Building an automated lifecycle marketing campaign: A step-by-step guide

The ability to deliver personalized and relevant messages to your prospects and customers with the right message, at the right time, and at scale is critical to the success of any modern marketing strategy.

But that level of personalization is almost impossible to achieve if you’re not leveraging automation in your lifecycle marketing. From welcome sequences to targeted nurturing campaigns, automated journeys empower marketers to deliver the right content to the right people at crucial touchpoints throughout the customer journey—and achieve scalability without sacrificing personalization.

Step 1: Pick a customer journey to automate

The number of automated journeys you could build is practically limitless—and, once you have your foundational lifecycle marketing campaigns in place you might want to introduce further layers of complexity.

But, before you do that, start by building a few of the basic journeys below. Not sure which one to tackle first? Consider which journey you think would have the biggest impact on your key success metric(s)? Which journey targets your biggest, untouched audience? Or even, which automation will take the fewest resources to create?

Welcome and onboarding

Craft a seamless onboarding experience that ensures customers feel valued and successful right from the start. Personalized welcome emails, guided tutorials, and proactive support can help customers navigate your offerings and become acquainted with the value you provide.

Nurture and content delivery

Build customer relationships through continuous engagement and the delivery of valuable resources. Implement a series of automated emails or drip campaigns to provide educational content, industry insights, relevant blog posts, or exclusive offers. By nurturing customers with valuable information, you position your brand as a trusted resource and deepen their engagement.

Product activation and engagement

Help customers unlock the full potential of your products or services. Automated messages can guide users through product activation, introduce them to features they may not have discovered, or highlight new releases. By proactively encouraging product exploration and usage, you increase customer satisfaction and foster long-term engagement.

Customer retention and loyalty

Strengthen customer loyalty by consistently reinforcing the value they receive from your brand. Automated campaigns can include personalized recommendations, loyalty rewards, and customer appreciation messages. By demonstrating your commitment to their success, you foster a sense of belonging and encourage repeat purchases.

Reactivation

Win back dormant or lost users by implementing targeted reactivation campaigns. Analyze customer behavior and preferences to develop personalized messages and offers that reignite their interest in your brand. These campaigns can serve as a second chance to re-engage and regain their trust.

Step 2: Build your journey

Choose a pre-built template or build from scratch

While you can build your journey from scratch marketing automation platforms offer a library of pre-built templates designed to cater to various campaign types, from individual emails to complete nurture campaigns or onboarding sequences, using frameworks based on industry best practices and results.

Define entry, exit, and attribution settings

Decide on the entry points that initiate your journey, such as subscribing to a newsletter, watching an on-demand demo, or reaching a specific milestone within your platform. You should also establish well-defined exit conditions to determine when a prospect or customer has completed the desired action or progressed to a particular stage in their journey. To gauge the effectiveness of your campaign, establish attribution settings that allow for accurate measurement and analysis of key metrics.

Leverage conditions and filters

In addition to entry and exit criteria, you should also define conditions and filters to trigger specific actions or messages within the journey based on customer behavior, preferences, or key indicators.

Test and ship

Before launching your journey, test and test again, including a final run-through of the entire journey to verify that all entry and exit criteria are accurate, conditions and filters are correctly set up, and you’re set up to measure performance from the moment it goes live.

Step 3: Report on impact and optimize

Once your new journey is live, regularly review its performance to assess its overall impact and identify areas for optimization—including where it could be beneficial to add in further complexity. Lara Barnett, Head of Marketing at Logicalis Australia, suggests creating multiple ‘layers' to your nurture campaigns, where prospective customers drop down a layer as they make their way further down the funnel each time they show buying intent. “

There are countless decisions you need to make regarding how many layers you need to nurture a customer to achieve your goal or goals, what the content might be, and when to trigger a new journey,” says Lara. “These decisions should be based on your knowledge of your customer, your industry, product, service, brand, and more, as well as being combined with your instincts as a marketer.”

Final word

If you’re not automating your lifecycle marketing, you won’t be able to create truly personalized journeys that deliver the messages to the right people at the right time at scale. Make sure you put the basic journeys in place now to nurture, convert, and retain your customers, and drive long-term growth for your business.