A Guide to Lifecycle Marketing [Stages, Strategies, Benefits & Software]

Lifecycle marketing is an essential tool for any modern business. It is a customer-centric approach to marketing and sales that considers customers' specific needs and allows firms to leverage lifecycle touchpoints.

These touchpoints can help businesses maximize sales, increase customer loyalty and gain more insight into customer behavior.

But there's more to this concept of marketing than just segmenting customers. To take full advantage of lifecycle marketing, this guide will go over the following topics:

• What is lifecycle marketing?
• What lifecycle stages are involved in lifecycle marketing
• Lifecycle marketing strategy defined
• Lifecycle marketing campaigns inspirations
• Benefits of lifecycle marketing
• How Ringy helps with effective lifecycle marketing

It seems we've got quite a mountain to climb ahead of us.

But don't worry! This detailed guide will make lifecycle marketing a piece of cake. Let's dive right in!

What is Lifecycle Marketing?

Lifecycle marketing is a customer-centric marketing strategy that focuses on communicating with customers based on their specific journey, from initial awareness to loyalty and advocacy.

Lifecycle marketing aims to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time. A well-executed lifecycle marketing strategy can significantly increase customer lifetime value, making it a critical focus for modern businesses. In essence, it maps marketing activities to the marketing customer lifecycle, creating relevant and timely experiences for every individual.

What Is Customer Lifecycle Marketing?

Customer lifecycle marketing is the practice of aligning marketing communications, offers, and channels with the distinct phases a customer progresses through with a business. It moves beyond single-purchase conversions to focus on cultivating a long-term relationship.

This approach integrates deeply with CRM lifecycle marketing strategies and tools. By using a CRM platform, businesses can track crucial CRM data, such as:

This deep insight enables highly personalized messaging across all lifecycle marketing campaigns. For instance, a customer who has just finished a free trial will receive a different message than a loyal customer who hasn't purchased in six months.

Studies show that personalized communications, which are the backbone of customer lifecycle marketing strategies, can drive a 10-15% increase in sales conversion rates. Lifecycle marketing software makes this level of personalization scalable.

That said, here's how traditional marketing vs. CRM-driven lifecycle marketing differ from each other:

5 Marketing Lifecycle Stages

The complete marketing lifecycle is typically broken down into five distinct phases, which serve as the foundation for any robust lifecycle marketing strategy.

Stage 1: Awareness

Focus: The primary goal is building brand recognition and trust among potential customers who are just discovering your solution. This is where a lead enters your funnel.

CRM Application: The CRM is used for Segmentation + automated outreach. You can segment new leads based on their entry source (e.g., paid ad, content download) and instantly trigger communications.

Example: A welcome drip campaign or lead magnet email is automatically sent upon sign-up, delivering valuable content and introducing the brand.

Stage 2: Consideration

Focus: Once aware, the focus shifts to education and trust-building. The customer is researching options and evaluating your solution against competitors.

CRM Application: This phase leverages the CRM for personalized content recommendations. Based on the lead's tracked behavior (pages visited, assets downloaded), the CRM identifies the next best piece of content to share.

Example: An automated nurture sequence showcasing value propositions is deployed, perhaps sending case studies or product demo videos relevant to the lead's industry.

Stage 3: Conversion

Focus: The objective here is clearly driving purchases or sign-ups, moving the prospect to a paying customer.

CRM Application: The CRM uses trigger-based messaging to intervene at critical decision points, such as cart reminders, scheduling sales calls, or initiating timely SMS follow-ups.

Example: A drip or SMS campaign automation is triggered when a user abandons a shopping cart, which can recover up to 20% of lost sales. This is a crucial step in the marketing campaign lifecycle.

Stage 4: Retention

Focus: After the first purchase, the goal becomes ongoing engagement and satisfaction to minimize churn and encourage repeat business.

CRM Application: The system handles post-purchase follow-up and automated feedback collection. It monitors product usage and purchase frequency to predict when a customer might need assistance or an upgrade.

Example: Loyalty program or customer survey automation is used to check on product satisfaction 30 days after purchase, which is essential for maximizing customer lifetime value.

Stage 5: Advocacy

Focus: The final stage focuses on transforming satisfied customers into brand evangelists, encouraging referrals and testimonials.

CRM Application: This stage utilizes the CRM for referral tracking, reward programs, and social engagement. It identifies your most loyal customers for outreach.

Example: A “Refer a Friend” program powered by CRM triggers is launched, offering an incentive to the existing customer and the new lead. This can be one of the most cost-effective forms of B2B lifecycle marketing, as referred customers often have a 16% higher lifetime value.

These five stages ensure comprehensive coverage of the entire customer lifecycle, allowing for a dynamic and responsive marketing effort.

Lifecycle Marketing Strategy Defined

A successful lifecycle marketing strategy is not a single campaign but a systematic framework designed to guide customers through the marketing customer lifecycle. It relies heavily on planning, automation, and continuous optimization, ensuring every step from awareness to advocacy is covered.

1. Map Your Customer Journey Stages

The first step is to clearly define and map your customer journey stages, from initial prospect to brand advocate. This involves detailing what actions a customer takes at each point, what information they need, and what barriers they might face.

