Modern marketing is much more than just converting leads into buying customers. It’s about long-lasting relationships, which require robust customer lifecycle marketing strategies to build.
But what exactly do these strategies look like, and how can you use the right customer lifecycle marketing automation software to execute them?
Join us today as we explore how you can optimize customer engagement and retention, among other outcomes, using proven strategies and technology.
What Is Customer Lifecycle Marketing Automation?
Customer lifecycle marketing automation (CLMA) refers to automatically delivering personalized content and experiences to customers at every stage of their journey with a brand, from initial awareness to repeat buying and advocacy.
As a business or organization, you can use customer data, technology, and customer engagement strategies in lifecycle marketing automation.
You can use the three aspects to understand customer behavior and trigger automated actions that nurture relationships, drive conversions, and promote long-term loyalty.
For instance, you can automate sending a welcome email to new leads, personalized product or service recommendations to existing customers, or a win-back offer to customers who are about to churn.
How Customer Lifecycle Marketing Automation Differs from Traditional Marketing
Unlike the one-size-fits-all, campaign-focused approach in traditional marketing, customer lifecycle marketing automation is a personalized, nurturing, and integrated approach that remains consistent throughout the entire customer journey.
Here’s a high-level overview of how the two marketing strategies differ:
| Aspect | Customer Lifecycle Model | Traditional Marketing |
| Scope | Focuses on the entire customer journey, from initial contact with a brand to post-purchase loyalty, while nurturing ongoing relationships. | Typically focuses on short-term campaigns and lead acquisition, with less emphasis on post-purchase outcomes. |
| Personalization | Uses data-informed automation to deliver highly personalized content, offers, recommendations, and customer experiences based on individual customer behavior and preferences at each stage. | Typically employs a one-size-fits-all approach when communicating with customers, with limited personalization. |
| Technology and Automation | Uses marketing automation software, customer data platforms, and AI to integrate customer data and automate personalized communication. | Relies heavily on manual processes, where teams usually write each message and analyze campaigns one by one. |
| Purpose | Seeks to build long-term customer loyalty, increase repeat purchases, and maximize customer lifetime value. | Primarily seeks to acquire leads and achieve initial conversion, with reduced emphasis on long-term customer retention. |
| Customer Experience | Creates a seamless and timely experience for each customer across various touchpoints and channels. | Creates a fragmented experience because customers interact with separate, disconnected campaigns instead of a continuous journey. |
Benefits of Customer Lifecycle Marketing Automation
When done right, customer lifecycle marketing automation delivers critical benefits such as:
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- Optimized Marketing Resources: Marketing automation enables you to deliver personalized messaging and experiences efficiently, without the need to add team members or increase lead generation expenditure.
- Improved Customer Engagement and Experience: You can get the right information to your customers at the right time and using the right channel. Customer engagement and their entire journey will be more seamless and positive.
- Better Customer Retention: Automated messaging, offers, and recommendations ensure your customers stay engaged and reduce the risk of churn. You can use proactive re-engagement strategies to retain customers who might otherwise consider leaving.
- Enhanced Customer Loyalty: Personalized customer engagement and experiences promote deeper connections and stronger, long-lasting relationships. Increased loyalty can lead to increased revenue through repeat purchases and customer-led advocacy.
- Higher Customer Lifetime Value: By nurturing customers from acquisition to advocacy, you can significantly increase their overall value.
The 6 Core Stages of the Customer Lifecycle
We’ve mentioned that the customer lifecycle is a journey, involving several stages. But what stages are these, and what tactics and metrics can you apply?
Let’s review the key stages of the customer lifecycle journey you need to consider.
1. Awareness
At the awareness stage, prospective customers become aware of your brand, product or service offerings, or niche pain points.
Since they don’t know you well (or at all), you’ll want to get on their radar, create curiosity, and sow the seeds for further engagement.
Some common tactics and automation examples at this stage include:
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- Automated welcome series, such as when a web visitor signs up for your newsletter
- Segmenting prospects based on behaviour, such as the number of pages visited or time on site
- Social ads that retarget visitors.
Your success at the awareness stage can include:
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- Impressions, reach, and unique visitors
- New leads added to your funnel
- Click-throughs or content downloads.
