How? By delivering thoughtful, well-timed customer experiences that engage potential, current, and past customers — even after a sale. At the core of this strategy is email marketing, which plays a role in every stage of the customer lifecycle. We’ll explain how it works below.
Why is Lifecycle Marketing Important?
Lifecycle marketing is important, because without consideration across the buyer’s journey, through the marketing funnel, and beyond, you’re leaving money on the table. Limiting your marketing efforts to lead and sales generation alone misunderstands the potential relationship customers can have with your brand.
Tailoring omnichannel marketing efforts to specific touchpoints along the customer lifecycle marketing journey can acquire, keep, engage, and re-engage potential, current, and former customers by keeping your brand front of mind, while building awareness around your products and services.
Here are a few basic examples of lifecycle marketing:
Increasing activation and conversion rates by sending well-timed abandoned cart emails
Offering incentives to disengaged former customers to pull them back in
Sending emails that offer special pricing and discounts to potential customers
Recommending useful or interesting informational content to repeat customers to keep them engaged with your brand
Now that you have a sense of what lifecycle marketing is, let’s take a look at the specific stages.
The Stages of Lifecycle Marketing & How Email Fits In
It’s important to note that while there is not a consensus in the marketing world about what the actual stages are, there are three stages that are commonly agreed upon. Those stages are: Acquire, Engage, Retain. Within those three different stages are smaller segments. However, for the purposes of this article, we’re going to discuss the three high-level lifecycle stages and how email can help your business best engage with leads in those stages.
The "Acquire" Stage: Getting Prospects into Your Funnel
The first rule of business is to attract and acquire leads that can be converted into sales. In order to acquire a lead, though, a potential customer has to first become aware of your brand and its offerings. (This awareness stage is sometimes listed as a separate stage in a customer lifecycle marketing strategy, and sometimes — like here — it’s included in the “acquire” stage.)
Drafting, publishing, and pushing content on your website, landing pages, social media platforms are some common ways to get leads. This content should be designed to reach people at the top of your conversion funnel. It should speak to customer needs that are still unmet.
This is where making a potential customer aware of your product/service is key. You’ll be competing for attention, so go big! Think well-produced videos, high-value blog posts, catchy and well-researched infographics — the kinds of content people want to share. After grabbing a potential customer’s attention, you’ll want to entice them further by getting their email address.
How Email Fits Into This Stage
Once you’ve acquired a lead, it’s essential to nurture it. Social media marketing, PPC, retargeting ads, and SMS push notifications can all play a role in this effort. However, email workflows may be the most effective strategy. Here are some email examples:
Welcome email series: Set up email workflows that welcome a new lead and offer them content that builds trust and interest. FAQs work well in this type of email workflow series.
Special offer emails: People love a deal. Provide unique deals and discounts to encourage further action.
Emails to gather customer data: Use your creativity to send fun, interactive emails to collect more information. This could include polls, quizzes, etc.
Emails with invite-only content and events: Webinars are a great offer in this type of email flow. Giving people information they want is a great way to build the relationship and work your lead further down the funnel.
One important note: As you’re trying to acquire and then nurture your leads, nailing the subject line is crucial. For help with that, here are 90 of the best email subject lines.
The "Engage" Stage: Nurturing Relationships and Driving Conversions
Once you’ve begun nurturing that lead, engaging them is your next goal. What does engagement look like? Engagement includes trying to elicit different customer behaviors, including:
Clicking an email or social media link to return to your website or landing page
Reading/viewing an email
Clicking on a PPC ad or an affiliate link on an influencer’s post
Scrolling through your website
The goal during this phase is to help the lead evaluate your offerings and assess which ones suit them best. This phase can take a while, so it’s important to be patient and to set up personalized email workflows that offer content and information that’s fresh.
How Email Fits Into This Stage
Using email to drive potential customer engagement should be viewed as a form of relationship-building. You’re looking to show your interest in the lead, so consistent (but not annoying) communication is essential.
Potential email workflows for this stage of their journey include:
Abandoned cart emails: This type of email campaign reminds users of what they left behind in a cart.
Browse recovery emails: This re-engagement tactic involves gently reminding your lead about what has already caught their eye.
Brand value emails: This type of email uses storytelling to showcase the brand and engage your lead.
Limited-time offer emails: Creating urgency with a deal that features a tight deadline can be a great way to encourage action.
Onboarding explainer emails: For SaaS providers, especially, explaining the onboarding process can sometimes be all it takes to convert a lead into a sale.
Once a lead has made their first purchase and become a new customer, it’s time to shift them into the retain stage.
The "Retain" Stage: Building Loyalty and Reducing Churn
The retain stage is exactly what it sounds like. It’s where your marketing efforts are geared toward retaining all your current customers.
Depending on the customer behavior, there are a number of different strategies to take during this stage. Loyal customers who make consistent repeat purchases should receive a different type of experience than a new customer. This is where segmentation within the three primary stages comes into play.
How Email Fits Into This Stage
As with every other lifecycle stage, email is an essential component of retaining your customers. From gathering testimonials to ensuring customer satisfaction, maintaining high-quality and consistent email communication can provide you with valuable intel, while also continuing to generate sales.
Showing appreciation, providing resources, and offering your customers value goes a long way in ensuring customer retention. Here are some of the email workflow types that can keep your customers engaged:
Post-purchase emails: Haven’t checked in on customer satisfaction yet? That’s an email workflow. Know about satisfaction but haven’t sent a thank you offer? That’s another one.
Loyalty program emails: Find out how deep the love goes with an offer to join your loyalty program.
Re-engagement emails: This email workflow targets customer relationships that have fallen on hard times. You can make them an offer or give them a gift.
Customer survey emails: Surveys can go a long way in keeping customers. Ask them about their pain points, new offerings they would like to see, etc.
Advocacy incentive emails: Use email to incentivize your loyal customers to refer your business to other prospects.
Essential Tools in Lifecycle Marketing
It might go without saying, but it’s key to have the right tools and teams for just about any marketing initiative. Lifecycle marketing is no exception. Some essential tools and teams include:
Content marketing team
A good CRM
A/B testing and analytics tools to gather and analyze key metrics and KPIs
Email automation tool
Customer loyalty program
How NeverBounce Can Help With Your Lifecycle Marketing
Without a doubt, email marketing is a foundational part of any good lifecycle marketing strategy. Use NeverBounce to keep all your email addresses validated, so your marketing efforts and strategy can help you acquire, engage, and retain customers day after day after day.