The LifterLMS Customers Screen: Lifetime Value and Segments

Until recently, answering "who are my best customers?" on a LifterLMS site meant exporting orders and building a spreadsheet. LifterLMS 10.3 added a Customers screen that does the arithmetic for you: lifetime value, order history and ready-made customer segments, all in the free core plugin.

This guide is for course business owners and marketers. It explains where to find the LifterLMS customers list, exactly how each figure is calculated (so you do not misread it), what the five segments contain, and how to turn them into campaigns that bring revenue back.

The definitions below come from the LifterLMS 10.3 source code, not from guesswork about what the labels probably mean.

Where to find the LifterLMS customers screen

Go to Orders > Customers in the WordPress admin. It sits between the orders list and Coupons. Administrators and LMS Managers can open it, because it uses the same permission check as the orders screens.

A customer, for this screen, is any user with at least one LifterLMS order that is not in the trash. That has two consequences worth knowing:

• Students you enrolled by hand, or through a membership without an order, are not customers here. They have enrollments but no orders.
• Students who checked out on a free access plan are customers, because a free checkout still creates an order. They simply have a lifetime value of zero.

If you sell through WooCommerce instead of LifterLMS checkout, sales data lives in WooCommerce and this screen will not show it. See LifterLMS with WooCommerce for how that setup differs.

The columns and what they mean

The list shows one row per customer, sorted by most recent order first. Every column except Email can be sorted, and the search box finds customers by name, email or user ID.

Column	How it is calculated
Orders	Number of LifterLMS orders for the user, in any status except trash.
LTV	Net lifetime value: the total of all succeeded and refunded transactions, minus the amounts refunded.
AOV	Average order value: LTV divided by the number of orders.
Last order / First order	Dates of the newest and oldest orders.
Active subscriptions	Recurring orders that are Active or Pending Cancel.
Registered	The date the WordPress account was created.

Three things to keep in mind about the numbers

• LTV is cash actually collected. It is built from transactions, not order totals. A subscription that has billed three times counts three payments; future payments do not count until they happen. A payment plan halfway through shows half its price.
• Free orders pull AOV down. AOV divides by every order, including free ones. A customer with one paid order of 300 and two free enrollments shows an AOV of 100. Read AOV together with the order count.
• No currency conversion. If you have ever changed store currency, amounts are summed as stored. The same caveat applies to the Sales reports.

The single customer view

Click a customer to open their record. It has two tabs.

Overview shows tiles for Lifetime value, Orders, Average order value, Refunded, Active subscriptions, First order and Last order. Below them you get the most recent orders, the billing details from the latest order (name, email, phone and address where collected), and the student's enrollments. Links take you to Edit user and View student report.

Orders is the full order history, 25 orders per page, with product, status, revenue and date for each.

The connection runs the other way too. On a student's page under LifterLMS > Reporting > Students, customers now get Lifetime value and Orders tiles with a "view customer" link. Support staff looking at a stuck student can see in one click that they are dealing with someone who has spent heavily with you, and respond accordingly.

For order statuses, refunds and transactions themselves, the LifterLMS orders documentation covers the details.

The five customer segments explained

Above the table are five links with live counts. Counts are cached for up to 15 minutes and refreshed when an order or transaction is saved, so a brand-new sale can take a moment to move someone between segments.

Segment	Who is in it
All customers	Everyone with at least one order.
High spenders	Customers whose LTV is at or above the 80th percentile of all paying customers, roughly your top fifth by revenue. The threshold is recalculated as your data changes.
Active subscriptions	Customers with at least one recurring order that is Active or Pending Cancel.
Free only	Customers whose LTV is exactly zero.
At risk	Customers who have paid something, have no active subscription, and whose last order is more than 90 days old.

Two edge cases change how you should use them. Free only includes customers whose paid orders were fully refunded, because their net LTV is zero; check before sending them a "you have never bought from us" message. And At risk is about purchase recency, not engagement. Someone who bought a lifetime course four months ago and studies daily is "at risk" in this sense. Pair the segment with last login or progress data before you assume they have gone cold.

