Lifecycle marketing: definitions, benefits and strategies

Author
Lauren Saalmuller
Content Marketing Lead

Lifecycle marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. While it would be nice to win over customers with a shining first impression and call it a day, truly effective marketing takes a consistent, sustained effort to win over consumers.

This is where lifecycle marketing comes in. Below you’ll find the definition and benefits of lifecycle marketing, plus some strategies marketing teams can use to improve their own processes.

What is lifecycle marketing?

Lifecycle marketing is the process of nurturing your customers throughout the customer journey. Its main goals are to grow your customer base, foster repeat buying, and nurture long-term loyalty. Achieving these goals isn’t as easy as setting up a rigid sales funnel and praying for the best—lifecycle marketing involves building deeply ingrained relationships with your customers.

You build these relationships by delivering what your customers need, tailored to where they’re at on their buyer journey. To help visualize the often involved process of selling to consumers, we like to look at the lifecycle marketing process as a sandwich. It has three categories that represent the three drivers of a business:

• The marketing (or sales funnel) lifecycle: This brand-focused lifecycle approach deals primarily with acquiring customers.
• The customer lifecycle: With a view of customer satisfaction, this approach defines how often customers buy from you and how they use your product.
• The shared loyalty lifecycle: This lifecycle deals with how the customer–brand relationship is developed over time through several customer touchpoints. The goal is to retain and grow customers and help them develop positive attitudes and behaviors toward the brand.

Aligning your lifecycle marketing strategy across all three layers of the sandwich will help you maintain high conversion rates and happy customers. This is an effort that goes well beyond the walls of your marketing department—the strategy will work best if your entire business is involved in each category. Though challenging, there are plenty of upsides to using a comprehensive lifecycle approach.

The benefits of lifecycle marketing

These are just some of the benefits you can expect from a well-executed lifecycle marketing plan:

Better alignment with the customer journey

A holistic lifecycle approach enables you to coordinate every one of your sales channels with the customer journey. With the right data on hand, marketing teams can more closely tailor their strategies to the nuances of each customer’s path.

Better targeted campaign outcomes

You probably already know that retaining customers costs a lot less than acquiring new ones. Focusing on the whole customer journey helps you increase overall profit and margins, offsetting your customer acquisition cost (CAC). Instead of investing resources only in customers whom you haven’t yet built relationships with, lifecycle marketing focuses its efforts across the board. Yes, new customer acquisition is important—but so is selling to your existing customers with a continuous lifecycle strategy.

Higher customer lifetime value

Nurturing customers increases their customer lifetime value (CLV). Along with lowering costs, lifecycle marketing increases retention and accelerates purchase frequency if done right.

Better ROI on resource usage

Rather than using a traditional sales funnel, a lifecycle approach to marketing allocates your resources where they’ll be most effective. Focusing on the needs and wants of your existing customers means you will get more value from the dollars, time, manpower, and skill sets you invest.

Increased efficiency with more useful data

Thanks to tech like predictive analytics, cookies, and automation, brands today can take a more data-driven approach to how they sell. Using data ensures you are basing your marketing decisions on actual metrics instead of spending your resources on guesswork. For example, a retargeting strategy informed by behavioral data is one of the many ways marketing teams can optimize their conversion efforts for higher revenue.

Stages of lifecycle marketing

The process of lifecycle marketing can be broken down into four stages. These stages align with the three lifecycles that are business drivers:

1. Awareness

The awareness stage—at the top of the sales funnel—is where potential customers learn about your offer. In this stage, you get to wow them with the value you bring and the problems you solve. Top-of-funnel awareness activities include:

• Content marketing — blogs, social media, influencers, etc.
• Paid advertising in spaces your ideal customer persona visits
• Engaging social media presence
• Presence at relevant industry events

This is where all customers begin, so it’s important to make this first impression positive.

2. Consideration

Did you catch their attention? At the consideration stage, would-be customers are intentionally browsing your website, following you on social media, or maybe even subscribing to your emails. This is the point where potential customers start warming up to you and learning more about your products and brand.

Automation will be your best ally here. With it, you can tailor your approach to keep your target customers’ attention based on the actions they take or interests they express. This might involve:

• Engaging customers through a website chat form
• Offering a discount or shipping promotion
• Sending SMS messages
• Personalizing your email marketing
• Retargeting paid ads based on behaviors you’ve tracked on your site.

3. Decision

The decision stage is where it gets serious. Customers have learned enough about who you are, what you do, and if they want what you’re selling. At this stage, your potential customers decide whether to make a purchase. This stage requires proof that you’re the best solution for your customer:

• Testimonials and social proof
• Product comparisons

With lifecycle marketing, it’s important to remember that selling continues well beyond the decision phase. If your customer ultimately decides to go with your offer, you can now start the loyalty stage.

4. Loyalty

Post-purchase loyalty is your best path to stable revenue. There are many ways to nurture loyalty. Once you gain a paying customer, you can nurture them by:

• Upselling or cross-selling products they might like
• Follow-up customer support ensuring the customer can use their product
• Offer a rewards or loyalty program
• Give customer-only discounts

In addition to encouraging more purchases from them in the future, this will also make them more likely to spread the word about your brand. If your product or service is something customers need more than once, this stage is to promote retention so you’ll be top-of-mind when they’re ready to purchase again.

