the total amount of revenue earned by the average customer during the duration of their contract.
While it might sound like a simple concept, calculating the average revenue per user (ARPU) and the customer churn, which are necessary components of the LTV calculation, is complicated because the information comes from many sources.
This complication can only increase when your customers change pricing tiers, purchase add-ons, or implement usage-based pricing.
Calculating LTV
This can be calculated as follows:
LTV = ARPU × Customer Lifetime
For example, if your ARPU is $60/month and your average contract length is 20 months, your LTV would be $60 × 20 = $1200. But how do you get to an ARPU of $60 or a contract length of 20 months?
While the definition is simple, the calculations aren’t. That’s because a lot of guesswork goes into calculating the average length of a contract—and a lot of math to improve that guesswork.
Since it isn’t possible to know the lifetime of your customers until they quit your service or to know the average lifetime of your customers until a statistically meaningful sample of them leave, LTV is often calculated with churn:
LTV = ARPU/Customer Churn
Customer churn is the percentage of customers that leave your platform during a specified period, usually monthly. It can be calculated as follows:
Customer Churn = (Churned Customers/Total Customers) × 100
If you have 1000 customers and 50 customers leave your site over the course of a month, then your customer churn is: (50/1000) × 100 = 5%.
If your customers are paying the same amount monthly as above ($60), then your 5% churn gives you an LTV of 60/0.05 = $1200. Note that in the calculation, you should use churn as a decimal, not a percentage.
The Challenges of Calculating LTV for Chargebee Customers
LTV can be challenging to calculate because, whatever way you choose to calculate it, the numbers are not fixed. For example, if you have three pricing tiers and several add-ons, then your customers might be spending different amounts each month. This can make ARPU hard to pin down.
That’s a pretty simple example, too. It could be that you offer discounts for the first few months of service or you give credit to paying customers if they recruit another client.
Then, there is the question of how to deal with permanent price increases or decreases. What if you have the enviable position of a very long average customer lifetime? In that case, should you apply a discount rate to future ARPU?
Churn can similarly jump around. It is often the case that customers do not churn linearly over the lifetime of their contract.
Most companies will find that there is a sharp drop off after the first billing period, along with some customers—hopefully the ones that truly find the value you offer and not just those that forget about their monthly payments—that just never quit. In this case, is it better to use an exponential function, and how does one do that exactly?
These don’t even include the issues specific to calculating LTV for Chargebee customers.
For example, Chargebee’s basic analytics dashboard might not differentiate between paid customers and trials when calculating MRR, MRR growth, and LTV. Although everyone in the industry would love it if every trial converted to a paid sign-up, that’s an overly optimistic approach to forecasting!
See how Chargebee’s data compares Baremetrics and other direct competitors here:
How to Calculate LTV for Chargebee Customers
Calculating all your needed revenue, customer, churn, and MRR movement metrics can be difficult, including LTV for Chargebee customers directly on Chargebee’s limited analytics dashboard. Third-party tools can help
Baremetrics monitors subscription revenue for businesses that bring in revenue through subscription-based services. Baremetrics can integrate directly with your payment gateway, such as Chargebee, and pull information about your customers and their behavior into a crystal-clear dashboard.
Baremetrics brings you metrics, dunning, engagement tools, and customer insights. Baremetrics monitors MRR, ARR, LTV, the total number of customers, total expenses, quick ratio, and more.
Want to see how to track other Chargebee KPIs? Check out our guides on calculating churn and CAC for Chargebee customers.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and LTV
LTV is at its most valuable when it is combined with customer acquisition cost (CAC). CAC is the average cost of getting one new paid customer. LTV is often combined with CAC as the LTV to CAC ratio. An LTV to CAC ratio of 3 (i.e., you earn $3 in LTV for every $1 spent on CAC) is generally considered sustainable.
If your LTV to CAC ratio is lower than 3, then you probably need to either find a way to onboard new clients for less or increase your LTV.
You can increase your LTV by improving your ARPU, i.e. increasing your prices or upselling to your customer pool, or decreasing your churn, i.e. increasing the length of your customer lifetime.
To succeed here, you need to segment your client population and direct different actions to each group.
Tracking LTV for Each Customer Segment
When trying to calculate your LTV for Chargebee customers, as well as the other needed SaaS metrics, directly on their platform, it can be difficult to get the fine-grain detail needed. For example, it is important to understand the variation in your LTV based on different segments of your customers. This is something that Baremetrics can do automatically.
The obvious follow-up question is: Why is this important?
Well, it helps you target your actions more effectively. For example, suppose your American customers keep their services three times longer than those in Canada.
In that case, you should see what value Americans are getting out of your service that Canadians are not. For example, if your software has American but not Canadian tax compliance in mind, it could be time to look into developing that functionality for your international customers.
Suppose you have some customers paying you annually while others pay monthly and see that annual customers tend to remain loyal to your business for a much longer period of time. In that case, you might want to increase the discount you offer for paying on an annual basis.
If you offer three tiers and notice that the bottom tier has a very low LTV compared to the others, then you might want to scrap it.
It could be that the reduced functionality removes that magic element that makes your product worth using, and forcing clients to upgrade, possibly at the same price for an introductory period, would get them to see the true value of the platform you provide and increase their longevity.
Calculate Accurate LTV With Baremetrics
LTV is an important metric that is needed for decision-making throughout the company. LTV is used to calculate your CAC budget, and its components ARPU and churn are used in many of your growth metrics.
However, LTV is only part of the picture. Without a host of other metrics, it is hard to make optimal decisions. Calculating LTV for Chargebee customers, along with all of these other metrics, directly in Chargebee can be difficult.
So, whatever payment processor or CRM you choose, use Baremetrics to monitor your sales data.
Baremetrics makes it easy to collect and visualize all of your sales data. When you have many clients, it can be difficult to calculate your MRR, ARR, LTV, and so much more. Indeed, Baremetrics does all of this for you, and more.
We can even monitor your SaaS quick ratio. Integrating this innovative tool can make financial analysis seamless for your SaaS company, and you can start a free trial today.
Tired of wasting time on spreadsheets? Get a free trial of Baremetrics today!
