is Lifecycle Marketing? Strategies & Best Practices //

Each business is unique. Marketers must delight customers and prospects at every stage of the customer journey with targeted marketing strategies to ensure profitability and prosperity.

The lifecycle marketing concept is well-known in the eCommerce industry, particularly in B2B. It aims to understand customer needs at each stage to achieve business and revenue goals.

This guide will teach you how to use customer lifecycle principles to build strong, lasting relationships with customers and prospects that lead to revenue. This guide also includes a section that explains how to use email effectively for this purpose.

What is Lifecycle Marketing?

Lifecycle marketing is a strategy to nurture prospects and customers at various stages of the customer journey to influence consumers’ behavior. It begins with the attraction/awareness stage and continues until advocacy.

You should use a variety of promotional strategies to succeed in your lifecycle marketing efforts. These include paid ads, social media, and content marketing. Each method should be carefully chosen to make sure it meets the needs of your customers at each stage. They are discussed in detail below.

Lifecycle Marketing Advantages

Why should a company add a lifecycle model to its promotional strategy? Let’s look at some of the best benefits:

• Increased customer life expectancywith practices that encourage long-term customer relationships, from retention to attraction.
• Increase revenue by focusing on attracting new clients and retaining existing customers.
• A better customer experience that emphasizes the buyer’s needs at every stage of the customer journey.
• Improve your brand imagethrough personal marketing strategies at every stage of your lifecycle.

Let’s now get to the heart of the guide: the marketing strategy and tactics that marketing teams should focus on to succeed.

Lifecycle Marketing Strategy and Tactics

Based on the buyer’s journey, every business can decide its lifecycle marketing strategy. These stages can be used as a guideline, and include tactics that will help businesses thrive in each phase, especially for B2B.

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1. Awareness

Prospective customers will first come in contact with a brand when they are searching for products or services. This stage is where they look for educational content that will help them solve their problems.

These are some marketing strategies that will allow you to nurture your audience during the awareness stage.

• Blog posts and articles
• 
  SEO
  
• Infographics
• Paid ads
• Video tutorials

To nurture newbies in this area, we created the Email Marketing 101 video at Moosend.

Visitors aren’t usually ready to buy yet during this phase. It’s better to avoid using aggressive marketing techniques and to show your authority in the field so that consumers can trust you.

2. Interest

This stage is when consumers begin to interact more with you and your competitors in order to find the best choice for them. You should provide them with more detailed information about your products/solutions, emphasizing their advantages, such as:

• Webinars
• Blog posts
• Email campaigns
• Advertisements targeted
• Testimonials from customers
• Case studies

Here is an email campaign from the health brand , with customer testimonials.

3. Desire

After the consumers have considered their options and needs, they can move forward to buy and enter the sales channel. To convert these customers and make them valuable customers, you will need to use more urgent strategies. These are some ways to make this happen:

• Personalized emails
• Demos
• Chat live
• Video tutorials
• Trials are free

Ultimate Meal Plans placed their free trial buttons in prominent locations on their website in order to attract repeat visitors and convert them.

4. Take Action

It was finally possible! You were trusted by the website visitor who made a purchase. You now need to make sure they are happy with the purchase and show them around. These are some tips to help customers engage in this phase.

• Support/Live Chat
• Video tutorials/Academy
• Shipping confirmation
• SMS
• Emails for onboarding

Take a look at this incredible introductory campaign from Trello to new users.

5. Loyalty

Customer retention costs five times more than customer acquisition. It’s therefore wise to invest in loyalty programs to retain loyal customers. You must give customers the right incentives via various marketing channels to encourage repeat purchases, and make them ambassadors.

Here are some things you can do on this stage.

• Referral campaigns
• Cross-sell and upsell campaigns
• Events/Webinars
• Surveys
• Winback emails
• Reward system

Body Shop, for instance, has a smart point system that offers customers regular discounts for loyal customers.

Additional B2B Marketing Strategy

B2B companies with long customer journeys may use a different framework to classify prospects and guide them through the funnel. Here’s a quick description:

1. Visitor A visitor who has visited your site at least once, but has not provided contact information.
2. Lead:People that have provided their contact information to you, e.g. through a landing page, or pop-up signup forms.
3. Marketing Qualified Leader (MQL: A lead that is relevant to your target audience and a good fit with your brand.
4. Sales Qualified Leader (SQL: A prospect who shows great interest in your brand, interacts with high-converting assets, e.g. books a demo .
5. Opportunities: A customer has expressed interest in purchasing your product/service to your sales team or account team.
6. Customer: A customer who has made their first purchase and is now a member of your customer base.
7. A loyal customer who recommends your brand to their family and friends.

For small businesses that have shorter journeys, this categorization might be too restrictive. They may benefit from a simplified approach based on available resources.

