As a DTC business, maximizing retention and LTV are the name of the game. In today's environment, the tech stack has gotten increasingly complex and businesses are inundated with different solutions to manage and utilize customer data. This trend has created highly fragmented sources of data that have made it harder than ever to understand and retain customers. In light of this challenge, our team of experts have provided a high-level analysis on the various solutions in the market and how ModernLTV fits into the ecosystem. With this, you can start to identify the right solution(s) for your business.

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vs. Traditional customer data platforms (CDPs)

Example: Segment, Tealium, HighTouch, Amperity

While these platforms can serve as the source of truth for your customer data, they offer limited to no predictive intelligence to combat churn and require ongoing engineering support.

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TLDR: These solutions offer robust capabilities, but are priced and designed for enterprise businesses with large engineering teams and resources.

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PROs

• Unifies all your customer data in one place
• Highly customizable to support unique data models
• Extensive network for 3rd party integrations

CONs

• Requires upfront implementation & on-going engineering
• Often redundant functionality with data warehouses
• Built and priced for large enterprise businesses

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vs. Marketing automation

Example: Hubspot, Klaviyo, Customer.io

These platforms a suite of solutions that engage customers across multiple channels, such as email, SMS, in-app messages, etc. By nature, these platforms need to manage/capture customer data to power the campaigns, workflows and customer journeys.

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TLDR: These solutions highly dynamic and designed for marketers, but not built to scale as your central hub for customer data.

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PROs

• Vertically integrated with marketing tools
• No-code interface built for marketers
• Cross-channel integration

CONs

• Not built/designed to serve as a source of truth for customer data
• Don't support flexible, real-time reverse ETL
• Often require purchase of entire platform to access CDP

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vs. Payments / subscription management (PSaaS)

Example: Stripe Billing, Recurly, Recharge, Bold

Every business needs to collect and process payments and many subscription businesses choose to layer on Recurly, Recharge, etc to handle all the subscription-related functionality. That said, while they provide off-the-shelf payment recovery solutions, they don't have nearly the range of functionality to comprehensively address customer churn.

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TLDR: These solutions are typically the source of truth for payments / subscriptions, but are entirely inadequate as a customer data solution given they are transaction-based and only capture payments.

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PROs

• Handles all subscription management
• Source of truth for customer churn
• Off-the-shelf payment recovery features

CONs

• Requires engineering resources
• Only access to payments data
• Focused on transaction data, not customer data

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