Introduction to customer lifecycle marketing

Introduction to customer lifecycle marketing

In the modern world that marketers now operate in, attention has become the prized currency. The battle for the finite attention of audiences has never been more difficult. There are more players making more noise and audiences are acutely aware that they are essentially “paying for things” with their time and attention and that means they are more reluctant than ever to hand it over to brands.

It’s in this environment that relevance has risen to be not just an important thing but the only thing. Relevance is the difference between grabbing and holding the attention of an audience or being ignored and blacklisted by the same. It’s the permission to keep a brand conversation going and the key to building trust in marketing relationships.

Customer Lifecycle Marketing (let’s call it Lifecycle Marketing from here for convenience) is the model that, in my humble opinion at least, is best placed to deliver relevance when you’re talking database marketing. It’s the cornerstone of my consultancy practice Advocate Marketing and a perplexingly overlooked weapon in the battle for attention.

One theory I have is that Lifecycle Marketing isn’t widely understood so its benefits remain somewhat clouded. In this blog post, I aim to give a quick introduction to lifecycle marketing, the model I have adopted for my clients, and the benefits you can expect from it. That should lay a platform for future blogs where we dig down into a bit more of the detail.

What is lifecycle marketing?

Lifecycle marketing is a strategic marketing framework designed to deliver customers with the experiences and content they need to graduate from their current customer lifecycle stage to the next. Ideally, it captures a humble social follow or email address and converts that into a customer, then onboards that customer so they have success right away, retains and grows them through repurchase, and finally identifies the best customers as advocates, giving them the tools to sell and recruit others like them.

The possible contact types

Unknown

Anonymous traffic to your website, social pages, etc. Can be cookied and have their experience somewhat customised as a result but no direct contact details are available.

Lifecycle marketing goal: Make a connection and identify.

Prospect

Have supplied contact details to the database, typically and email via an online form. May also be a follower in social media.

Lifecycle marketing goal: Convert to customer.

Customer

Have made a purchase for the first or repeat time. Contact profile has a richness of data with more comprehensive contact details and purchase data available.

Lifecycle marketing goal: Retain and grow.

Advocate

Happy customer willing to promote the brand and recruit new customers. Will have a detailed profile and very responsive to contact.

Lifecycle marketing goal: Identify as advocate and supply tools for advocacy.

Consider the following typical progression a single contact may experience in a lifecycle marketing program:

1. Enticed by the promise of relevant content, a previously unknown web visitor subscribes via their email address.
2. That prospect is nurtured with customised content and motivated to buy, becoming a customer.
3. That customer receives content and services designed to ensure they get the best out of their purchase, the building blocks of a brand relationship.
4. Later, they are sent content designed to retain them and strengthen their relationship towards loyalty, growing their value where possible through cross-sell and upsell.
5. Now a happy customer, they are now enabled to spread the good word about the brand, which they do willingly and naturally as brand advocates.

What we are trying to maintain is a fair value exchange between contact and brand. As they offer more of their time and attention, the brand must respond with more customised and relevant content. The prospect is offered more value than the unknown, the customer more than the prospect, and the advocate more than all the rest. This is logical because as they progress through the contact types that person is becoming more and more valuable to the brand.

We’ve codified and simplified this process into a four-stage framework below.

Our lifecycle marketing framework

Stage 1 – Acquire

Lifecycle Marketing works best with a constantly refreshing database of new contacts, so we need a plan for how we will keep acquiring them. Once we’ve made a connection we want to nurture that relationship to create opportunities for purchases, converting contacts to customers.

Stage 2 – Onboard

This is the mission-critical stage of lifecycle marketing. It’s here that a mutually beneficial long-term relationship can be forged or destroyed. Content here is designed to get the customer up and running with their purchase as quickly as possible, confident that they will be successful with it. This is also the most attuned to brand messaging the customer will ever be, a huge opportunity.

Stage 3 – Retain

This is where we make our play to embed the customer long-term. Our first priority is retention, we want them to remain happy with the product or service and begin to develop loyalty to the brand. Once we are happy they are retained, we push gently for growth through upsell and/or cross-sell. This is must be deftly executed, we need to respect that these customers have done a lot for us already so we don’t want to push them with a hard sell. If we’ve done our job in the previous stages, however, repeat sales should come as a logical extension of the developing relationship and be somewhat effortless to generate.

Stage 4 – Advocate

We have a customer so happy with the brand that they are telling others about it. These word-of-mouth referrals are the gold dust every business craves and this stage is all about identifying these advocates and enabling them to spread the promote and recruit other great customers. Here we are looking at exclusive content and access to the brand as well as rewards.

In practice

Lifecycle marketing needn’t be a linear process, the relationship between contact and brand can begin at any stage at all. Our model is completely modular as a result, no stage requires the previous to be completed in order to begin. We typically start engagements at the stage where the client has the most need for improvement and work our way through the rest from there, in order of need.

The key is as soon as it begins, lifecycle marketing focuses on progressing the contact to their next stage of development, incrementally adding value to the business bottom line in the process.