2. Education
At the education stage, your prospects are evaluating and learning more about your brand, as well as understanding the pain points and how you address them.
They aren’t ready to buy yet, but they are still considering and learning. You’ll want to nurture them, establish credibility, and shape their perception of your brand or the niche pain points.
At this stage, you can apply tactics such as webinars, live demos, educational email series, and lead scoring to identify and prioritize high-engagement prospects.
You can also track metrics such as click or open rates for educational emails, webinar attendance, time spent on your core educational resources, and upward movement in lead scores.
3. Selection
The selection stage features prospects comparing options, validating vendors or providers, and progressing toward a buying decision.
You’ll want to make it easier for them to choose you through tactics such as:
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- Automated demo and trial request follow-ups
- Personalized pricing quotes and proposals via email
- Case studies unique to the prospect’s niche or use cases
- Alerts to your sales team when leads reach the set threshold.
Some of the key metrics to track at this stage include demo or trial request rate, time spent in the selection stage, proposal acceptance rate, and prospect-to-opportunity conversion rate.
4. Onboarding
Once your qualified leads turn into customers, onboarding ensures you get them up to speed smoothly and quickly.
You’ll want to reduce drop-off, deliver early wins, and promote confidence in using your service or product.
You can use tactics such as welcome series with key setup steps, setup guides or checklists, reminders if they don’t complete onboarding steps, and automated feedback checkpoints.
The metrics to track at this level include time to first value, completion rate of onboarding steps, support tickets the customer opens during onboarding, and drop-off or churn from onboarding.
5. Adoption
You’ve onboarded your customers, and they are now using your service or product. How can you ensure they use it consistently and derive the expected value?
You can send in-app or email nudges to try underused features, segment customers based on their usage level (medium, high, or inactive), promote add-ons, and deliver user education.
Ensure you measure success through metrics such as feature adoption rates, active user percentages, customer satisfaction, and depth of product or service usage.
6. Achievement
At this stage, customers achieve their expected outcomes or goals using your service or product, realize ROI, and ideally become repeat buyers and loyal advocates.
You’ll want to boost loyalty, retain the customers, and expand your business.
Some key tactics at this stage include milestone-based emails, automatically triggered renewal offers, advocacy or referral campaigns, and success stories or customer spotlight content.
You should also track key metrics, such as retention and renewal rates, upsell revenue, customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, and customer lifetime value.
Essential Components of Customer Lifecycle Marketing Automation
To successfully automate customer lifecycle marketing, you must combine various fundamental elements to execute the core stages outlined above.
These crucial elements include:
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- Technology: You need a customer data platform (CDP) to collect, organize, analyze, and activate customer data. Customer lifecycle management (CLM) software is also necessary as a complementary tool. The tool receives data from the CDP for channel orchestration, automated workflows, and personalized content, among other applications.
- Unified Customer Data: The CDP consolidates all your customer data from different sources, including websites, apps, and CRM systems, to provide a comprehensive view of each customer.
- Advanced Segmentation: Your CDP groups customers into distinct segments based on their lifecycle stage, preferences, and behavior to help you produce targeted messaging.
- Automation: Your technology stack, including the CDP and CLM, can trigger specific marketing messages and campaigns at opportune moments in each customer’s journey.
- Personalization: You should be able to tailor content, customer experiences, recommendations, and offers to individual customers based on their unique behavior, data, and preferences.
- Performance Analytics: It’s important that your tech stack allows you to measure critical metrics to monitor customer behavior, the effectiveness of your campaigns, and the overall progress through the customer lifecycle stages.
Steps to Build Your Customer Lifecycle Marketing Automation Strategy
We now understand the importance of robust lifecycle marketing strategies. Let’s discuss how you can create one that aligns with your business, customers, and goals.
- Define Your Audience: Know the exact individuals or businesses you are targeting. Consider their needs, likes, behaviors, preferences, and demographics. Outline the problems you can solve for them. Create buyer personas, define your lifecycle stages, and map the ideal customer journey.
- Adopt a CDP and CLM: Research and choose the right customer data platform and customer lifecycle management software.
- Design Automated Experiences: Personalize your content and messaging for each stage of the customer journey. Develop automated workflows for each stage, such as welcome emails. Select the most effective channels for interacting with your customers at each point of contact.
