Lifecycle marketing, as its name suggests, involves studying the whole customer journey in an integrated way, from first contact to customer relationship management rather than narrowly focusing on a given campaign, channel or metric.
Instead of focusing on separate campaigns, you should use an ‘always-on’ approach to marketing look as your customer’s entire journey, across all devices and channels, and optimise your messaging to align with the various touch points along that journey.
Because lifecycle marketing works across platforms, it is key the different teams running different aspects of your marketing can collaborate and all pull in the same direction when applying a lifecycle marketing strategy. To start with, everyone needs to be on the same page and understand exactly what customer lifecycle marketing entails.
Below are some definitions of lifecycle marketing from different departments/business types.
Email Marketing:
“Lifecycle marketing intergrates your ecommerce and email databases to generate highly personlised messages for your customers” - Kath Pay, Email Marketing Expert
CRM:
“Customer life cycle is a term used to describe the progression of steps a customer goes through when considering, purchasing, using, and maintaining loyalty to a product or service” - Margaret Rouse, Tech Target
Academic:
The customer life cycle describes the points in the continuum where you: 1) Claim someones attention. 2) Bring them into your sphere of influence. 3) Turn them into a registered and/or paying customer. 4) Keep them as a customer. 5) Turn them into a company advocate. - Sterne and Cutler, aurthors of the [paperintroducing the concept of the customer lifecycle back in 2000
Ecommerce:
“Customer lifecycle marketing (CLM) is an approach to customer communication that recognises that different stages on the journey to becoming a loyal, active customer require different marketing messages and strategies.” - Ecommerce analyitics software,
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