How to build a customer lifetime value (CLV) dashboard
You will learn
Learn how to build and set up the custom customer lifetime value (CLV) dashboard to understand and predict each of your customers’ purchasing behaviors over time. Custom CLV provides insights into your customers’ buying habits, including potential future purchases and opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling for impending purchases.
Custom CLV is available with Advanced KDP and Personalization, which are separate from Klaviyo’s standard marketing application. You can also access custom CLV during an active trial of either product. Head to our billing guide to learn about how to purchase these plans.
Before you begin
Dashboard requirements
- Have at least 500 customers who have placed an order.
This does not refer to total profiles, but rather the number of people who have actually made an order with your business. Note that if this section is on a profile but is blank, Klaviyo doesn’t have enough data on that individual to make a prediction.
- You have an ecommerce integration (e.g., Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, etc.) or use the Klaviyo API to send placed orders.
- You have at least 180 days of order history and have orders within the last 30 days.
- You have at least some customers who have placed 3 or more orders.
Setting up your segments
CLV segments are optional for viewing the dashboard and changing your prediction window. Create segments using CLV attributes to populate the Segments using CLV card and review campaigns and forms that use those segments. Learn how to create and set up your CLV segments.
Only Owners, Admins, Managers, and Analysts can access this dashboard.
Navigating to the dashboard
Navigate to Personalization > Predictive models.
Here you will see a default dashboard with the current data model used, followed by segments, flows, upcoming campaigns, and forms using particular CLV attributes.
Customizing your dashboard
Reviewing your CLV calculation
- To review your CLV settings, click on Settings in the top right.
- At the top of this settings card, review the account metrics currently used to calculate CLV (Placed orders, Refunded orders, and Cancelled orders). Only metrics currently used by your CLV model appear here. To check or change a missing metric’s mapping, follow the next step.
- Optional: if you are an Owner, Admin, or Manager, click Update metric mapping to open your metric mapping settings. Updating a mapping applies to all applicable reporting in your account. After adjusting your mappings, click Save on that page. Then return to Personalization > Predictive models and reopen Settings to continue.
If you are editing a mapped metric or using a new custom metric, it may take up to 48 hours for this change to be reflected in your report. Additionally, if one was recently edited in your account, you may see a banner noting that this is still updating.
Adjusting your predicted time range
Your prediction window is the time range in which Klaviyo provides customer purchase forecasting. In other words, during this time frame, Klaviyo predicts how much money a particular customer is expected to spend and their total number of orders.
By default, your prediction window is set to 365 days. This means that Klaviyo provides CLV predictions for the next 365 days. However, you may find that you want to narrow in a certain time period (e.g., Black Friday and Cyber Monday), or increase the period if your buying cycle tends to be longer.
Adjusting your predicted time range updates Predicted CLV, Total CLV, and Predicted Number of Orders for profiles in your account. This affects segments, flows, campaigns, and forms that use those predictions.
Updating and saving your new prediction window
To change the time range for the prediction window:
- In Settings, enter a number of days greater than 0 and no more than 50,000 in the Predicted date range field. Do not use negative numbers or special characters (e.g., a comma to separate larger numbers).
- Review Prediction confidence, which updates as you change the number of days.
- Klaviyo shows Highest when your predicted date range is shorter than your historic date range, and Medium when it is equal to or longer than your historic date range. This indicates confidence in the forecast; it does not guarantee that an individual customer will spend the predicted amount.
- Click Preview to preview this change without applying it. You will see a banner noting that the dashboard is providing preview examples of what your data may look like. Review the example profile values and the segments, flows, campaigns, and forms that would be affected. Check that you have entered the intended number of days.
- Click Save once you are satisfied with your prediction window.
- In the Save CLV settings confirmation, review the change and click Save again to apply it.
A green success message will then appear, confirming any changes that you saved.
Changes to your prediction window may take up to 2 hours to reflect in your data.
To discard unsaved changes, click Cancel if the Save CLV settings confirmation is open. Close the Settings panel, then click Discard changes in the confirmation.
Learn more about using the customer lifetime value dashboard and cards.
Additional resources
- Understanding the customer lifetime value (CLV) dashboard
Learn how to use the custom customer lifetime value (CLV) dashboard to understand and predict each of your customers’ purchasing behaviors over time. Custom CLV provides insights into your customers’ buying habits, including potential future purchases and opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling for impending purchases. In addition, you can use custom CLV insights to better personalize the customer buying journey, including around key times of year and events that matter to certain customer segments.
- How to segment by customer lifetime value (CLV)
Learn how to create a customer lifetime value (CLV) segment and export any key CLV information. CLV is part of Klaviyo's predictive analytics and can be a powerful tool to use in segmentation. It is the total amount, both past and predicted, that a customer will purchase from your brand over time. CLV segments allow you to group customers based on this amount so that you can send them relevant content and trigger segment-based flows. For example, you can use historic CLV to build a VIP welcome flow or use predicted CLV to send targeted campaigns to customers who will likely spend a certain amount over the course of a year.
- Understanding Klaviyo's predictive analytics
Learn more about the different types of predictive analytics data displayed in your account, the various ways Klaviyo computes this, and guidelines for how you can utilize this data.