CLV
Pronunciation: C-L-V
Also written as: CLV — Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Lifetime Value; the total net revenue a retailer can expect to generate from a single customer throughout the entire duration of their relationship.
Full Definition
CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) is a predictive metric that combines average purchase value, purchase frequency, and customer lifespan to project the total monetary worth of a customer to a retail business. It informs decisions on customer acquisition spend, loyalty investment, and segmentation strategy. Retailers use CLV models to distinguish high-value customers from low-margin segments and to prioritize personalization efforts. The metric may be expressed as historical CLV (based on actual past spend) or predictive CLV (modeled from behavioral data). Editors will encounter this term written as CLV, LTV, or CLTV—all refer to the same concept; house style should standardize to one form.
Usage
Usage note: Standardize to one abbreviation (CLV, LTV, or CLTV) throughout a document; define on first use. Do not write 'CLV value' (redundant acronym).
In Context
- "Segmenting the customer base by CLV enabled the retailer to allocate its marketing budget more efficiently." — Customer analytics strategy document
- "The predictive CLV model was trained on three years of loyalty card transaction data." — Data science methodology report