What is Lifecycle Marketing? How To Implement Your Lifecycle Marketing Strategy in 2023

Lifecycle marketing is a term heavily popularized by InfusionSoft that describes how companies transform their sales and marketing activities to expand their business.

With it, you can maximize your efforts to attract and convert customers, increase your customer lifetime value by reselling to them and generate referrals to grow your company.

In this post, we’re going to describe in detail the stages of lifecycle marketing and how you can implement them for your business.

What is lifecycle marketing? 

 Lifecycle marketing is one of the techniques of outbound marketing, usually overlooked and less emphasized. Customer lifecycle marketing refers to all the activities, interactions, and transactions that an individual makes with your brand in the time they interact with your brand—predicated on the understanding that diverse marketing ideas and tactics suit clients at varying stages of their interaction with a brand.

The client's lifecycle journey is dynamic that can often be more complex than it appears in many simplistic depictions. A lifecycle marketing strategy is what keeps the game going. The more you know about your customer, the more effective your strategy will be vice versa. 

There tend to be multiple stages of a customer lifecycle process that may seem hectic to practice but can give you guaranteed results, eventually resulting in increased sales.

The customer lifecycle phases need to be broadened and comprehended to intersect and impact one another in the multi-touch eCommerce environment of today. Before reinvesting in marketing procedures for customer acquisition, placing infrastructure into line, or even developing a customer lifecycle plan, it is essential to comprehend how each consumer interacts with your brand, whether a loyal existing customer or a new customer.

Let's dig deep into some of the benefits of customer lifecycle marketing that can eventually bring in some results and numbers. 

What are the benefits of customer lifecycle marketing?

Customer lifecycle marketing is a crucial tool that enables you to observe and track a customer's journey and steer them toward brand advocacy. Within its customer lifecycle, marketing holds the potential to align your customer’s overall journey with your marketing strategy. 

Hence, the next time customer comes in to shop, they should feel like they never went away from the brand or, say, they feel homely surfing and shopping throughout their visit. If you work in marketing or business development or want to advance your career in one of these fields, learning about lifecycle marketing might be beneficial. brands. Customer lifecycle marketing holds the following significant benefits: 

With the aid of this strategy, prospects may be turned into paying clients before becoming loyal clients who promote the business and its goods. It provides clients with various marketing and communication materials according to the stage of the customer's lifecycle. The first benefit of a customer life cycle analysis is that it enables you to comprehend how customers engage with your brand at every step of the customer journey.

You can pinpoint If you work in marketing or business development or want to advance your audience's consumer engagement and tweak them to ensure a better experience once you have this data. You may customize client interactions at each level to ensure they have all they require to proceed.

A decreased churn rate and more satisfaction are the results of personalization. Compelling marketing and customer service may help firms connect with clients before and after a transaction.

Which stages they invest the most in may also depend on this. It could also entail using re-engagement strategies to win over former clients. Additionally, the company responds to criticism and bases future product and marketing strategy development on it. As it enables companies to successfully appeal to clients at all phases of the customer lifecycle, it is frequently a valuable approach.

Increased marketing efficiency may increase revenue, attract and reward new consumers, and keep hold of current ones. The lifetime worth of a customer to the firm also improves with effective marketing throughout the customer lifecycle.

The customer's lifetime value is the sum of their value to the business throughout their relationship. Customers' worth to the company may be increased by using this form of marketing to create lasting connections with them and keep them throughout the entire process.

Also, this marketing technique can improve conversion rates because it targets clients in a way that corresponds explicitly to their tastes and circumstances.

What are customers' lifecycle stages?

Throughout the interaction with your brand. A customer undergoes multiple lifecycle stages, each experiencing a connection that lately converts into loyalty and advocacy of your brand. Below described are the few stages of a customer’s lifecycle. 

1. Awareness

The awareness stage is crucial since it marks the beginning of the client journey. Customers will be aware of your brand during the awareness phase. Your job is to connect with prospective clients and provide them with data that can expedite the purchasing process. 

Launching personalized email campaigns and marketing messages for each of your customers separately, e.g., welcome emails for your new customers, value-added relevant and timely messaging, and promos for your already existing customers, or it can be special discounts for the loyal customers that keep on shopping from your brand and that too, spread awareness among the others. 

