Customer lifecycle marketing

What is customer lifecycle marketing?

Customer lifecycle marketing is a data-driven, cross-channel strategy that targets marketing content and offers to prospects and customers based on their precise location in the customer lifecycle to move them through the sales and marketing funnels more efficiently. The goal of customer lifecycle marketing is to attract new customers, keep them engaged with a brand’s products and services long-term, and, ideally, turn them into loyal advocates for the brand who then help to convert other potential customers.

Successful customer lifecycle marketing requires a thorough understanding of who a customer is, a history of their previous brand interactions, knowledge of their needs and pain points, and even ideas about their future preferences. This is also known as a 360-degree customer view, and it enables more effective marketing campaigns. 

Customer lifecycle vs customer journey

Although the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, there is a subtle distinction between “customer lifecycle” and “customer journey.”; The difference is one of perspective. The customer journey describes a customer’s experience with every brand touchpoint from the customer’s point of view. In contrast, the customer lifecycle is a higher-level examination of the same relationship from the marketer’s perspective. 

The stages of a customer journey — awareness, consideration, decision, adoption, and advocacy — are descriptions of the customer’s activities or thought processes, while the customer lifecycle stages (listed below) describe the same “journey” in business terms. In general, the customer journey can be used most successfully in marketing efforts to improve customer experience and brand satisfaction, while the customer lifecycle is key to converting prospects to customers and retaining customers over time.

A customer journey can be particular to a type of customer — or even one specific customer — and the customer lifecycle is a general description of any customer’s relationship with a brand. Although the customer journey and customer lifecycle overlap, there isn’t necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between the stages in each.

What are the stages of the customer lifecycle?

There are six distinct customer lifecycle stages:

1. Awareness (also referred to as “reach”)

2. Engagement (also referred to as “acquisition” or “evaluation”)

3. Conversion

4. Retention

5. Advocacy

6. Churn or dormancy

‍1. Awareness/reach

The awareness stage sits at the very top of the marketing funnel, where marketers build brand awareness through campaigns designed to reach new prospects and attract new website traffic — or foot traffic to a brick-and-mortar store. Potential customers in the awareness stage often know they need a product or service to address a specific pain point. However, they are either unaware of specific brands that offer solutions or unsure about what distinguishes one brand or product from another.

Common marketing activities at this stage include:

• SEO-related tactics such as on-page website optimization and short-form, keyword-driven blog posts geared toward capturing organic search traffic and siphoning traffic away from competitors’ sites.

• Advertising that creates a positive first impression of the brand on websites, social media platforms, podcasts, and radio or TV broadcasts popular with the target audience or billboards in locations frequented by them.

• Partnering with influencers or cross-promoting content with a partner that has an overlapping target audience.

2. Engagement/acquisition/evaluation

A successful awareness campaign leads to brand engagement: Prospects discover the brand’s products and services, and express interest — by visiting the website, subscribing to an email list, following social media channels, or browsing the shelves at a store. At this stage, marketers help prospects make an informed decision with content and offers highlighting features, benefits, and cost-effectiveness. 

Common content marketing strategies at this stage include:

• Short, easy-to-understand product demos that address specific pain points and underscore key value propositions. 

• Long-form content such as best practices or buyer’s guides, ebooks, research-based white papers, and data-driven industry reports that highlight the need for the product and situate it as an industry leader.

• Case studies that provide real-world proof of the product’s effectiveness.

• In-store promotions like free samples.

3. Conversion

To move a prospect from evaluation to purchase, marketers make the purchasing experience as frictionless as possible and provide content that assures the customer they’re making a good decision. 

Common conversion strategies include:

• Optimized landing pages that offer clear, competitive pricing and make it easy to download a trial or freemium version of the product, access a discount offer, or make an initial purchase.

• Providing customer testimonials that speak to the quality of the product and the brand’s customer service.

• Email campaigns that reiterate special offers, reinforce the product’s value propositions, or remind shoppers on e-commerce sites about items that remain unpurchased in their carts.

4. Retention

Many marketers know it costs less to keep an existing customer than to capture a new one. Satisfied customers are often repeat customers, and customer retention is as important as lead generation. Successful customer retention campaigns can increase revenue and lifetime customer value by shaping a positive customer experience. 

Strategies for the retention stage of the customer lifecycle include:

• Making the product easy to use by providing easy-to-follow setup or onboarding materials and user guides, excellent customer service, FAQ pages, and customer-led troubleshooting forums. 

• Discount offers for additional purchases and new product announcements.

• Email campaigns for upsells or cross-sells of complementary products.

5. Advocacy

Long-term customers are not only a reliable revenue stream: They can become brand ambassadors, references, and a source for case studies and testimonials. Successful retention strategies that lead to positive experiences can turn customers into advocates.

Advocacy and nurture tactics can include:

• Product review requests and soliciting input on new product development.

• Rewards, discounts, and customer loyalty programs for referrals or purchases.

• Incentives for sharing testimonials on social media or participating in case studies.

• Raising the industry visibility of loyal customers through webinars, seminars, and events.

6. Churn/dormancy

Ideally, every customer’s lifecycle would settle into the advocacy phase in perpetuity, but sometimes regular customers stop purchasing a product or abandon it for a competing product.

Marketers use several tactics to turn former customers into return customers, including:

• Winback campaigns featuring offers targeted against other brands.

• Re-engagement campaigns that combine the tactics used at the awareness and retention stages.

Benefits of customer lifecycle marketing

To grow, a business must attract new customers while retaining existing ones. Customer lifecycle marketing strategies address these two priorities simultaneously by accounting for the needs and behaviors of customers and prospects at every stage of the buyer journey. It is usually less expensive to retain customers than to acquire new ones, and lifecycle marketing offsets customer acquisition costs by reducing churn and leveraging paying customers as brand advocates. 

Customer lifecycle marketing also boosts sales by keeping customers engaged, turning first-time buyers into repeat business, and increasing the value of each purchase and customer lifetime value. Customer lifecycle marketing campaigns that harmonize messaging and branding across all touchpoints can also ensure a cohesive brand experience, boost brand visibility, and polish brand reputation through word-of-mouth advertising.

Customer lifecycle marketing strategy

Customers interact with brands across a variety of channels, and there may be as many different customer journeys as there are customers and prospects. Aligning customer lifecycle marketing tactics to an omnichannel marketing strategy is a major challenge for marketers. This alignment requires demographic information about each customer, data on their previous brand interactions, and accurate predictions about evolving customer preferences. 

Without these insights, it’s difficult to target personalized marketing messages and offers accurately, and tactics that miss their mark may even detract from a customer’s relationship with a brand. But even when that data exists, it is often fragmented, siloed across various teams, platforms in the martech stack, or analytics tools that track the performance of each marketing channel separately. While omnichannel marketing strategies are largely successful because they meet customers and prospects on their preferred turf, they pose their own challenges, as different channels require different strategies. But customers expect a seamless experience with a brand across all of them.

A data warehouse can form the backbone of a successful customer lifecycle marketing strategy. Funneling all customer data into a central location updated in real time forms the basis of the “customer 360” holy grail, providing the data needed to orchestrate personalized experiences and effective cross-channel marketing campaigns.

Layering an AI-enabled composable customer data platform on top of an enterprise data warehouse makes it possible to rapidly assemble audiences for complex, cross-channel campaigns, measure their effectiveness in real time, and optimize them continuously to improve customer engagement and loyalty.