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Can you afford your growth strategy?
If you don’t know your customer lifetime value (LTV), you’re walking into a nightmare scenario:
High customer acquisition cost (CAC), wasted ad budgets, unprofitable scaling… and even growth that destroys your margins.
And the last thing any marketer needs is missed revenue targets, panicking executives and clients, or budget cuts… right?
But once you know your LTV, you can plan growth strategies and run campaigns that increase both revenue and profits—and that means happy executives and happy clients.
That’s why we created the LTV Playbook—a clear guide to calculating and improving your LTV no matter your industry.
Inside, you’ll discover:
- A 3:1 profit ratio formula for calculating the LTV that works for your business.
- Practical, low-effort tactics to increase LTV before and after checkout.
Plus other strategies to help you unlock more value from every customer.
Support Theory
Tomorrow is Friday. What are the odds of you having a bad day?
If you’re a glass-half-full type of person, you’d probably say… 10%. Just a guess.
But now imagine we ask you the odds your car will break, or you’ll receive worrying family news, or that your boss or partner will tell you something to ruin your day?
Maybe you’d say there’s a 5–10% chance of each one happening. Add them together, and that’s way more than 10%.
Why did your answer change?
Well, according to psychologists Tversky and Koehler, humans tend to overestimate the likelihood of an event based on how detailed the description is. They call this the Support Theory.
In one experiment they conducted, their participants estimated the probability of death from cancer was 18%, heart attack 22%, and other natural causes 33%—a total of 73%.
Another group judged the probability of death from any natural cause as just 58%. Spoiler alert: This obviously includes all three probabilities.
Same outcome, less specificity, and therefore, lower probability.
The Support Theory can influence our decision-making a lot, or make us more persuasive.
- When applying for a bank loan, the more details you include proving solvency, the higher your chances of approval.
- A well-mapped out business plan helps persuade investors more than a huge growth number alone.
- You understand heart disease risks better once you break them down into high blood pressure, high cholesterol, family history, etc.
And the best thing is, Support Theory is a heck of a good sales angle. Let’s see how.
Three ways to leverage Support Theory
1) Don’t list vague benefits, break them down into specific components
Serious question. What is an “all-in-one platform?” Or a platform that “improves productivity”?
Vague benefits like these won’t benefit your brand.
Instead, try to be specific and break down your products’ features into specific solutions.
Lark does this well. While most project management tools all go with the catch-all discourse, this landing page copy actually names some of the problems it solves:
This also applies to D2C brands. If you say your product is “healthier,” explain why. What are the ingredients? What does it improve?
Important note: Too many details can also lead to cognitive overload. So while it’s good to break the benefits down to minor features, you don’t have to list every specific thing at the start.
Even in the example above, Lark does “…and more,” in an attempt to make the most of Support Theory, but not overwhelm you.
2) List your competitors’ negatives in detail
This is the equivalent of the “nothing personal, kid” meme.
It might sound like a cheap shot, but you can totally compare your brand to others. If you do, enumerate the drawbacks of competing products.
Example: Instead of saying “Better than Figma,” Sketch app has a dedicated landing page where it lists all the ways it has the edge over Figma… in detail:
There are ten items in the list, and a bunch of user testimonials too.
The more specific you can be about your competitor’s flaws, the more real and convincing your advantage feels.
3) Frame customer pain points as detailed, unpacked risks
Let’s say you want customers to know they are losing time by not using your solution.
… Yes, you guessed it. “Losing time” is vague and unimpressive.
What does losing time actually look like? Are they copying the same data into three tools? Waiting days for someone to approve a task? Spending too much time on projects that don’t produce meaningful business outcomes?
When you unpack the risk, it feels more immediate. And more painful.
Motion app uses this in its content strategy. You won’t hear Motion say that traditional to-do lists don’t work. Instead, Motion simply reports data that “only 41% of US people complete their list.”
Motion also frequently uses this stat in their copy.
By doing this, Motion backs up its claims with concrete stats and vivid examples that make the problem feel urgent and real.
The more detailed the problem, the more likely and costly it feels. That’s the Support Theory at work.
Give it a try!
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ICYMI, last time we looked at the Endowed Progress Effect.
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