Driving Value with Lifecycle Marketing

Many enterprise leaders understand that they have to focus beyond one-time transactions. For business success, they need to establish long-term, loyal relationships with their customers. But it’s too often the case that critical teams are not involved across your entire customer lifecycle.

Marketing all too often is focused (by sheer necessity) on the lead stages in the marketing funnel. Everything after gets handed over to customer service or account managers. But if your marketing team is not focusing on full lifecycle marketing, how many opportunities are you leaving on the table?

What is lifecycle marketing?

Lifecycle marketing is a strategy that organizations can use to meet customer needs, enhance their engagement, and foster more loyal and long-term relationships. A good full lifecycle approach means really understanding your customers—from where they are in their journey to who they are and how they act. Effective lifecycle management requires a good amount of data and analysis as well as pretty continuous optimization.

Understandably, we meet with many enterprises who are more focused on traditional marketing tactics aimed at bringing in new customers, upselling to existing customers, or providing backup support to customer service and account managers. But a focused lifecycle marketing strategy can deliver substantial additional engagement with existing customers.

Rethinking Your Existing Customer Journey

Most marketing teams strongly prioritize the awareness, consideration, and conversion stages of the marketing funnel (you might use a slightly different model: e.g., interest, evaluation, intent), but let’s focus on those stages marketing teams are usually less involved in that bring your funnel into a full lifecycle.

Onboarding

Depending on what type of company you are and what product or services you offer, this might not be an essential stage. But if there is any setup, tutorials, or communication that must happen for customers (either first-time or reengaged customers)—this is a crucial moment. The right information and easy-to-understand materials can establish trust and set expectations.

First impressions are critical, and this is your first interaction with them as customers and partners not leads. Think about what they need to know and how best to communicate it (video tutorials? Interactive setup guide? In-person meetings? Metrics to consider at this point include offering adoption rate and customer satisfaction. Having marketing involved here helps ensure a seamless brand experience, consistent value propositions, and more polished deliverables.

Retention and Support

Clients are onboarded, they’re using your product or service... now is the time where many organizations start letting relationships stagnate or lump everybody back into one bucket to send out basic marketing and sales information. We see marketing teams heavily involved in selling new or additional products to existing customers, but it’s less common to see marketing involved in traditional customer service functions and customer relationship building.

Good retention and support mean really understanding your customer and tailoring communication to their needs. Personalized product recommendations, tutorials, and thoughtful support emails are smart materials to consider. Do not let your relationship boil down to only sales pitches. Customer retention rate and repeat purchase rate are important metrics to keep your eye on.

Loyalty and Advocacy

You have the opportunity to foster a deeper relationship with some customers. Your best customers could become brand ambassadors and advocates. These are customers who are emotionally-connected to your brand and partnership, and who are willing to share it loudly and proudly. Some organizations draw a distinction between advocates and ambassadors where brand ambassadors are customers whose brand position is official and recognized and brand advocates are unofficial, organic fans.

Building and supporting this stage can include customer spotlights, special access to products or features, exclusive offers, loyalty programs, personalized communication, and user-generated content opportunities. Watch your net promoter score, referral data, and user-generated content at this stage.

Reactivation

This is another stage that often gets over-looked or under-emphasized. Some customers will drift away. It will happen even with the best strategy and tactics in place. But it’s never too late to build the relationship again. Retargeting campaigns, special offers, and tailored support campaigns can be critical for reactivation.

Don’t kick these customers back to the start of the lifecycle. They’re not first-time customers, and their history matters. Make sure you measure reactivation rate and watch feedback responses at this stage.

Part Two and Getting Started

In the second piece in our lifecycle marketing series, we’ll discuss common mistakes organizations make in their lifecycle funnels.

In the meantime, do you have any questions about how to expand marketing’s role in these lifecycle stages? Or are you interested in building a comprehensive, actionable lifecycle marketing strategy? We can help. Cimarron Winter helps mid-sized and enterprise businesses build smarter lifecycle marketing strategies and manage campaigns relating to the various lifecycle stages.