By understanding these lifecycle stages marketing efforts can be precisely targeted. For example, a B2B company's stages might be slightly different from a B2C retailer's, underscoring the need for tailored B2B lifecycle marketing or consumer-focused strategies.

2. Identify Touchpoints for Engagement

Next, identify all potential touchpoints for engagement across various channels (email, social media, SMS, in-app messages). A touchpoint is any moment where the customer interacts with your brand. The goal is to ensure communication is relevant and continuous.

This step requires integrating lifecycle marketing tools with your CRM so that customer data informs where and how engagement happens. A consistent, multi-channel approach increases retention rates by up to 91% compared to single-channel efforts.

3. Automate Workflows for Each Stage

Automation means setting up trigger-based messages that deploy the right content at the precise moment a customer's status changes (e.g., sending a welcome email upon sign-up, or a re-engagement offer after a period of inactivity).

Using lifecycle marketing software for this purpose frees up marketing teams and ensures consistency. Automated welcome emails, for instance, see 4x more opens and 5x more clicks than standard bulk emails.

4. Measure and Optimize Campaign Performance

The final, crucial step is to measure and optimize campaign performance continuously. Review key metrics tied to the business goals of each stage, such as:

• Open rates (Awareness)
• Click-through rates (Consideration)
• Conversion rates (Conversion)
• Churn rates (Retention)
• Referral rates (Advocacy)

By constantly testing and improving, businesses can achieve significant gains in customer lifetime value (CLV), the ultimate metric of successful customer lifecycle marketing.

Lifecycle Marketing Campaigns Inspirations

Once you've identified the customer lifecycle stages that work for your business, it's time to develop campaigns and initiatives that engage customers.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Campaign 1. Onboarding Customers

Onboarding is the process of introducing new customers to your business and helping them get acquainted with what you have to offer. This could include an email series, a customer success page on your website, or customer onboarding videos.

At this stage, customers have gone from being interested in your product to signing up to become customers. A successful onboarding process will keep them engaged and ensure they have the best experience with your business.

To ensure maximum conversion, we recommend the following best practices:

• Make customer onboarding emails easy to understand and informative.
• Personalize customer onboarding videos to your customer's needs.
• Create customer success pages on your website that explain the benefits of using your product or service and how it can help them achieve their goals.
• Offer customer onboarding support to ensure your customers get the most out of their experience.

Campaign 2. Expansion

Once you have identified customer needs and created a successful onboarding process, it's time to focus on customer expansion. At this stage, you need to identify ways to deepen customer relationships and increase their loyalty.

To do this, you need to understand customer behavior and create campaigns to help build customer trust and brand loyalty. Here are some ideas:

• Create customer loyalty programs such as discounts or rewards for repeat customers.
• Offer customer referrals to encourage friends and family members to become customers.
• Send customer surveys to get customer feedback and understand customer needs.
• Run customer education courses to help customers get the most out of their experience with your product or service.

Campaign 3. Retention

Once customer acquisition is complete, the customer lifecycle marketing process will move on to customer retention.

This phase of lifecycle marketing focuses on maintaining customer loyalty and engagement by providing them with value-added services or offers that help meet their needs.

During this stage of marketing, some best practices to keep in mind are:

• Strengthen customer relationships through loyalty programs, discounts, and other offers.
• Utilize email campaigns to send personalized messages tailored to different customer segments.
• Engage customers with content like product tutorials, webinars, and podcasts.
• Offer special promotions that are only available to existing customers.
• Measure customer satisfaction regularly and adjust accordingly.

Campaign 4. Win-Backs

Win-backs are a marketing campaign that you can use to get customers who have already bought something from you to buy again. These customers have gone through your customer lifecycle marketing process and made a purchase before but haven't purchased again.

Win-back campaigns should focus on customer needs and provide customer incentives to encourage customer loyalty. Here are some ideas:

• Offer customers an exclusive discount or promotion code.
• Personalize the message to emphasize customer lifecycle marketing.
• Increase engagement with follow-up emails, surveys, and polls.
• Send customer re-engagement emails with exciting content and updates about your product or service.

The most important thing to remember when setting up win-back campaigns is that customer engagement should be the ultimate goal.

Benefits of Customer Lifecycle Marketing

There are numerous benefits to implementing a customer lifecycle marketing strategy. Some of the top benefits include:

1. Aligns with Customer Journey

Lifecycle marketing is a strategy that helps match your marketing campaigns with the different stages customers go through.

From the initial awareness to the consideration and purchase stages, lifecycle marketing helps create meaningful customer experiences that lead to conversions.

For example, you can send customers product recommendations during the research phase or create post-purchase surveys to find out how to improve your products and services. This helps provide an engaging customer journey where customers feel valued and appreciated.

2. Increased Retention Rates

The main goal of lifecycle marketing is to keep customers engaged and interested in your brand over a more extended period. According to HubSpot, businesses only need to retain 5% more customers to see over a 25% increase in revenue.

You can look at and do a few things to increase your customer retention.

