Customer Lifecycle Nurturing

Do you know how interested prospects turn into brand advocates? Great things take time, and much like a seed that needs nurturing to grow, your interested prospect must be nourished with a good marketing strategy.

This is essentially what customer lifecycle marketing does, leading unfamiliar prospects to the path of converting into loyal customers. 

Customer Lifecycle Marketing has five stages: reach, acquisition, conversion, retention, and loyalty. Depending on the stage your client is in, you must know what customer lifecycle emails to offer to help them move up the loyalty ladder. 

We put together everything you need to know about customer lifecycle marketing and strategies for each stage to help you increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). So, let’s dive into it! 

Lifecycle marketing aims to follow a journey customers take from the initial contact with a brand or product all the way to customer loyalty and advocacy. To understand customer lifecycle stages better, you need to:

• Measure the success of it
• Identify potential turning points 

This is essentially what Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) does. CLM tracks and analyzes lifecycle stages, sets metrics for each step, and measures the outcome. 

CLM recognizes that customers go through distinct phases during their relationship with a company, and it focuses on understanding and addressing their needs and preferences at each stage. The lifecycle stages are:

• Reach
• Acquisition
• Conversion
• Retention
• Loyalty  

Each stage presents a unique opportunity for businesses to engage with customers, build trust and drive revenue. Let’s explore together the type of customer lifecycle emails that are most effective for each stage. 

This is the initial step of the customer journey when a prospect finds out about the business through your efforts in social media, SEO, and other marketing techniques. At this point, they are cross-examining your company and competitors to understand which platform will better solve their problems. To improve this stage, ask yourself these very questions:

• Am I using enough marketing channels to put my company on a customer’s radar? Hint: social media platforms, search engine ranking, sponsored ads, and more can help you.
• Do I have good customer service experience? Hint: Focus on reviews, and impressions from your current or past clients, create surveys and ask for feedback to measure customer satisfaction. 
• Does my brand have a presence on different channels to share news or promotional messages? Hint: Besides social media, having a brand presence on other platforms is essential. Wooxy.com marketing automation provides omnichannel communication with potential clients via email, telegram, SMS, and web push. 

You can’t just sit back and hope clients will stumble upon it. During this stage, use all available marketing techniques at your disposal to educate potential customers about your product or service. 

Up to this point, prospects are already showing interest in your product or service. They may have visited your website, social media pages or have initiated a direct communication via email or call. 

During the acquisition stage, the primary focus must be providing high-quality content. This can include:

• SEO-optimized blog posts
• Unique email templates
• Engaging social media posts

If they have already subscribed to your newsletters, you can send weekly, monthly digests covering a broad scope of topics. You may also launch a drip campaign, and as Wooxy’s hyper-segmentation features detect your prospects’ interests and preferences, these messages will be tailored to their needs. 

Automated lifecycle emails can also be ever-green campaigns. Say your business is SaaS; you can offer a free trial or freemium of your product or service. SaaS customer lifecycle emails can convince them to move up the lifecycle ladder from an interested prospect to a new customer. For e-commerce, suggest products that initially brought them to your website or page. 

If your last efforts at each stage were successful, congrats, you finally acquired a customer who made a purchase. Is your job done? No, your relationship with a customer has just started. At this stage, you must do everything to move them up to retention and loyalty. To keep them engaged, it is vital to ensure consistent communication. Here are automated lifecycle email ideas to consider during this stage:

• Confirmation emails, whether serving transactional or marketing purposes
• Product or service recommendation emails 
• Surveys, feedback requests to measure customer satisfaction 
• Special event offers or newsletters (such as birthday emails, seasonal messages, etc.)
• Cross-sell, upsell, or down-sell automated messages.

Post-purchase emails can vary, but the goal is the same: To climb up the lifecycle stage from conversion to loyalty. Let’s not forget that same statistic that constantly proves that acquiring new customers costs much more than retaining existing ones. 

So, read on to uncover the last two crucial steps in the customer’s lifecycle. 

This lifecycle phase provides repeat purchases to your business. However, several marketing strategies should be implemented to foster trust and achieve ongoing engagement. Here are lifecycle email ideas to nurture customer retention:

• Reward strategy marketing emails: There are various types of loyalty program emails companies use to retain customers, such as point-based, tiered, VIP, etc. 
• Feedback requests to measure customer satisfaction. You can create surveys or insert NPS (Net Promoter Score) or different feedback metrics in your emails that provide valuable suggestions for customer retention. 
• Abandoned cart emails. The average cart abandonment rate is 70% (Source). To retain customers, use abandoned cart email strategies. 
• Re-engagement campaign. Can you imagine that companies lose 1,6 trillion per year due to customer churn? (Source). In order to gain churned customers back, launch a re-engagement email campaign with a marketing automation platform. 

Satisfied customers can become brand advocates of the company, promoting it to others and influencing natural word-of-mouth referrals. This is the ultimate goal of every business aimed to strengthen its reputation and leverage loyalty to attract new clients.

 At this stage, surprise loyal customers with special deals, discounts, bonuses, or other rewarding offers. On top of that, invest in the following loyalty strategies:

• Positive word-of-mouth: Referral emails are more personal, so recommendations of the product from peers or family members will be more influential on a person’s purchase decision. 
• UGC marketing: User-generated content is always powerful because it is your loyal customers’ honest experience and opinion. Use their reviews when sending promotional messages to build trust and boost sales. 
• Pre-launch email campaign: Make your loyal customers feel special by giving them a chance to sneak peek at your new product launch. 

Armed with this knowledge, automate all customer lifecycle emails using Wooxy.com. Through omnichannel communication (via email, SMS, telegram, web push) and advanced analytical tools, reach, engage, and retain customers easily.

Customer Lifecycle marketing consists of 5 stages:

1. Reach
2. Acquisition
3. Conversion
4. Retention
5. Loyalty

To progress to the next stage of the lifecycle ladder, it is important to give equal importance to each stage. You can make your job easier by automating the process with Wooxy to reach, engage and retain customers at each phase of the lifecycle.