In this day and age where consumers have an abundance of choices, closing a sale isn’t enough to build a profitable business.
About 65% of an organization’s business comes from its repeat customers. This means real growth happens when you retain your first-time buyers and, ideally, turn them into brand advocates.
For that, you need a targeted marketing strategy that stems from a deep understanding of the customer lifecycle journey.
This article discusses the different stages of the customer lifecycle journey and how to navigate it to build lasting customer relationships.
A customer lifecycle journey refers to the stages your customer goes through from their initial awareness of your product or brand, to when they either start advocating for, or no longer engage with it.
As a marketer, you, in collaboration with your oganization’s sales team, are responsible for managing the customer lifecycle journey and coming up with strategies to maximize conversion at each stage.
On the other hand, a customer journey is the path your customer takes while interacting with your brand during a specific transaction or experience. For example, clicking an ad to visit a brand’s website for the first time is a crucial step in the customer journey.
The customer journey is seen from the customer’s perspective. It seeks to capture how a customer feels when interacting with a brand during a specific series of actions.
The moment a customer starts their journey with your company, you can direct your marketing efforts to ensure they’re aware of your offerings, and move them along the stages of your customer lifecycle: from being problem-aware to solutions-aware and then eventually buying your product or service.
It’s hard to target your customer in each stage of the customer lifecycle journey as the path from awareness to decision depends entirely on the individual.
But together, these concepts can help you offer a smooth experience for your customers and lead them to conversion. This is where customer lifecyle management comes in.
Customer lifecycle management is a strategic approach businesses use to manage and optimize customer interactions throughout their journeys.
The idea is to track, shape, and understand their experiences during all the stages of the customer lifecycle journey—from awareness to loyalty.
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The process begins with analyzing the stages of your customer lifecycle journey. It involves gathering customer data from different touchpoints (like social media, website, and ads).
It’s a laborious process, where you’ll use analytics tools to try and understand how customers behave at each touchpoint. Then, you use your findings to make decisions to foster customer engagement at every stage of your customer lifecycle.
Analyzing the awareness stage is all about knowing how your prospects are discovering you.
When tracking your customer’s data at the awareness stage, your first order of business is to monitor your traffic sources. Gather insights about traffic from organic search, paid search ads, social media referrals, or direct traffic.
Let’s say you’re launching a new product and want to promote it. So, you run a campaign to increase your brand awareness through Facebook ads.
When gathering these insights, ask yourself these questions:
In this stage, your prospects know what they need to solve their problem; they just haven’t found the solution yet.
Let’s say you offer a time-tracking software for service-based entrepreneurs, freelancers, and organizations working remotely.
A prospect knows she needs to track her time to manage her clients better. She heads to Google and types “time-tracking software” and is bombarded with tons of blogs and landing pages. She clicks on a blog that reads “best time-tracking software for freelancers” and reads about several tools.
After contemplating different options and considering her needs and budget, she chooses your brand, and goes ahead and fills out the form for the demo. But your work isn’t done yet. You still need to monitor her behavior and interactions as she evaluates your software.
When gathering these insights, ask yourself these questions:
In this stage, your customers decide to make a purchase with you. As such, your checkout process, payment options, and shopping experience play a significant role.
Let’s go back to our time-tracking software example. Your prospect requested a demo, and you set up a call with her. After the call, you offer her a week’s free trial and consistently share helpful email communication (blogs and guides) with her until the trial period ends.
On her last day of free trial, you send her a personalized offer and a special discount code that convinces her to close the deal.
However, your efforts must continue. You still need to ensure she keeps using the software and doesn’t churn.
When gathering these insights, ask yourself these questions:
Per a recent survey, a 5% increase in customer retention can increase your profits by 25–95%. This is your cue to refine your retention strategies and make it worthwhile for your customers to stick around and become brand advocates.
When gathering these insights, ask yourself these questions:
Your loyal customers are the most crucial pillars of your marketing strategy. As they repeatedly purchase from you and engage with your brand, you should deepen your relationship with them.
When gathering these insights, ask yourself these questions:
Funnelytics can help you gain a holistic view of how your customers interact and behave at each stage by visualizing and centralizing your the data points and key metrics in a single location.
The best part is that you don’t even need to switch between different platforms to collect data. Funnelytics connects directly to your platforms and makes it easy to monitor results through automated reporting.
Unleash the full potential of Funnelytics with a free 14-day trial and get access to the platform that will help you plan, measure and optimize your customer journeys.
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In the awareness stage, your focus is answering your customers and helping them understand the problem they’re looking to address. If they’re searching for “how to be healthy,” provide them with ample resources around that topic.
The goal here is to build trust and position your product or service as the best choice.
Say, a prospect is looking for an online course on “following a healthy diet.” They’re already in the consideration stage.
This is where you need to help them consider your offerings as a viable solution to their problem.
Your role in this stage is to help your customers choose your product or service, and provide the information and reassurance they need.
Marketing at this stage focuses on keeping existing customers engaged, satisfied, and loyal to your brand.
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The aim of the loyalty stage is to turn your existing customers into brand advocates who not only continue to buy from you, but also promote your brand to others. You do that by offering exclusive deals such as early access, discounts, and rewards to applaud their consistent support.
Knowing your customers well is crucial for laying out the perfect marketing plan and customer journey maps are a critical part of getting to know them.
They help you outline even the smallest funnel detail around the various customer stages, touchpoints, and interactions, and analyze them deeply.
Thankfully, a customer journey mapping tool like Funnelytics can help visualize the entire process and gather all the data from your customer lifecycle journey in one place.
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Founder & CEO @ Funnelytics Inc.
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