Using segments for marketing

Segments are only useful if they lead to an action. Here are the plays that tend to pay off for course businesses.

High spenders: ask, reward, and learn

• Invite them first to a new course, cohort or price increase, with a members-only access plan or a private coupon. See LifterLMS coupons and vouchers for how to restrict a code.
• Ask for testimonials and case studies. They have the most results to talk about.
• Interview five of them. What made them buy again is the best input you will get for your next offer.

Free only: convert with a next step

These are people who trusted you with an email and finished a checkout. Send a short sequence that builds on the free course they took, then offers the paid course that comes next, ideally with a time-limited discount. Check their progress first: someone who never started the free course needs a nudge to begin, not a sales pitch.

At risk: win back past buyers

Past buyers convert better than cold traffic. Announce what is new since their last purchase, offer an upgrade path or bundle, and give a clear reason to act now. Exclude anyone who is still actively studying.

Active subscriptions: protect recurring revenue

This is the segment that keeps the lights on. Use it for onboarding check-ins, "what is coming next month" emails and annual-plan upgrade offers. Customers in Pending Cancel are still counted here; they are your most urgent retention conversations.

Getting the list into your email tool

Click a segment, then use the table's Export button to download a CSV and import it into your email platform as a tag or audience. For ongoing automation rather than one-off exports, connect LifterLMS to your email platform directly. Our guides to the LifterLMS Mailchimp integration and WP Fusion for CRM sync cover the options. Exports contain personal data, so delete the file once it is imported.

Adding your own segment (for developers)

The built-in segments are filterable. This snippet adds a "Repeat buyers" segment for customers with two or more orders. It uses the llms_customer_segments filter to add the link and llms_customer_query_segment_sql to define who is in it:

<?php
/**
 * Plugin Name: LLMSX Repeat Buyers Segment
 */
add_filter( 'llms_customer_segments', 'llmsx_add_repeat_buyers_segment' );
function llmsx_add_repeat_buyers_segment( $segments ) {
	$segments['repeat_buyers'] = __( 'Repeat buyers', 'llmsx' );
	return $segments;
}

add_filter( 'llms_customer_query_segment_sql', 'llmsx_repeat_buyers_sql', 10, 2 );
function llmsx_repeat_buyers_sql( $sql, $segment ) {
	if ( 'repeat_buyers' === $segment ) {
		$sql = ' AND customers.order_count >= 2';
	}
	return $sql;
}

The new link appears without a count, because counts are calculated for the built-in segments only; the llms_customer_segment_counts filter lets you add one if you need it. There is also an llms_get_customer_metrics filter for adjusting the figures shown on a customer's record. Keep code like this in a small custom plugin so it survives updates.

Common mistakes

• Treating LTV as forecast revenue. It is what has been collected so far, net of refunds. Subscription value yet to be billed is not included.
• Looking for manually enrolled students. No order, no customer record. Use the Students report for them.
• Emailing "Free only" as non-buyers. Refunded customers sit there too.
• Reading "At risk" as churned. It means no purchase in 90 days and no active subscription, nothing more.
• Comparing figures across currencies. Multi-currency history is summed without conversion.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Customers screen part of free LifterLMS?

Yes. It was added to the core plugin in version 10.3 and needs no add-on.

Why is a student missing from the customers list?

They have no LifterLMS order. Manual enrollments, membership auto-enrollments without a purchase, and sales handled by WooCommerce do not create LifterLMS orders.

Can I change the 90-day window for At risk?

Not with a setting. A developer can add a segment with a different window using the llms_customer_query_segment_sql filter shown above.

Who can see customer lifetime value?

Administrators and LMS Managers by default, the same users who can manage orders. Instructors do not see it.

What to do next

Open Orders > Customers this week and look at two numbers: how many customers sit in Free only, and how many are At risk. Those are your cheapest sources of new revenue. Pick one segment, write a three-email sequence for it, and measure the result before doing the next.

If you want segments that combine purchases with progress, logins or quiz results, or want them synced to your CRM automatically, that is a job for our LifterLMS integrations team. Tell us what you want to know about your customers and we will suggest the simplest way to get it.