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Beyond Customer Lifetime Valuation: Measuring the Value of Acquisition and Retention for Subscription Services

Published: 25 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Understanding the value of acquiring or retaining subscribers is crucial for subscription-based businesses. While customer lifetime value (LTV) is commonly used to do so, we demonstrate that LTV likely over-states the true value of acquisition or retention. We establish a methodology to estimate the monetary value of acquired or retained subscribers based on estimating both on and off-service LTV. To overcome the lack of data on off-service households, we use an approach based on Markov chains that recovers off-service LTV from minimal data on non-subscriber transitions. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the methodology can be used to (i) forecast aggregate subscriber numbers that respect both aggregate market constraints and account-level dynamics, (ii) estimate the impact of price changes on revenue and subscription growth and (iii) provide optimal policies, such as price discounting, that maximize expected lifetime revenue.

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Cited By

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  • (2025)Different Approaches for Customer Lifetime Value in e-Book Subscription DomainArtificial Intelligence and Soft Computing10.1007/978-3-031-81596-6_6(65-76)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2025
  • (2024)A Cross Domain Method for Customer Lifetime Value Prediction in Supply Chain PlatformProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645391(4037-4046)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • (2023)On the Reliability of User Feedback for Evaluating the Quality of Conversational AgentsProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3583780.3615286(4185-4189)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
April 2022
3764 pages
ISBN:9781450390965
DOI:10.1145/3485447
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Publication History

Published: 25 April 2022

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Author Tags

  1. Customer Lifetime Valuation
  2. Markov Decision Processes
  3. Observational Causal Inference

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WWW '22
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WWW '22: The ACM Web Conference 2022
April 25 - 29, 2022
Virtual Event, Lyon, France

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Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Different Approaches for Customer Lifetime Value in e-Book Subscription DomainArtificial Intelligence and Soft Computing10.1007/978-3-031-81596-6_6(65-76)Online publication date: 17-Feb-2025
  • (2024)A Cross Domain Method for Customer Lifetime Value Prediction in Supply Chain PlatformProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645391(4037-4046)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • (2023)On the Reliability of User Feedback for Evaluating the Quality of Conversational AgentsProceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3583780.3615286(4185-4189)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2023
  • (2023)How to really quantify the economic value of customer information in corporate databasesHumanities and Social Sciences Communications10.1057/s41599-023-01654-610:1Online publication date: 13-Apr-2023

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