Understanding the customer lifecycle marketing:
‘Customer is the King’ you’ve probably heard this phrase before, but in 2022 we moved a step ahead and consider our customers not kings but rather our friends. This can be an easy life hack for the success of your brand. In today’s times, businesses are approaching their customers with a personalized communication strategy known as customer life cycle marketing.
The basic idea behind customer lifecycle marketing is that your customers are humans and deserve a human-like relationship with you instead of a monotone, just sending random recurring emails, type of relationship.
Customer Lifecycle marketing or email marketing for customer Lifecycle is based on understanding different marketing messages and strategies appropriate for customers, according to the different stages of their journey with a brand. Understanding these different stages and providing the best offer at each stage will lead to successful customer engagements, increased monetization, and long-term retention.
The lifecycle stages of a customer:
Your customer enters a Lifecycle journey from the moment they see your product and showed a little sign of interest. We call this stage prospects.
Then these prospects move on to the next stage of being a customer when they make a purchase.
Brand nurtures relationships with customers, this is the relationship-building stage.
In the retention stage, brands retain a customer making them regular.
And lastly, on the advocacy stage, customer advocates for brands on social media and others.
And the key to generating successful customer leads is not just understanding these stages but also realizing where the customer is in the cycle and sending specific emails accordingly. Emails, thus creating brand advocates. And the key to digital native business these days is not to let cloud costs get out of control, keep track and reduce cloud costs today.
How to write effective Lifecycle emails?
You can’t treat a stranger like your best friend, similarly, it’s not very clever to send the same email to a prospect and an advocate. Customers at different Lifecycle stages must be offered different content through emails that complement the status of their relationship with the brand. So, understand the activity and status of the customer before even thinking about the email.
Once you figure out what stage your customer is at, the next step would be drafting the perfect email that improves customer leads.
Emails for site visitors
An anonymous person just had a look at your website. What should be your next move? Convince him to make a purchase or at least fill out a registration form that provides some contact details about them. So it’s best to offer attractive first-purchase benefits and discounts via website pop-up messages and retargeting ads.
But also be sure to comply with laws like GDPR, and follow the best SEO practices as this may scare away the visitor.
Emails for registered users
Customers at this stage are still prospects who are yet to make their first purchase. Your job now is to convince them with the perfect email to make a purchase. Bribe these customers with the benefits of engaging with the brand while offering discounts and coupons and other benefits they can receive on their first purchase. A tip for drafting the best emails at this point is to make them as personalized as possible. Add the customer’s name, products they were looking at on the website, their location, etc.
Emails for first-time customers
According to research, the majority of first-time customers are likely to never return to your website. And even if they do, the chances of a second purchase are not very high. However, the majority of customers who made a second purchase are likely to make another one. So basically, this is the stage where you can convert a prospect into a loyal customer. Engage the customer as much as you can, and provide the best offers via coupons and valuable incentives that are irresistible to make a second purchase.
Emails for frequent customers
Customers who frequently make purchases are the most valuable asset of your brand. Treat them accordingly. Make sure you send out emails to them which are highly relevant and extremely personalized. Make these customers feel like they’re important to the brand and are valued. Offering customized rewards along with loyalty programs, RFM segmentation can lead to better personalization for the most valuable customers and the ones who are at the risk of churning.
Emails for risky customers
When you realize that a customer is at the risk of churning, get to work like never before! Communicate with the customers and let them know you miss them. Remind them of the items they previously bought and ask for feedback for the same.
Emails for churned customers
This is a critical stage. It’s not very easy to regain customers who haven’t made a purchase in a long time. The only way to win these customers back is to offer aggressive offers and incentives precisely personalized according to the items they bought in the past.
Emails for reactivated customers
It is estimated that the retention rates of reactivated customers are similar to first-time customers. So, the marketing strategy for both of them should be alike. Use the information you have about the reactivated customers and send out detailed information about new products and offers.
Bonus tip: Test your emails at every stage.
While emails are a great medium to market your brand and increase brand awareness or dictate value it's important that you do it correctly. No one wants to read an email that starts with "Dear first name," or has broken HTML in their email client. That's why we recommend using Inbox pirates - an email preview chrome extension that generates previews for every email you send out and is compatible with Gmail, Hubspot, Apollo, Sendinblue, and more.
Conclusion
In order to make the most of customer lifecycle strategy, brands need to understand how their efforts of mapping customer journeys combined with drafting appropriate emails can change their success game.
While many huge brands are still failing at this and bombarding their customers with cliche emails, many start-ups have generated huge revenues with this strategy.
This article can thus be a good start for brands to analyze each stage of the customer lifecycle.
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