A Guide to Customer Lifecycle Marketing & Management

Lifecycle Marketing: What It Is and Strategies for Success

?The most successful businesses on the planet are those who maintain a solid base of just a few thousand customers who return time and time again. These businesses invest in the customer lifecycle to not only get customers to buy but to return and keep buying, yielding far superior marketing ROIs.

To take full advantage of customer lifecycle marketing, you need to know what it is and some of the techniques used to move customers through the funnel and prevent them from dropping out at the end.

Let’s take a look at the lifecycle marketing concept and how to apply it to your business.

What is Lifecycle Marketing?

?When answering the question, “What is lifecycle marketing?” it’s necessary to examine what the consumer lifecycle is as a concept.

?The customer lifecycle is the process of a customer discovering your brand, buying from your brand, becoming a loyal customer, and then eventually stopping the use of your product/service.

If we look at an ideal customer lifecycle diagram, a loyal customer will follow a circular route throughout the buying journey without ever dropping out entirely.

For example, a loyal Starbucks customer follows a very short cycle. They pass a store, go inside, buy something, and then leave. That’s the end of the immediate life cycle.

?However, due to lifecycle marketing, that customer returns the next day and begins this cycle again. They never fall out of the funnel and stop buying from Starbucks.

?This is the power of customer lifecycle marketing. It’s all about defining your ideal customer (the person most likely to buy your product), getting them to make that first purchase, and then convincing them to make repeat purchases.

?To successfully execute this type of marketing campaign, you must understand customer life cycle marketing stages and grasp how different marketing techniques fit into the buyer’s journey.

Why is Lifecycle Marketing Effective?

?Before discussing how your business can implement these marketing techniques, let’s examine why lifecycle marketing is such an effective way to grow your business. With lifecycle marketing, you can:

Improve ROI – It costs an average of five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. This is why the ROI from focusing on the consumer life cycle is so high.

Improve Lifetime Value (LTV) – The LTV of each customer dramatically increases when you prevent them from falling out of the purchasing cycle. A customer that buys a $10 product one time is worth far less to your business than a loyal customer who purchases a $10 product every week for a year.

Grow Through Retention – Customers who become brand fanatics are more likely to recommend your company to others. It’s the easiest, most low-cost form of marketing there is.

The biggest mistake companies make is advertising to their target audience and hoping they get from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel.

Successful businesses focus on preventing customers from ever exiting the funnel in the first place.

Customer Lifecycle Stages

?Every business must understand the different marketing lifecycle stages before they can meticulously plan for each stage in the buyer’s journey.

Take note, the lifecycle method is not designed to act in the same way as a rigid sales funnel. It’s designed to be a new marketing and sales funnel adapted to the needs of your business.

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Reach

?In the first stage, your target market has a problem, and they’re looking for a product to solve that problem. At this stage, you are attempting to get the eyes of your ideal customer on your product.

At this stage, customers will be comparing, researching, and reading reviews. This stage is where businesses typically focus on SEO and social media marketing.

Your goal is to get customers to reach out.

Acquisition

?The acquisition stage is where a customer gets in touch with you. They will be narrowing down their ideal choice of product or service.

Top-notch customer service and online educational content are essential for moving customers to the next marketing lifecycle stages.

Conversion

?Your customer has made their first purchase. To keep this customer inside your funnel, you must ensure that your product or service solves their problem in totality.

The following steps involve retaining that customer.

Retention

?Better understand your customer. Check in with them. What did they like? What didn’t they like? Is there anything else you can help them with?

This data is essential for continuing to meet the needs of your new customer.

Surveys are a great way of obtaining this data. Providing them with exclusive perks can also act as an extra sweetener.

Loyalty

The final stage is making a customer into a brand loyalist. Brand loyalists not only buy more, but they write reviews, tell their friends, and they defend your brand online.

Loyalty is where your marketing efforts pay off, and the consumer life cycle keeps rotating between Conversion, Retention, and Loyalty without the customer falling out of that cycle.

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Useful Metrics When Analyzing Lifecycle Marketing

?Part of your digital customer lifecycle management responsibilities involves tracking vital metrics that analyze customer behavior. These help you to tweak your marketing strategies to serve the needs of your customers better.

Here are some of the useful metrics to analyze when it comes to your marketing strategies:

• Purchase history.
• Time spent on your website.
• Newsletter engagement.
• Social media engagement.
• Frequency of purchases.
• Average customer LTV.
• General demographics.

All these metrics enable you to develop an image of your most valuable customers, what they have in common, and what they respond to best.

Lifecycle Marketing Tips

Looking for ways to strengthen your lifecycle marketing campaigns? There are plenty of lifecycle marketing automation options that enable you to push more customers through the various stages of your funnel.

Personalized Recommendations – Instead of general discounts to acquire customers, opt for personalized recommendations. Amazon does an excellent job of personalizing recommendations.

Browse Abandonment Campaigns – Did a customer spend a long time looking at a product/service and then didn’t buy it? Start a campaign offering an exclusive discount on that product or provide recommendations for similar products.

Encourage Referrals – Make your customers work for you by marketing your brand to family and friends. It’s not uncommon for gambling companies and hotel booking platforms to provide cash rewards for referrals.

Communicate Well – Nobody wants to speak to a robot. They want to speak to a human being promptly. Communicate regularly, based on the user’s preferences, and invest in improving your customer support department.

Invest in Automation – Customer lifecycle marketing is time-consuming. Investing in lifecycle marketing automation can cut down on the amount of time spent marketing, thus increasing your overall ROI.

These are just five ideas for how you can boost the success of your business by retaining your customers. However, the nature of this type of marketing is its highly flexible and must be adapted to your business and your target audience.

Lifecycle Marketing Automation

?In business, time is money. Spend too much time on marketing, and it takes resources away from other aspects of your business. That’s where lifecycle marketing automation comes in.

LeadJig’s marketing automation services include digital ad placement, omnichannel marketing, email blast marketing, and more to enable you to automate much of your customer lifecycle marketing campaign.

Not only does automation save time, but it’s also fully data-driven, therefore yielding superior results.

Contact LeadJig to find out more about how our marketing automation software can improve your business’s ROI.?