A Lifecycle Marketing Intro for Beginners

Marketing is the activity, collection of institutions, and procedures for developing, conveying, delivering, and exchanging value-added solutions for consumers, clients, partners, and society at large.

Every customer is different.

They are at different stages of the buying journey and, therefore, answer different messages. Having just one message—and shouting that in the least of them—will not work and should even turn a number of them off.

Instead, you would like a far better strategy. One that takes into consideration the stage customers are in. From there, you’ll customize a more suitable message.

How does one do that?

 

Well, you’ll do what’s called lifecycle marketing. during this post, you’ll learn the following:

What lifecycle marketing is

 

Create a lifecycle marketing strategy

Lifecycle marketing tactics

What is lifecycle marketing?

Lifecycle marketing is the process of matching the sort of communication a customer wants to ascertain as they progress along their lifecycle.

Typically, the customer lifecycle consists of six high-level stages, almost like the modern-day marketing funnel:

Awareness – Your potential customers first study your brand.

Engagement – Your potential customers interact together with your brand and learn more about your offerings.

Consideration – Your potential customers evaluate your offerings and choose if you’re the proper fit.

Purchase – Your potential customers become customers by buying from you.

Support – You support your customers by ensuring they’re deriving maximum value and satisfaction from their purchase.

Loyalty – Your customers love your brand. They purchase from you repeatedly and/or take the initiative to inform others about you.

The idea behind lifecycle marketing was developed (now Keep) to market its email marketing software. 

Today, the concept continues to be related to email marketing.

However, customers don’t just interact with a business via email. So we will expand the scope of lifecycle marketing to other marketing channels too.

How to implement a lifecycle marketing strategy

 

To create a lifecycle marketing strategy, we’ll use this framework, courtesy of Barilliance. It involves three steps:

Triggers

Message(s)

Channel

Let’s check out them in additional detail.

• Triggers

 

Triggers are predefined conditions that determine when a marketing message should be presented to a customer. These conditions are aligned with the six stages of the customer lifecycle.

Since the six stages of the customer lifecycle are pretty high-level ones, let’s break them down into more specific segments which will function triggers:

Prospects who haven’t heard of your brand [Awareness]

New site visitors [Awareness]

New email subscribers [Engagement]

Prospects who are comparing [Consideration]

Cart abandoners [Consideration]

First-time customers [Purchase]

Churned customers [Support]

Active customers/VIPs [Loyalty]

Any customer action often becomes a trigger.

• Message

 

This is what you send your customers.

Don’t just send anything, though—not only should your customers care about the message, but it should even be associated with the trigger that sent said message.

For instance, you’ll want to send an email reminder to cart abandoners, i.e., customers who dropped off at the Consideration stage.

• Channel

 

This is where the message is happening. It is often any marketing channel—email, social, live chat, YouTube, etc.

Lifecycle marketing tactics

 

With the framework in situ, let’s check out how we will apply it. We’ll use the segments we created as samples of the way to execute lifecycle marketing.

• Prospects who haven’t heard of your brand

 

Trigger: Customers realize they need a drag and search on Google to find out the way to resolve it

Message: Educate your customers on the way to solve the matter 

Channel: program optimization (SEO)

Customers can’t buy from you unless they know you exist. And discovery usually occurs because customers first determine they have a drag they need to unravel.

When that happens, most of the time, they address Google. this suggests if we would like potential customers to seek out us, we’d like to rank on Google. 

Not only that, we’d like to work out what problems they’re checking out and what sorts of words they’re using.

To do that, we will use a keyword research tool. Here’s how:

 

Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer

Enter a couple of terms associated with what you’re selling (e.g., “coffee,” “cappuccino,” “coffee bean,” etc)

Go to the Matching terms report

Switch the tab to Questions

Here, you’ll see over 300,000 potential topics you’ll target. look around the list and detect people who are relevant to your website. Then create content that will rank for these topics.

• New site visitors

 

Trigger: Customers land on your site for the primary time after discovering your content

Message: subscribe to your newsletter

Channel: Email

After discovering your content, most people will leave and never return. 

So if you would like them to continue engaging together with your content and brand, you would like to urge them to remain or return to your website again.

There are some ways to try to do this, including getting them to follow you on your social channels. In my opinion, email is the best channel because you own direct communication. (Social platforms can remove you anytime.)