Remember, that's your duty to engage with the customers to retain them and give them better knowledge about your brand, specifically by identifying what they want to hear from you. 

Create as much awareness as possible so that at least each potential customer knows about your brand. That’s the very first step to customer acquisition. Consumers tend to shop more from brands they have already heard about from friends and family. 

2. Desire

The second stage in the customer life cycle is desire. Have you ever shopped or purchased a product just wandering around the market or just roaming around and scrolling down online stores? Most people tend to buy a product they’ve heard about multiple times, and now, there’s a desire to buy the product because everyone else around is shopping that product, and the potential customer wandering around pages has seen an ad of your brand on each of the pages he/she visited. Create content that can engage so well that it creates desire.

You can launch an email marketing campaign and nurture the lead by creating desire. Desire always leads to action, so the first step can be designing exceptionally crafted emails to draw the customer's attention toward your product. Once you’ve emailed your potential customers some information about your product, you need to launch email campaigns now that contain engaging content, discount offers, and promo codes so a desire arises. Engaging creatives play a vital role in creating a desire. You can show your potential customers the benefits of your product by sending them personalized emails. You can ask for suggestions from your customers regarding your product, so they feel connected with the brand. This way, email marketing can help you acquire the maximum number of customers from your potential list. 

3. Intent

Now that you’ve created awareness and there is a desire to buy your product among the mass, there comes the stage when the customer is ready to make a transaction with your brand and is just a step away. Here, all you need to do is make some extra effort that can convert this potential customer into a loyal customer who lately becomes an advocate for your brand.

 E.g., you can email campaigns and target those sets of customers who are almost ready to buy your product if you send them emails that contain special offers for them or create any value for them. This will create room for your brand in the customer’s head, and the next time they plan to shop for the same product, they will return to you. 

4. Action

The goal of your email marketing strategy is to draw in more customers. You need to show your potential customers the offers they are expecting from you. They are in search of value for the money they are going to spend. 

Your emails, crafted with value for the customers, can help your customers, who are on the last stage of their customer lifecycle journey, perform an action and make a transaction. E.g., if a potential customer was shopping and suddenly left the page, you can target them with emails that have value for them, especially what others are not offering. The correct email at the very right moment is the secret spell of email marketing. 

5. Loyalty

Now that you have finally made a transaction with the customer, you’ve received bucks from the customers who matter the most. Be proactive to justify how much money you’ve made the customer spend. Bring in value for them, offer them special discounts, and proactive re-engagement email campaigns can help you retain the customers that have already purchased from you.

Loyalty to the brand is what brings in the numbers for the company.  Loyal customers who know your product's quality and the post-purchase support they get from you will spread the word in their family, friend, and social circles. 

The complete customer lifecycle journey does not end on the purchase but starts at the very moment. Bring in loyal customers for your brand by closely monitoring the metrics and providing your potential customers with sheer value. 

How to build a customer lifecycle marketing strategy: 

A novel customer lifecycle strategy always pays off if you know your target market. Existing customers often have this understanding, but more is needed to guarantee that this will also pertain to potential new customers. Customer lifecycle marketing is a sensible strategy and resolution to this problem because of this. 

Using a strategy centered on customer success ensures that the consumer knows how to use services and solutions to overcome obstacles, maximize capital, and achieve business goals more efficiently.

Let’s dive into building a successful lifecycle marketing strategy. 

1. Bring in new traffic to the site

The first stepping stone is to bring potential customers to the website. The more traffic is coming onto your website, the more potential customers and, ultimately, more sales. Applying various marketing methods, such as search engine optimization, paid ads, and email marketing campaigns can help you bring in a lot of new visitors to your website. 

Getting your blog pages ranked on the first pages of the search results is the best method to bring new traffic to the site. Moreover, you can use those blogs in the awareness and desire stages as well by sending emails with the goal of nurturing leads.

You can also redirect traffic to your website by optimizing your landing pages. Write high-quality and valuable content to attract page traffic and then redirect it to your website using a call-to-action button. 

E.g., you can run paid ads on Google and different search engines that can draw more attention to your brand. You can also create an email list of the people that you think are your potential customers. Send them value-added emails that force the customers to shop at least once from your store. Once they are on your website, that's sheerly your responsibility to pitch them offers that you think can help them make a decision and perform a transaction. 

