Analysis of customer lifetime value and marketing expenditure decisions through a Markovian-based model

• The study proposes a methodology to find optimal promotion campaign to maximize CLV.
• Bank customers are divided into segments in terms of their profit levels.
• The impact of different campaigns on different segments is analyzed by using MDP.
• Potential customer values of banking customers are predicted.
• In-depth interviews were carried out with experts from eleven leading Turkish banks.

The general aim of this study is to provide a guide to the future marketing decisions of a firm, using a model to predict customer lifetime values. The proposed framework aims to eliminate the limitations and drawbacks of the majority of models encountered in the literature through a simple and industry-specific model with easily measurable and objective indicators. In addition, this model predicts the potential value of the current customers rather than measuring the current value, which has generally been used in the majority of previous studies. This study contributes to the literature by helping to make future marketing decisions via Markov decision processes for a company that offers several types of products. Another contribution is that the states for Markov decision processes are also generated using the predicted customer lifetime values where the prediction is realized by a regression-based model. Finally, a real world application of the proposed model is provided in the banking sector to show the empirical validity of the model. Therefore, we believe that the proposed framework and the developed model can guide both practitioners and researchers.