However, a visitor to your website won’t fork over their contact information without some enticement. you’ll do that in a sort of way. for instance, we keep it simple by asking them to hitch our weekly digest

E‑commerce stores tend to dangle discounts as an incentive

Whereas bloggers prefer making a gift of free eBooks

• New email subscribers

 

Trigger: Customers check-in for your newsletter

Message: A welcome series introducing your brand, content, and catalog/products

Channel: Email

Once the prospect signs up for your newsletter, you ought to deliver whatever you promised—a discount code, eBook, etc. 

But beyond that, it’s an excellent opportunity to continue engaging them and introducing more of your content (or if you’re an e‑commerce store, your catalog of products).

For example, after confirming your subscription, marketing agency Demand Curve follows up with an email of resources you’ll inspect 

• Prospects who are comparing

 

Trigger: Customers are trying to find product comparisons on Google

Message: Feature comparisons, product comparisons

Channel: SEO

Customers will always want the simplest bang for their buck. 

So albeit they’re conversant in your brand, they’ll make comparisons. one of the ways they are doing this is often by searching on Google for comparisons between your brand and your competitors’.

Here’s the way to find who your customers are comparing you with:

 

Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer

Enter your name 

Go to the Matching terms report

Under Terms, click on “vs”

Here, we will see the various brands that our customers are comparing us with.

It’s up to you whether you would like to make one page or individual pages for every competitor

Rather than the quality side-by-side comparison of features where the page creator wins, we decided to feature independent polls and mention the features that only our toolset has.

• Cart abandoners

 

Trigger: Customers add products to the cart but don’t complete the acquisition 

Message: Complete the checkout process

Channel: Email, retargeting

During the method of shopping, customers may procrastinate or hesitate. 

they start by adding your products to the handcart but abandon it halfway because they’re distracted, 

have another interest attend to, are surprised at the entire price, or are annoyed by a component of your checkout process.

Statista’s March 2021 study found that nearly 80% of online shopping orders were abandoned.

Abandoned carts are fine if customers return. But many don’t. Sleeknote claims that e‑commerce brands lose around $18 billion in sales annually due to cart abandonment.

That means you would like how to undertake and obtain these customers back.

The most common way is to send an “abandoned cart” email. Here’s an example from Bonobos, a men’s clothing brand

Abandoned cart emails aren’t just limited to e‑commerce brands. you’ll use these emails for any incomplete transaction in any industry. for instance, here’s one from 

CodeAcademy, a web programming school

Besides email, you’ll also retarget these customers using social media ads. That way, as they’re browsing online, they’re reminded to finish their checkout together with your brand.

• First-time customers

 

Trigger: Customers buy your product

Message: the way to get the simplest out of your product

Channel: Email, in-app, live chat, social media, video, content marketing

Give your new customers an excellent experience, and they’ll get on their thanks to becoming a 

VIP of your brand. a method to try to do this is often to supply support and education—teach them how best to use your product so that they’re going to be motivated to remain or buy more.

At Ahrefs, besides our in-app onboarding, we also send emails introducing a spread of resources we’ve created to assist customers to get more out of our product. 

This includes a quick explainer on what our toolset does, an introduction to our knowledge domain, and in-app tutorials, also reminding them they will speak to support staff on the live chat anytime they have help.

We also share with them the simplest content on our blog and YouTube channel, most of which features the various ways to use our toolset and execute different tactics

Education and support aren’t just limited to software-as-a-service (SaaS) businesses like ours. E‑commerce brands can roll in the hay too. Take a glance, for instance, at how Beardbrand creates content to support its customers

If you sell women’s clothing, you’ll always show your customers the way to pair up different styles for various reasons. Or if you sell sneakers, teach your customers the way to look out of them (especially suedes!), clean them, and pair them up with different styles (or even lace them differently!).

Conclusion

 

The segments and triggers I’ve written about aren’t exhaustive.

Depending on your business, you’ll take a more granular approach and make more segments. And for every segment, you’ll always consider more triggers.

Bear in mind the absence of action also can be a trigger. for instance, a situation where a possible customer joins your email list but doesn’t open the past five emails is often a trigger that spurs you to send a replacement message.

What does one think? Did I miss out on anything about lifecycle marketing? Let me know

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