- Integrate Your Marketing Tools: Connect your CDP and CLM to other marketing tools, such as CRM systems, analytics software, and email platforms, to ensure seamless data flow and trigger automated actions.
- Implement, Monitor, and Iterate: Use your designed workflows to create and launch automated campaigns that cover the entire customer lifecycle. Track how these campaigns perform at each stage of the lifecycle. Finally, use the data and insights from the monitoring phase to continuously refine your campaigns as time progresses.
Top Customer Lifecycle Marketing Automation Tools
As mentioned earlier, your customer lifecycle marketing automation tech stack should include a customer data platform and a customer lifecycle management tool.
There are numerous options to choose from for these two applications. In this section, we’ll briefly discuss the best tools you should consider.
1. Customer Data Platform (CDP)
A CDP helps you collect and unify data from all your other systems, including websites, email marketing tools, analytics platforms, CRMs, and more.
The data is then activated by passing it down to marketing automation tools, such as your preferred customer lifecycle management software.
At Coffee + Dunn, our team helps you implement Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, which covers both Customer Insights — Data and Customer Insights — Journeys.
As a CDP, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights lets you collect and unify customer data. The tool allows your marketing, sales, and customer service teams to personalize customer engagement across different touchpoints.
Reach out to our team to learn more about our customer engagement services and CDP implementation solutions.
2. Customer Lifecycle Marketing
Depending on your needs, budget, and goals, you can choose from top customer lifecycle marketing tools such as:
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- ActiveCampaign
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Oracle CX
- Klaviyo
- Marketo
- Adobe Experience Manager
Common Challenges and Solutions
Even with the best customer lifecycle marketing software and strategies, you may encounter the following common challenges.
- Over-Automation: Launching and running too many automated campaigns simultaneously can lead to impersonal and robotic customer interactions that alienate customers and lower your brand value. You must use automation moderately, ensuring you balance it with personalized human interaction.
- High Customer Expectations: The modern customer expects highly personalized, timely, and seamless experiences across all touchpoints. Not meeting these expectations can lead to churn. Focus on omnichannel support to ensure you meet customers at their most preferred interaction points.
- Resource Constraints: You may not have the necessary monetary and human resources required to implement and maintain a robust marketing automation ecosystem. Choosing the right tool for your budget and adjusting as your customer and staff numbers grow is a good strategy to overcome these shortcomings.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Have questions about customer lifecycle marketing automation? We have the answers.
What Industries Benefit Most From Customer Lifecycle Marketing Automation?
If you run a business or organization in industries with high lifetime customer value, subscription-based models, and recurring revenue systems, you can benefit greatly from customer lifecycle marketing automation.
You may be in a SaaS, E-commerce, or service-based business. Other key beneficiaries include education, manufacturing, real estate, media and content, and retail.
What Metrics Should Be Tracked for Each Stage of the Customer Lifecycle?
The metrics to track for each customer lifecycle stage can vary based on your industry and goals.
For example, as we discussed earlier, you can track impressions, new leads, and click-throughs at the awareness stage.
At the achievement stage, you can track renewal rates, customer satisfaction, revenue from upselling, customer lifetime value, and Net Promoter Score.
How Long Does It Take to See Results From Lifecycle Automation?
There’s no fixed timeline for achieving the desired results from lifecycle marketing.
You may start to see the initial impact in days or weeks after launching your campaigns.
Bigger changes, such as customer retention, can take weeks to months to start showing results.
The duration varies depending on your technology stack, team expertise and experience, type of automation, the target lifecycles, and the complexity of the customer journey.
Looking Forward
When done right, customer lifecycle marketing automation can be your bridge to improved customer engagement and retention, increased revenue, and optimal returns on investment.
You’ll need the right customer lifecycle management strategies and tools to help you achieve these results. Besides a lifecycle marketing automation tool, you’ll also need a robust customer data platform.
At Coffee + Dunn, we help you adopt and optimize Dynamics 365 Customer Insights as the best CDP for businesses looking to streamline operations and enhance customer engagement.
Partner with us today to implement D365 Customer Insights to maximize your customer lifecycle marketing outcomes.
