You hear that following up with new contacts can increase your revenue, that personalisation is a “hot trend” for your marketing this year and getting your message right is an absolute must to attract your ideal customers. But how does this fit into Lifecycle Marketing? Here, we’ll be sharing with you some examples of Lifecycle Marketing strategies for you can make use of for a more effective Lifecycle Marketing strategy.
Not sure what Lifecycle Marketing is? Read this post first
The Basics
Lifecycle marketing is about getting the right message to your customers at the right time. How does that happen and can this be automated?
Yes, it can be automated! Here’s the how. By recognising the trigger activated by your customer you can send them a timely message that meets their needs at that moment using the channel that they last used.
Trigger
This is the “when” and sets off a marketing reaction based on your customers recent actions. That could be:
- Opting into a newsletter
- Dates including birthdays, anniversaries, or even joining your subscriber list
- Customer purchases
- Browsing behaviour on your website
- Changes in customer accounts
This is different to traditional marketing, which is triggered by the brand. Lifecycle Marketing is triggered by the customer.
Message
The “what”. Your message is the communication being sent to or shared with your customer.
Keep it relevant and contextual based on the trigger, or your customer’s actions. If they’ve just signed up for a free download or guide, then send an email welcome series and share more content around that topic with them.
Content with a specific message can include:
- Blog posts
- Social media posts
- White papers
- Emails and email sequences
- Guides
- Testimonials
- Product reviews
By getting your message out there for every stage of your customer journey you’ll quickly get ahead of your competitors. Unfortunately, when only messages from a small range of the buying stages are shared then Lifecycle Marketing can become less effective. This is often the case for many small businesses.
Channel
Now for the “where”. Which channel do you engage your customers?
To get your customers attention, you need to choose the right channel to interact with your customers.
Those channels can be your:
- Blog
- Social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn)
- Search (Pinterest, YouTube, Google)
- Website
Get to know the place where your customers are most likely to be and share your message with them there. This is where they are most likely to see it and take action.
Examples of Lifecycle Marketing Strategies
Here are some examples of Lifecycle Marketing strategies you can implement into your business with the lists separated by B2C and B2B.
Personalised follow-up
We all like to feel cared about by the businesses and brands we follow and spend our money with. Your customers will feel the same way too. Personalising your emails with their interests, needs and recent behaviours will do that.
Here’s how that can be achieved.
B2C examples:
Based on browsing history you could send:
- Personalised recommendations
- Cart abandonment
- Session abandonment
Based on last purchase you could send:
- Onboarding for new clients
- Upsells & cross sells
- Introduce loyalty programme
B2B examples:
Based on browsing history you could send:
- Recommended reading
- Interesting resources
- Invite to book a call or appointment
Based on last purchase you could send:
- Upsells & cross sells
- Invite to refer a friend programme
- Share details of product/ service launch
Next steps…..
To put these strategies into place, you first need a system that connects customer data to your marketing system.
There are many tools out there that can do this for you, but usually they need to be integrated with another tool or via a third party app like Zapier, IFTTT, or similar. When working this way, things can get a little messy and tricky to keep ticking over, especially if you’re unsure of how to manage and maintain multiple tech systems in this way.
Being Keap certified consultants, the tool Solofusion recommends for the full impact of lifecycle marketing is Keap. We love its all-in-one approach to keeping all of your marketing in one place that’s easy to manage too.
If you’d like to see it in action, you can sign up to a 14 day free trial by clicking here.
