What is Lifecycle Marketing?
Lifecycle marketing is a customer-focused strategy designed to nurture and engage customers throughout their entire journey with a company. It involves segmenting customers based on their behaviors, preferences and interactions and providing personalized communications and experiences that fit their specific needs at each stage of the lifecycle.
Understanding the Customer Lifecycle
The customer lifecycle includes several distinct phases consumers go through when interacting with a business. Each stage offers marketers unique opportunities to connect with consumers impactfully. Here’s an overview of the four stages.
1. Acquisition
The acquisition stage focuses on encouraging new customers to learn more about your product or service. The goal is to convert potential prospects into new customers or users. App Store Optimization (ASO), for example, is key to garnering new mobile app users. Marketing strategies like advertising, content marketing and referral programs are pivotal at this stage to build awareness and acquisition.
2. Activation
After a customer has been acquired, the next stage is activation — getting them to actively use your product or service. Activation can involve setting up a profile, making a first purchase or crossing an initial engagement threshold. Good onboarding flows are crucial in this stage to provide value quickly.
3. Engagement
Once customers have taken the desired action, the goal shifts to building long-term engagement and retaining them as active customers. This can involve gamification, new feature updates, personalized messaging and finding ways to make your product or service a part of the customer’s regular habits and routines.
4. Loyalty
The loyalty stage is the highest level of the customer lifecycle. These are your biggest fans and brand advocates who show strong brand affinity and sustained engagement over time. Loyalty programs, exclusive access and incentives can create loyal customers.
The Goals of Lifecycle Marketing
The primary goals of lifecycle marketing strategies are to increase customer engagement, reduce churn and encourage long-term brand loyalty. By creating individualized, relevant marketing messages, companies can enhance customer experiences, which can lead to higher retention rates and loyalty.
Lifecycle marketing also helps businesses optimize their strategies by sending the right customers the right messages at the right time. This targeted approach can lead to higher conversion rates, more significant customer lifetime value and positive ROI for marketing initiatives.
Channels for Lifecycle Marketing
Below is a list of common channels companies can use to implement lifecycle marketing strategies.
- Email marketing involves sending targeted, personalized emails to users at different stages of the lifecycle, such as welcome emails, engagement emails, retention emails and winback emails.
- Push notifications are an app lifecycle marketing technique that involves sending relevant notifications to customers’ mobile devices to encourage them to re-engage with the app. Businesses can also use push notifications to tell customers about new updates or features.
- In-app messaging is another type of app lifecycle marketing strategy that involves displaying contextual messages and prompts within the app to guide users to take specific high-value actions, promote new features or gather feedback.
- Web messaging includes onsite messaging and web push notifications to highlight specific content to users.
- Social media platforms can be used to promote products or services, share helpful content and interact with the community.
- Retargeting ads include advertising to consumers who have visited your website or used your app. These ads strive to re-engage consumers and drive conversions.
- Content marketing includes creating helpful and relevant content, such as blogs, guides and videos, to draw in and keep consumers.
- App store optimization includes improving the app’s listing in app stores by using relevant keywords, captivating descriptions and high-quality visuals to improve visibility and encourage more downloads.
Key Strategies for Effective Lifecycle Marketing
Implementing an effective customer lifecycle marketing strategy includes following these fundamental principles and best practices.
Segmentation and Targeting
Segmenting customers based on their behaviors, demographics, preferences and lifecycle stage is essential for providing relevant and personalized messages. With data-driven insights, businesses can create targeted campaigns that focus on specific customer segments and increase the likelihood of engagement and conversion.
Personalization of Communications
Personalization is a crucial driver of effective customer lifecycle marketing. Businesses that tailor their messaging with personalized content, offers and messaging can build stronger connections with customers and offer experiences that resonate on a more personal level.
Integration Across Channels
Seamless integration across channels is essential for providing a consistent and unified customer experience throughout the lifecycle. Companies can reinforce their brand identity and strengthen customer relationships by ensuring that messaging, branding and campaigns are aligned across multiple touchpoints.
Tools and Platforms for Lifecycle Marketing
Businesses can take advantage of several tools and platforms to boost their customer lifecycle marketing strategies. Customer experience platforms, marketing automation systems and analytics tools can help companies collect and examine customer data, segment consumers and automate personalized messages.
Airship is a customer experience platform that provides robust capabilities for lifecycle marketing. We help businesses create personalized, unified customer journeys and offer better experiences across web and app. With advanced segmentation, automated messaging and real-time analytics, Airship empowers you to deliver highly targeted and tailored experiences throughout the customer lifecycle.
Benefits of Adopting Lifecycle Marketing
Implementing lifecycle marketing strategies can lead to numerous benefits for your company, including:
- Improved Customer Experience. Providing personalized and relevant messages at every stage of the customer journey can help businesses boost the overall customer experience, leading to higher satisfaction.
- Higher Conversion Rates. Targeted messaging and offers tailored to specific customer segments can improve conversion rates and increase revenue.
- Increased Customer Loyalty. Lifecycle marketing can encourage brand loyalty and repeat business by building stronger emotional connections and providing value at every touchpoint.
- Reduced Churn. Proactive engagement and personalized retention efforts can help companies address potential churn risks.
Case Studies: Real-World Examples
AMC Theatres used Airship’s customer experience platform to drive mobile app adoption and engagement as part of their lifecycle marketing strategy. They used rich push notifications with images and movie trailers to promote new movie releases and incentivize ticket purchases directly through the app. To drive engagement and loyalty, they incorporated geofencing for location-based offers and deployed re-engagement campaigns with timely messaging.
With the help of Airship, AMC increased app traffic, boosted conversions via rich notifications and retained users through location-aware messaging across the mobile customer lifecycle.
Getting Started With Lifecycle Marketing
If you want to implement lifecycle marketing techniques into your marketing strategy, start by collecting and analyzing customer data. You can collect zero- and first-party data to build richer customer profiles.. With these insights, you can clearly define the stages of the customer lifecycle and segment audiences into distinct groups based on their lifecycle stage, behaviors and traits. This data-driven audience segmentation helps you create targeted messaging.
Once you’ve segmented your audience, you can develop coordinated lifecycle campaigns tailored to each stage of the customer journey. Use marketing automation and analytics to streamline processes and continually improve your strategy based on performance data while providing extraordinary experiences at every touchpoint: on the web, in the app, and everywhere in between.
To further improve your customer lifecycle marketing strategy, partner with a trusted expert like Airship! We offer powerful solutions to help you deliver personalized messaging to your customers. With advanced segmentation, automation and real-time analytics capabilities, Airship empowers companies to create customized experiences at every stage of the customer lifecycle.