Explore the Benefits of Customer Lifecycle Marketing Strategy

Your website users’ experience should be top of mind for any marketing organization or manager to ensure missteps are not the reasons for particular behaviors. It is important to go to great content lengths to ensure that your brand messaging and customer service mesh well and share the same voice and tone throughout each stage of the customer lifecycle. Because the cost of retaining a customer is on average much lower that the cost of new customer acquisition, increasing the customer lifetime value should be considered a top priority.

But, how can you increase the customer retention rates if you have a hazy understanding of the concept? And, what does it have to do with lifecycle marketing?

All too often, marketers are unable to determine what their actual customer retention rate is and thus are unable to increase the brand’s value in the eyes of their customers.

Funnel-based marketing (also known as lifecycle marketing) has been around for some time now. It is a great way to get to know and understand your customers’ pain points and needs throughout each stage of the customer lifecycle. The power of understanding allows you to provide valuable and entertaining insight, all while building and nurturing a strong relationship with your customers.

Funnel-based marketing also helps with creating user engagement through brand awareness and recognition. This method has been used to model, measure and track marketing initiatives to a specific dollar amount per marketing initiative.

What does that mean? Tracking the revenue of content initiatives can be a major benefit for most businesses that are utilizing customer relationship management software and marketing automation. These invaluable tools provide insight into the actions, behaviors, needs and wants of your current and prospective audience, current clients, and past customers.

More often than not, the focus on customer lifecycle is centered on how we as marketers can best serve prospects to encourage lead generation.

Since the dawning of the digital age, customers have focused on developing top-of-mind awareness for certain brands and are eager to remain in the know about what is going on in the world around them. This has spawned the fear of missing out (FOMO) in consumers across the board—putting pressure on marketers in every industry to create the most innovative and informative content.

Content marketing is a great way to foster these trends if you can align your content production with the proper stages of the customer lifecycle. Simply put, to leverage this effectively, you need to create beneficial content that moves your website visitors through the customer lifecycle and assists and qualifies them each stage of the way.

Lifecycle marketing is a data-based approach to focusing content production on each stage of the entire customer experience. This method simplifies the search for ways to appeal to a more concentrated and engaged audience.

For the most part,  past focus on the customer lifecycle has been centered around developing awareness, interest, and eventually the decision to purchase. But, that was where it ended. These days, that is just not enough to generate the needed brand awareness to achieve success.

With traditional forms of marketing, customers decided upon a course of action (the conversion of your sale) based upon their need for certain products or services at that time, and that was it. At this point in traditional marketing, most businesses or organizations will then head back up the ladder to the beginning stages to start the process over, and attempt to gain new customers. This is where the digital age has stepped up and improved upon the traditional means of marketing.

In modern marketing, it is just as important to maintain an engaging and thought provoking relationship after the sale as it is to maintain during and before the sale. This idea is based on building a community around your brand and thus producing an environment conducive to on-site community engagement.

The value of customer experience at every stage of the customer lifecycle, including the delight and expand stages, is crucial to prevent customer churn and to lengthen the customer lifecycle. The length of your customer lifecycle (and inevitably the lifetime customer value) all benefit from top-of-the-line customer service and community engagement.

The idea with customer lifecycle marketing is to build a bond with your past, present, and potential customers in a way that speaks the truth, in brevity, of your brand and industry.

Customer lifecycle marketing with content marketing-focused initiatives will help build your brand in a manner that generates community engagement, reduces customer acquisition costs, and increases customer lifetime value and brand awareness like no other. Build your brand on your land!

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