Lifecycle Marketing Stages: The Customer Lifecycle Journey

Lifecycle marketing centers around targeting each aspect of the buyer’s journey (or customer lifecycle) with incentives and support. Each stage of the customer lifecycle calls for different marketing strategies—in other words, existing customers need different incentives than potential ones. By analyzing what customers need at each stage, you can create a steady marketing strategy that consistently brings in new customers, retains current ones, and incentivizes organic outreach by your most loyal devotees.

Every touchpoint in the customer lifecycle is just as important as the one before it. Use these five customer lifecycle stages as a basic template for understanding the benefits of lifecycle marketing:

1. 1. Building awareness: At the very start of the lifecycle, you need to bring potential customers into the awareness stage with your company. This means using anything from social media marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) to webinars and white papers to generate interest with consumers. The primary objective of this stage is simply to get on to a potential customer’s radar.
2. 2. Engaging the customer: After you create brand awareness, it’s time to follow up with engagement campaigns to facilitate customer acquisition. Research which marketing messages and mediums work best at drawing in and satiating the curiosity of your target audience. Make sure to include a call to action (CTA) to move your engaged customers toward making a purchase.
3. 3. Finalizing purchases: In this phase, the goal is to turn a potential customer into a new customer. For an e-commerce company, that means selling a product from your online store; for an app, it might mean getting someone to download what you’ve put online. Similarly, for a brick-and-mortar shop, the goal would be to get a customer to move from seeing advertising to entering and shopping at one of your locations.
4. 4. Fostering loyalty: Post-purchase, do your best to turn your new customers into loyal customers. Customer lifetime value is generated far more through repeat purchases than onetime deals. Use loyalty programs and useful notifications to foster customer retention. These repeat customers will likely become the lifeblood of your business.
5. 5. Incentivizing referrals: There’s no end to the customer journey in this methodology, as the ultimate goal is for your marketing to encourage brand advocacy. Once someone proves to be a particularly loyal consumer, use incentives to encourage them to spread the word about your business. Word-of-mouth testimonials will create awareness for new potential customers, and then they can begin their own lifecycles with your company.

Effective lifecycle marketing means cultivating customer relationships for a lifetime. Keep these five tips in mind when reaching for that goal:

1. 1. Decide how to track success. Sit down with the rest of your team to decide which marketing metrics you’ll use to track your success at each phase of the customer lifecycle. Keep a steady eye on how you’re performing in each individual marketing channel (such as social media, email marketing, and so on). Measure things like customer churn to identify room for improvement as well as things like conversion rate to see how well you’re succeeding. Use each instance of success or failure as a case study for future strategization.
2. 2. Define a target audience. There are several customer lifecycle marketing strategies, but all of them start with defining a specific and ideal customer base. When you know the personas you want to attract to your company, targeting and retargeting them becomes markedly easier. You can also use client relationship management (CRM) software to keep track of your interactions with customers.
3. 3. Provide incentives at each stage. At each phase of your lifecycle marketing campaigns, provide your users with incentives. This is the key to both engagement and reengagement. Give your customers reasons to focus on your company, make a purchase, and become loyal brand ambassadors.
4. 4. Seek out customer data. Customer engagement relies on knowing who the customers you hope to engage are in the first place. Learn as much as you can through online data about the demographics you hope to target. This will help you finesse all your content marketing to appeal to them as much as possible. Use digital marketing automation software to help you in this task, but remember to ensure all your advertising material has a personalized and human touch.
5. 5. Start new initiatives regularly. Embark on new marketing efforts as a matter of course. New discounts, perks, and incentives of other varieties bring in new consumers, foster customer loyalty, and encourage people to become brand advocates. At the same time, optimize your best current initiatives even as you start to develop new ones.

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