Lifecycle marketing is one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal for nurturing prospects and retaining customers, allowing you to cater to your audience’s needs at every stage of the buyer journey.
But what does it take to build lifecycle marketing campaigns that work? You must lay the groundwork first, by honing in on your ideal customer profile (ICP), mapping out the customer journey, identifying key metrics for success, and tracking the data that will allow you to refine your campaigns over time.
Once you have those foundations in place, you’ll be able to automate lifecycle marketing campaigns—from welcoming new users through to customer retention and reactivation—that not only allow you to target your customers with the right message at the right moment, but scale those campaigns over time.
Develop a deep understanding of your customer
Before embarking on any marketing campaign, it is essential to have an understanding of your ideal customer profile, immersing yourself in the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral aspects that define your target audience. Beyond the implications for operationalizing your data, this knowledge allows you to tailor your messaging and offerings throughout the customer lifecycle with pinpoint precision, addressing their unique pain points and preferences at every stage of the journey.
“What makes a great marketer is empathy — being able to step into your customers' shoes, see through your customer's eyes, think through your customer's mind,” says Lara Barnett (Vandersluis), Head of Marketing for Logicalis Australia and an expert at building out multi-layered nurture campaigns.
Research backs that up, too, with a study from Gallup finding that organizations that leverage customer behavioral insights outperform their peers by 85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin.
Map the customer journey
It’s impossible to build a lifecycle campaign if you don’t have an understanding of your customer’s journey in the first place.
“Before you start building out a nurture campaign, think about if you were in this person's position—whether that’s an HR manager, IT manager, or CEO. What would your concerns be? What would I be thinking about at this point in time? Who would I want to hear from? Where would I be looking for that information?” says Lara. “If you can answer some of those questions for yourself as a starting point, then you know a good path to figuring out the right journey.”
Tom Mitchell, Senior Lifecycle Operations Manager at Sona, agrees: “You've got to take a step back and not just look at marketing but look at sales and success and then back to the start again and make sure the whole life cycle of a prospect to customer is looked at holistically and is handled consistently.”
Try visually representing each touchpoint customers have with your brand during the customer journey using a tool like Figjam or Miro. It might get messy, but you’ll gain valuable insights into critical moments of engagement and decision-making and spot any gaps in your current approach. Here’s a three-step approach to mapping your customer journey:
Step one: Determine all touchpoints, channels, and key conversion points
Your map needs to show all the points of contact your customer has with your brand, on that specific journey and to achieve the desired goal. Be sure to consider:
Owned, earned and paid channels
Online and offline touchpoints
Key conversion points (i.e., subscribing to newsletter, signing up for a trial, making a purchase, upsell or renewal).
Step two: Collect direct feedback
Interviewing customers, and asking about their experience as it occurs will be worth its weight in gold when building and validating your customer journey map. We’ve added a few key questions to help get you started:
How easy or difficult did you find using our website/app/platform?
Are you satisfied with the (onboarding/ check out/ billing) process?
How did the product/ brand help you? Were there any problems that were not solved by our product/ brand?
Is there anything we can do to support you or better your experience with us?
Step three: Map it out
By this point, you are likely to have a solid understanding of your particular customer journey. Now you just need to put it all down on ‘paper’ (or your chosen platform) and see this map come together. Plot the route the customer needs to take to achieve the goal, add all the touchpoints the customer can visit along the way, and consider decision trees around key conversion moments.
Then, invite input from your other stakeholders to ensure accuracy. Once all your information is down, you can then work on aesthetics, so anybody within the company can understand the customer journey map visualization at a glance.
Identify key metrics for success
To assess the effectiveness of your lifecycle marketing campaigns, establishing clear and actionable metrics is imperative. Identify one or two key success metrics for your overall lifecycle program that align with your company’s objectives. Examples of program-level key metrics could be:
Customer Lifetime Value
New or net MRR
Influenced pipeline or revenue
It’s important to make sure you have buy-in from all executive stakeholders. Then, set your supporting metrics at the operation and campaign or program level to create a hierarchy of impact to move those key success metric(s). Here’s an example of what this looks like in practice:
With this framework in place, you can align specific individual campaigns, addressing defined sections of your customer lifecycle, to move the needle on relevant operational metrics. Examples of aligning individual campaigns to specific operational or supporting success metrics could be:
Campaign: Top-of-funnel content journey
Key metric for the campaign = new trials
Supporting metric for the campaign = email engagement / retargeting ads performance
Campaign: New user activation journey
Key metric for the campaign = new mrr
Supporting metric for the campaign =product usage metrics/email engagement
Ultimately, you’ll be equipped to evaluate the success of individual campaigns and their cumulative impact.
Harness the power of data
You can’t measure what you don’t track. Data collection lies at the heart of effective lifecycle marketing campaigns, providing invaluable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and engagement levels that allow you to both kick off your campaigns and ensure you’re targeting the right segments with the right messages, as well as being able to iterate your campaigns over time as you start to see results come.
Yet, “most companies are using only a fraction of the data in their possession. Sprawling legacy systems, siloed databases, and sporadic automation are common obstacles,” according to research by McKinsey. “Often, too, organizations may not have a clear understanding of the specific outcomes they’re looking to achieve through data optimization. All that is leaving significant value on the table.”
This makes conducting a comprehensive audit of your data capture processes essential to ensure the acquisition of the necessary information for measuring key metrics and unraveling the intricacies of the customer journey. For example, if lead quality is one of your metrics, am I capturing data in alignment with my ICP definition so I can evaluate quality? If MRR is my metric and I acquire leads through trials, am I capturing product usage data to understand engagement at this stage of the journey, which is predictive of future MRR?
Marketers need to be “as militant and efficient as possible in organizing their data,” says Tom. "Because at the end of the day, your marketing is only going to be as good as your data.”
Final word
Ultimately, you won’t see success from your lifecycle marketing campaigns if you don’t have the right foundations. By deepening your understanding of the ideal customer profile, mapping the customer journey, defining metrics, and embracing data collection practices, you can pave the way for targeted marketing campaigns that drive growth.