2. Entice them to make a purchase

As we discussed earlier, you need more than generating and diverting traffic to your website alone to bring in results for you. Launch campaigns of more excellent value to the customer, create desire, and compel the potential buyer to purchase. Create hype about your product so there’s not only a desire but a wish to purchase the product. 

Here's how Peloton creates hype about it's products:

You and your marketing campaigns will entice the customers to make a purchase. You need to identify the problems your potential customers face while shopping from different brands, address them, and discuss them to differentiate yourself from the competitors. 

3. Upselling to increase purchase frequency and average order value

If you are making and implementing a strategy to bring in new customers, why can't you bring in new offers that can upsell other products and double the revenue at the same marketing cost? 

Once the potential customer is on the website, he or she wants to buy the product, now, you can show them excitement, or that can cost less and provide more value if they bundle up on products and shop two instead of one. 

In this email, Zoom is upselling its premium annual plan.

In the example above, the customer receives emails containing bundled-up promotions that can save your customers a couple of bucks and provide maximum value. That’s how you can upsell your products at the exact marketing cost, simultaneously providing value to the customers.   

4. Show your valuable customers how important they are

Usually, customers are looking for value for their money. Besides giving them only the product they want, why not offer them more value by making them feel important to your brand? They are essential to your brand, but that is what only you know. Let the customer feel this as well. 

Let them contribute to the ecosystem you’ve created so they can feel important, and there’s a two-way contribution to the brand identity. That’s how a successful customer lifecycle strategy operates. 

5. Bring back lapsed customers.

Your customer lifecycle includes more than just sequential stages. It is a dynamic–anti mechanism alternatively. Your customer lifecycle marketing strategy should have room for customers who leave you without. Keep a trace of those customers. 

Using surveys and feedback emails, find out why they left the shopping process and the issues they faced. By knowing this, you can easily trace the customer’s problems throughout the journey, engage the relapsed customers and offer them solutions and value they were looking for but didn't get. 

Here are two survey and feedback examples from HotelTonight and Shopify:

How can you apply your lifecycle marketing strategy?

Understanding the lifetime value of customers you deliver, particularly to recurring clients, is necessary to develop a customer lifecycle marketing plan based on these statistics.  Such marketing tactics must be used to promote client acquisition, stimulate repeat business, and foster consumer loyalty.

1. Social media marketing

Social media platforms are a great way to fully implement your customer lifecycle strategy. You need to define your strategy's objectives and goals and map out your potential customers' demographics, controlling the number and frequency of the prospects you want to reach and closely monitoring the amount of money you spend on your marketing campaigns. 

2. Email marketing

Email marketing can greatly influence the number of leads daily and help you grow your potential customers. By defining a solid email marketing strategy, you can show your potential customers the news, offers, and information they want to hear. 

Craft templates that don't make your customer feel like another brand sending out marketing emails. Be standing in the customer’s shoes, think of what they want to hear from you, and that’s where your strategy wins. Your designed offer for your customers should win their hearts and entice them to purchase anyway. 

3. Ad campaigns

Customized Ad campaigns help you generate a more significant ROI. One benefit that ads come with is that you can reach out to the maximum number of customers in one go, and that too with a limited budget. 

Compared to sending out emails to every customer or even sending out bulk emails, you can reach out to a limited number of customers at customers in more cost. Whereas if you place ads on any search engine or social media, it helps create awareness among more people that lately converts into the customers that transact. 

You can show ads to each of your customers at different stages of the customer lifecycle journey depending upon what to show them and deliver them the value they deserve. 

Implement your customer lifecycle marketing strategy with Mailmunch!

Customer success is the only element of your marketing strategy that climbs you up the success ladder. Ensure your potential customers have the best experience while investing in your services and products. Implementing a customer lifecycle marketing strategy correctly is as important as creating one. You may have an excellent lifecycle marketing model, but you must apply it correctly. 

Ensure you implement your customer lifecycle marketing strategy and stay vigilant after implementing it. This will save you effort and can optimize your marketing budget, eventually boosting your sales! And if you want a reliable tool like Mailmunch can help with your email marketing efforts within the customer lifecycle marketing campaigns.