Lifecycle marketing, as its name suggests, involves studying the whole customer journey in an integrated way, from first contact to customer relationship management rather than narrowly focusing on a given campaign, channel or metric. Instead of focusing on separate campaigns, you should use an ‘always-on’ approach to marketing look as your customer’s entire journey, across all devices and channels, and optimise your messaging to align with the various touch points along that journey. Because lifecycle marketing works across platforms, it is key the different teams running different aspects of your marketing can collaborate and all pull in the same direction when applying a lifecycle marketing strategy. To start with, everyone needs to be on the same page and understand exactly what customer lifecycle marketing entails. Below are some definitions of lifecycle marketing from different departments/business types.
Email Marketing:
“Lifecycle marketing intergrates your ecommerce and email databases to generate highly personlised messages for your customers” – Kath Pay, Email Marketing Expert
CRM:
“Customer life cycle is a term used to describe the progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using, and maintaining loyalty to a product or service” – Margaret Rouse, Tech Target
Academic:
The customer life cycle describes the points in the continuum where you: 1) Claim someones attention. 2) Bring them into your sphere of influence. 3) Turn them into a registered and/or paying customer. 4) Keep them as a customer. 5) Turn them into a company advocate. – Sterne and Cutler, aurthors of the paper introducing the concept of the customer lifecycle back in 2000
Ecommerce:
“Customer lifecycle marketing (CLM) is an approach to customer communication that recognises that different stages on the journey to becoming a loyal, active customer require different marketing messages and strategies.” – Ometria, Ecommerce analyitics software
Personalization
The definitions differ slightly from one another because of the different angles the various writers have attacked the problem from. However, almost all point to some form of personalization being key to effective customer lifecycle marketing. This it crucial to get right, as effective personalization brings a host of benefits which can help you increase sales and retention, which after all are the objects of any customer lifecycle marketing plan.
personalization problem
One key benefit of personalizing messages is that it recognizes the customers as individuals. By marketing one way to prospects, another way to those that have already purchased a product and another way to long-term, high-value customers you can make your marketing messages far more compelling and effective. Customers will also appreciate the personal touch, and you’ll stop them driving them away by bombarding them with messages which aren’t relevant to them.
A second key benefit of personalizing messages via a customer lifecycle model is that they can align with the point in the lifecycle that the potential customer is currently in. Marketing messages from the brand which recognize where the customers are in their individual lifecycles and thus can tailor messages much more effectively. Taking a SaaS business as an example, it’s no good asking someone who has just signed up to a mailing list to find out more to buy your ultra-premium business level product straight away, and similarly its probably not worth trying to push customers that have shown interest in the high level business product towards your free basic trial option.
Email Marketing
Customer lifecycle marketing applies to all areas of marketing, but it is particularly important to consider email marketing, because email offers a unique ability to contact your customers at given moments with personalized messages.
When done correctly, personalized email messages combine all kinds of data to deliver mails which are extremely relevant and useful to the customer. Below is an example of a personalized email right done right.
The personalised email marketing message
It’s important to consider how you can optimize your email messaging at certain key touchpoints across the customer journey, and therefore taking a step back and looking the whole customer journey is a must. For more information on applying customer lifecycle marketing techniques to your email marketing campaigns, check out our new guide.
Applying lifecycle-thinking to social media marketing
Social media are one of the most powerful digital marketing channels since they can be applied through the customer lifecycle with these aims:
Reach: Organic and paid social updates to create awareness including through lookalike targeting
Act: Paid social options to generate leads
Convert: Retargeting options at an individual level to increase conversion
Engage: Customer communications through organic updates, retargeting and uploading customer lists to reach known customers
This lifecycle visual summarizes the options for using paid and organic social across RACE.
Like the other visuals in the post, it can be used for a simple ‘gap analysis’ in a workshop to review how you are using social media. It helps prove how a combination of paid and organic social are needed to gain the best coverage across the lifecycle.
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