• First, look at the customer lifecycle funnel and see where customers drop out or disengage. This will tell you what kind of lifecycle marketing campaigns you should create to retain those customers.
• You can also create campaigns that reward loyal customers with discounts on products or services, exclusive access to content, and exclusive deals. This is a great way to keep your customers engaged with your brand and return for more.

Finally, you can also focus on understanding customer lifetime value and create campaigns tailored to each customer's needs. This will help ensure that your lifecycle marketing campaigns effectively increase customer retention.

3. Increased Sales and Profits

Lifecycle marketing can increase your sales and profits in a few different ways. First, it helps you target customers more likely to purchase from you. By focusing on customer lifetime value and understanding each customer's individual needs, you can create campaigns that are most likely to resonate with them.

Second, lifecycle marketing helps increase customer loyalty and engagement, which can lead to more repeat purchases. By creating campaigns that reward loyal customers and provide regular updates about your products and services, you can keep customers engaged with your brand over a more extended period of time.

Finally, lifecycle marketing also helps to increase customer referrals. According to research, 77% of customers feel more inclined to buy or use a product if it was recommended by friends and family.

Therefore, you can easily increase your sales and profits by creating campaigns that reward customers for referring your products and services to their friends and family.

4. Cost Savings

By targeting customers who have already shown interest in their products and services, companies save money they would otherwise spend on attracting new, potential customers.

Additionally, by creating campaigns tailored to each customer's needs, companies can save money on the costs associated with creating and executing new campaigns.

5. Improved Insights

Customer insights are essential for businesses to understand what customers want and need. By gathering customer data through lifecycle marketing campaigns, companies can gain valuable insights into their target markets that help inform future decisions.

Businesses can use these insights to develop more effective product and service offerings, create better customer experiences, and make more informed decisions about marketing investments.

With the proper implementation of lifecycle marketing, businesses can reap the benefits for many years.

How Ringy Helps With Effective Lifecycle Marketing

Effective customer lifecycle marketing requires powerful and integrated lifecycle marketing software.

Ringy serves as a dedicated CRM lifecycle marketing platform designed to streamline and automate the entire customer journey across the five key marketing lifecycle stages.

1. Awareness: Automate Outreach and Capture More Leads

Ringy is built to automate outreach and capture more leads right at the start. It connects directly with lead vendors, websites, and landing pages to automatically pull new contacts into the CRM. This instant integration means no manual entry and no missed opportunities.

With automated email and SMS capabilities, new prospects can be engaged instantly, kicking off the marketing campaign lifecycle smoothly.

2. Consideration: Personalize Every Interaction

To excel in the Consideration stage, Ringy helps you personalize every interaction. Every contact is organized, tracked, and automatically scored based on their activity.

This data segmentation allows you to create highly targeted drip campaigns and deliver personalized content, be it an educational email sequence or targeted SMS outreach, that resonates with the audience's unique needs, ensuring you stay top of mind.

The best part is personalized marketing can reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC) by up to 50%.

3. Conversion: Move Prospects Through the Funnel Faster

Ringy's features are designed to move prospects through the funnel faster to achieve the conversion goal.

Features like click-to-call and Local ID allow teams to connect with customers using a local presence, significantly boosting engagement. Integrated calling, texting, and emailing tools ensure the sales team is agile.

Furthermore, trigger-based automation guarantees that crucial follow-ups happen at the right moment, which directly increases conversion rates.

4. Retention: Keep Customers Engaged Post-Purchase

A core part of lifecycle marketing strategies is post-sale engagement. Ringy helps keep customers engaged post-purchase using automated reminders, feedback collection, and nurture campaigns.

By maintaining ongoing communication, the platform helps strengthen trust and build the long-term loyalty necessary for maximizing CLV. Retaining a customer is up to five times cheaper than acquiring a new one.

5. Advocacy: Turn Happy Customers Into Promoters

In the final stage, Ringy makes it easy to turn happy customers into promoters. The platform manages referral programs and testimonials using custom tags, automations, and analytics.

By tracking engagement and communication history, Ringy identifies satisfied customers and triggers invitations for them to share their positive experiences, amplifying vital word-of-mouth marketing.

The Data-Driven Advantage

Ringy provides a data-driven advantage by offering built-in analytics and reporting tools that help users visualize the customer lifecycle in real time.

This crucial functionality allows marketers to see which lifecycle marketing campaigns convert best, which lead sources drive the highest ROI, and where to focus optimization efforts for future success, all within one centralized dashboard.

Conclusion

Congratulations on making it to the top! We appreciate your patience and support.

At this point, the benefits of lifecycle marketing are clear. By implementing a comprehensive strategy, businesses can segment customers into different lifecycle stages and create tailored campaigns that resonate with their target audience.

This helps them build relationships, engage customers, increase marketing success, and bring in more revenue. What's even better is that customer lifecycle marketing software makes it easier to track customer interactions and measure the success of campaigns. This is where Ringy comes in.

Ringy provides a comprehensive suite of tools that enable businesses to manage their lifecycle marketing campaigns and maximize their marketing success. Try it out today and start driving more conversions!