Lifecycle Email Marketing Campaign Examples for Each Stage

Lifecycle marketing campaigns can come in many forms, as you may have noticed. Yet, emails are a simple tool that will benefit all brands, regardless of their industry or size.

A multitude of email marketing tools such as MailChimp or Moosend can be used to help you create customer-lifecycle marketing campaigns that meet different pricing and business needs. Marketing automation allows you to set up the relevant triggers and conditions in order to nurture your audience with relevant and timely emails.

Let’s look at some examples of top email campaigns for various stages.

1. Awareness – Moosend Monthly Content Newsletter

To attract more attention, send an email campaign to educate top-of the-funnel users. Inform them about important topics within your niche market.

Subject Line: Happy New Content

2. Interest – Windsor & Newton Nurturing Email campaign

You can nurture your leads by creating a campaign that includes reviews and testimonials. This will highlight how others have used your products/services.

Subject line: See what these illustrators created using our Fineliners

3. Desire – June Oven Demo Email Invitation

If you have had positive interactions with prospects and they are showing real interest in your brand, it is time to send them an email inviting them to one of your demos.

Subject line: Your place or ours? Book a June Demo

4. Action – Framer’s Onboarding Email Campaign

Customers who are new to your services or products often need guidance. Onboarding emails are a great way to improve customer service and encourage retention.

Subject line: Don’t leave the blank canvas unattended — get creative with a template

5. Loyalty – Cometeer’s Email Referral campaigns

This phase can be sent in many ways, including referral requests and rewards for top customers. This is a referral email campaign that will increase your customer base via word of mouth marketing.

Subject line: Celebrate International Coffee Day by getting a deal

Lifecycle Marketing Best practices

Let’s now look at some ways to make your lifecycle marketing strategy stand out.

1. Create a Customer Persona

When creating your lifecycle marketing strategy, the first thing you should do is create a buyer profile. It’s the persona of your ideal customer. Marketers create it to help them understand their customers in depth, address their needs, and solve their problems at every stage of their customer journey.

The ideal customer profile includes important information such as demographics and psychographics. It is also helpful to imagine a day in the customer’s life, to get into their routines and habits.

To make it even simpler, create customer journey maps and share it with all customers-facing roles within your company to get them on the exact same page.

2. Set Smart Goals

Each stage of the lifecycle marketing journey has its own goals. However, to be able to track your metrics effectively, you need to establish specific goals that can be revisited from time to time. You’ll be able to identify what works and what doesn’t, which will help you improve your strategy for the future.

The SMART goal framework is a tool that helps you set realistic goals. It stands for Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic and Timely. This framework allows marketers to set higher-quality goals to nurture prospects, customers, and employees.

3. Make sure you have the right tools on board

How do you track the progress of leads through the funnel so that you can provide the best content and follow ups to convert them? Salesforce Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) is essential to this process. It can be combined with Google Analytics tools to access data analytics and reports in real time.

You will also need an email platform that offers top-notch features such as ready-made templates, reporting/analytics, and a way to optimize your lifecycle email marketing strategy.

4. Use Customer Segmentation

Divide your customer base by milestones to simplify your lifecycle marketing efforts. Below are some key categorization criteria:

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Audience segmentation is a way to create highly targeted messages for prospects and customers to increase sales.

The Takeaways

If you want personalized marketing to be successful, it is important to highlight the customer lifecycle stages. This will ensure that your marketing addresses the customer’s real needs and wants. Start mapping your ideal buyer profile and buyer’s journey to plan your next steps to satisfy prospects and customers as soon as possible.

Moosend has everything you need to create a lifecycle email marketing strategy that is effective, including automation features and integrations with CRM. Get a free trial today to get started

Lifecycle Marketing FAQs

Let’s address some commonly asked questions about lifecycle marketing.

1. What are the pillars for lifecycle marketing?

Lifecycle marketing is built on the following pillars: 1) Awareness, 2) Interest and 3) Desire. 4) Action and 5) Loyalty. However, every business can adapt these pillars to suit their specific needs.

2. What is CRM and Lifecycle Marketing?

Customer lifecycle marketing refers to the strategies businesses use to increase their revenue. CRM, on the other hand, is the software that manages them.

3. What is a lifecycle marketing manager?

Lifecycle marketing managers plan the customer journey and design promotional strategies for each stage. They also monitor the progress.

4. Why is lifecycle marketing so important?

It allows businesses to personalize their customer’s experience at every stage of the buyer’s journey, and increase sales and retention with highly targeted messages.

The post What is Lifecycle Marketing? Email Marketing Automation Platform for Thriving Businesses: Strategies & Best Practices [2023] was first published on Email Marketing Automation Platform.

Author: Alexandra Marinaki