Common Lifecycle Marketing Mistakes
In part 1 in our lifecycle marketing series, we look at the basics of lifecycle marketing and how marketing teams can rethink and expand their current funnel by focusing more on later stages in their customer journey—including the onboarding, retention, and advocacy stages.
Now, we’ll examine the most common mistakes we have seen and where organizations can optimize and drive more powerful lifecycle marketing campaigns.
Data and Communication Siloes
As mentioned in part 1, marketing is frequently seen as being pre-sale focused. Above and beyond that, even if an organization includes marketing in post-sale activities, different tools are frequently used across teams. Depending on your tech stack, you might have a marketing automation platform, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, and a customer success platform (CS or CSM).
These divisions of duties and tools leads to divided and inconsistent views of your customer and their activities. Data integration isn’t easy, but it’s crucial for the best lifecycle marketing campaigns and performance. Marketing needs to be considered at all stages of the customer life cycle, and all teams need a unified source of truth about their customers.
Not Listening to Your Customer
We usually see this mistake happen in two different scenarios. The first scenario is that teams focus too much on their brand and their business needs and not enough on the customer’s. This usually means lifecycle marketing ends up being very sales and product oriented. Great long-term lifecycle marketing should include nurturing that goes beyond talking about your brand and your products.
How can your marketing team take a more nuanced approach to post-sale customer needs? Tailoring educational content that helps customers, celebrating customer milestones, sharing insights about important industry trends, proactively asking for feedback and feature needs from your customers… these are just some ideas that all step outside of the sales box and help build trust and loyalty.
The second scenario is a personalization and data problem. Your team knows not to simply rely on transactional product-focused tactics, but either from a lack of data or a lack of time… you’re unable to segment your audience and personalize messaging, assets, and offers. Customers are not one size fits all, and you have to make sure you’re using what you know about your customers, their needs, and their actions to segment and personalize to them as much as possible.
Failure to Adapt
If you’ve built a lifecycle marketing strategy that works, good for you! You’re way ahead of the curve. But it gets very easy to rely on the tried and true, which causes some organizations to stagnate in terms of their activity—from channel, messaging, asset, and offer standpoints. Don’t let yourself stagnate. Customer preferences and industry dynamics are always changing.
We recommend setting aside a healthy budget to test new tactics or even retest old tactics that didn’t work previously. Maybe SMS didn’t work five years ago when you tried it, but your customers have changed and are more open to strategic, smart SMS campaigns now. Maybe you have oversaturated with your existing retargeting display campaigns and need to substantially change with fresh interactive media on a different channel. Test, keep your eyes on performance data, and always try new ideas.
Quick Highlight of Other Mistakes to Avoid
We don’t have the space to talk about all potential pitfalls, but here are a few more common ones to review as you’re thinking through your lifecycle marketing strategy and tactics:
Over-emailing: Emails are great, and segmentation plus automation means we can get deep into emails. But remember… you push too hard and you’ll just force unsubscribes.
Not testing: Don’t ignore what you can learn from focused A/B tests.
Vague KPIs: Set clear metrics that you know are valuable based on your organization and process. Track them diligently and turn insights into optimization.
Are you looking to expand marketing's role across your customer lifecycle, or are you interested in developing a comprehensive, actionable lifecycle marketing strategy? Cimarron Winter can help. We specialize in assisting mid-sized and enterprise businesses build smart lifecycle marketing strategies and effectively manage campaigns across the entire customer journey.