5. Advocacy

Word of mouth is one of the most powerful ways to generate new leads. Offer incentives to get your customers on board as brand evangelists, and consider including a referral program in your greater marketing plan. Throwing some love back to the people who send you more customers is money well spent. You should have "always-on" campaigns targeting an audience segment of loyal customers. These campaigns can look like:

• Requests to leave product reviews
• Exclusive first access to sales or new releases
• Referral perks for inviting new customers
• Invitations to leave feedback that fuels product improvements

How to get started with lifecycle marketing

Breaking down your customer lifecycle into the phases above will help make the process less overwhelming. From there, it’s a matter of breaking each phase down even further to pinpoint your marketing objectives. Once you‘re clear on what objectives determine success for each phase, you can map out campaigns to reach them.

During the campaign ideation phase, it helps to start with the end in mind and work backward from there. There are a few essential elements to factor into your lifecycle marketing process:

Lead generation

To market to prospects, you have to get their attention first. Define how you’ll generate leads. Quizzes, email subscriptions, free trials, or contests are some ways you can capture contact information that will be invaluable throughout the lifecycle process. Ideally, your approach to capturing leads will be evergreen.

Once you’ve tested different approaches and found the highest-performing lead capture strategies, automate them and keep them running in the background to continue funneling new leads into your marketing system.

Customer definition and segmentation

Where and how your campaign is executed will depend on the customer segments you want to reach. Once interested leads start to come in, segment them into groups by key identifiers. These could be interests, familiarity with your brand, or even by lead generation strategy. Segmentation helps you create targeted messaging that’s defined by the more specific needs of each segment, rather than marketing to every customer with the exact same approach. As customers go through their lifecycle, the messaging will change according to their needs at whatever stage they’re in. With segmentation, you can develop more personalized messaging that positions you to strengthen customer relationships.

Creating a nurturing strategy

Once you win customers, it’s vital to continue doing the work to keep them. This is where a nurturing strategy comes into play. Your nurturing strategy will include things like building engagement, creating more customer touchpoints, and ramping up your newsletter strategy.

All these efforts may be small individually, yet they are critical to the entirety of the lifecycle. After you’ve tested several campaigns to get a sense of what your ideal customer responds to, you can start automating nurturing workflows. This will mean one less marketing task you need to manage in real time, so you can focus your efforts on monitoring performance and usage data to tailor future campaigns.

Tracking and assessing campaign data

Without a strong data component, data-driven decisions can't be made. Retargeting is harder, reaching warm leads is more challenging, and any digital marketing efforts can fall flat. In other words, campaign data is the fuel that keeps your lifecycle marketing engine going. This is often upheld by a customer relationship management platform (CRM)—but a CRM alone doesn’t always come with the luxury of built-in data-capturing features to keep you informed along the buyer’s journey.

Thankfully, a customer data platform (CDP) is perfect for that. With tools like Simon CDP, you can create omnichannel customer experiences without needing to know code. They enable you to consolidate historical and recent customer data into a single view, so you can create customer touchpoints that are real value drivers.

Whether you’re working on audience management, email marketing, or cross-channel orchestration, Simon Data simplifies the end-to-end lifecycle marketing process. With the visibility of a centralized platform, campaign metrics become easier to track and assess.

Automation

Automation is your best friend when it comes to executing campaigns at scale to cover all the stages of the customer lifecycle. Whether you’re trying to create more touchpoints on different marketing channels, gather key metrics, or create a welcome sequence, automation will make the process much simpler and quicker. Marketing automation improves the overall customer experience. It helps lower churn rates and maintain conversion rates—no more missing out on additional sales because you didn’t set up an automated trigger to remind your customers of their abandoned carts.

Lifecycle marketing metrics

How do you know if lifecycle marketing campaigns are effective? Let these metrics be your guiding star.

• Customer lifetime value (CLV): Often the backbone metric of lifecycle marketing, this measures the total revenue a customer generates over time, helping assess customer retention.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): CAC tracks the cost of acquiring new customers—compare it with CLV to ensure that you’re retaining high-value customers.
• Retention rate: Shows how well you’re keeping customers over time; higher retention means stronger loyalty.
• Churn rate: In the same bucket as retention rate, churn rate is the percentage of customers who stop buying from you—lower churn indicates higher engagement and satisfaction.
• Conversion rates: How many customers are moving from one stage to the next? Conversion rates identify funnel bottlenecks.
• Engagement metrics: This broad term includes website traffic, time on site, bounce rate, and interactions to gauge how well your content resonates.
• Net promoter score (NPS): NPS measures how likely customers are to recommend your brand, a key indicator of advocacy. Check the NPS pulse often through surveys!

Tools for Lifecycle Marketing

A good lifecycle marketer and an effective toolkit work in tandem for better campaigns. Without one of the other, you can’t measure or optimize lifecycle marketing.

Data analytics

A lifecycle campaign is only as good as the visibility you have into it.

Analytics tools track marketing effectiveness, and the right user can interpret this information for optimizing strategies. As an example, Google Analytics provides in-depth website and app tracking, while Mixpanel specializes in customer behavior analysis to refine engagement strategies.

Customer engagement software

Lifecycle marketing thrives on reaching customers where they are. Tools like Klaviyo for email/SMS marketing and Braze for cross-channel messaging help you communicate across channels. Linking all these channel experiences so they play nice is the challenge of lifecycle marketing!

AI-powered tools

AI-driven tools help you personalize and execute campaigns with better opportunity to scale. For instance, Persado helps brands with AI-driven language analysis, and MoEngage uses to help you generate campaigns quicker.

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)

Finally, CDPs are the glue that consolidate and activate customer data from multiple sources in real-time. This is a secret weapon for lifecycle marketers because it keeps a pulse on each customer and allows you to run targeted campaigns hands-free with the right setup.