Campaign Execution for Lifecycle Marketing

Perhaps you’ve heard about Lifecycle Marketing, and the approach of sending marketing based on where the customer is in their journey with your business makes intuitive sense, but you aren’t sure how to get started. If that is the case, this guide can help you take your first steps with executing these campaigns.

Let’s get started.

The Foundation of Campaign Execution

Let’s start by looking at all of the key elements of implementing your Lifecycle Marketing based on where the customer is in their customer journey with your business.

Audience Segmentation

Bucketing your audience into clearly defined groups helps you understand who your customers are and where they are at in terms of their relationship with your business. These segments are critically important because when they are done correctly, they represent the stages in the customer journey, and will naturally guide which marketing messages each member of your audience should receive. For example, let’s take these examples of segments and how you would market to each of them:

New Audience Member Segment

• Segment: New website visitor or email subscriber

• Campaign: Build confidence in your brand or business and highlight items they have browsed as well as best sellers

• Goal: get them to continue shopping with you and make that first purchase

First Purchase Segment

• Segment: Customer who has placed first order

• Campaign: Thank them for their purchase and make sure they get the most out of their new purchase

• Goal: make them feel good about being a customer and prime them for product review and rewards program

These two segments flow naturally and as a result the messaging changes based on the customer’s growing relationship with your business. There are many more segments you can build out, but in order to send the appropriate message you must first create these segments and use the data you have on hand to build them. Always think through the segment, then begin to stress test it by understanding the type of campaign that segment should receive and how that campaign helps you accomplish the goal of moving that customer to the next stage of the customer journey.

Customer Journey Mapping

Next, build out the key stages of the typical customer journey, from awareness and then purchase, through to retention and eventually advocacy. In broad strokes, these stages typically involve awareness, consideration, purchase, and retention. Get into the nitty gritty here and create as many stages as you can, from there you should prioritize the ones that are going to have the biggest impact on your business. Does your business have a low conversion rate? Focus on the awareness and consideration stages to fix that. Do you get a lot of first time customers who never return? That signals you need to focus on retention. This mapping should feel very aligned with the segments we mentioned in the previous section.

Here are some examples:

• New audience member / email subscriber

• Engaged email subscriber / social media persona / site visitor with no purchase history

• Engaged email subscribers / social media persona / site visitor who has recently abandoned a shopping cart

• Email subscriber with no opens or website visits in 90 or more days

• First time customer with recent purchase

• First time customer with purchase 30 days out

• First time customer whose purchase was 60 or more days out

• Customer with 2+ purchases and $XXX spend with recent purchase

Some of these stages of the journey indicate the contact has very high value, some have moderate value, while others have little or no value. Once you understand the user journey, you can focus your efforts and drive customer lifetime value.

Personalization

The underlying theme that has gone nameless up to this point is that the goal behind Lifecycle Marketing is personalizing your marketing messages in order to improve their effectiveness. The heavy lifting is made easy once you have a system in place for segmenting customers based on where they are in the customer journey. Beyond that, your messaging should include the customer's name, recommend products based on past behavior, and obviously tailor content to their specific interests or needs.

This first step of campaign execution was focused on building the foundation for your Lifecycle Marketing strategy. Once you have this dialed in to the point you have clearly defined profiles that match the stages of your customer journey (or at least the stages you want to focus on), you are ready to build out your messaging and sending those messages when appropriate.

Let’s turn our attention to the tools that will help us run these campaigns efficiently.

Campaign Execution Tools

Automation

Since Lifecycle Marketing involves sending out many different messages to different segments at different times, you will want a tool that can help you manage this level of complexity. Marketing automation software manages this effortlessly by ensuring that the right message is sent at the right time without manual intervention. If you have marketing automation tools you like, now is the time to ensure you have created automated messaging that will trigger based on your segments, confirm that the content is appropriate for the stage of the customer journey, and that the Call to Action (CTA) is consistent with moving the customer to the next stage of your customer lifecycle.

Channel Approach

Customers interact with brands in many ways, such as email, social media, your website, and physical stores. Your Lifecycle Marketing campaigns should incorporate these channels when appropriate, ensuring that the right message is delivered wherever the customer is interacting with your brand. Focusing your campaigns for each channel based on segmentation and stage of the customer journey can help you improve your conversion rate and in turn improve your ROI for your advertising spend.

Measurement and Analysis

The importance of measuring the success of your Lifecycle Marketing campaigns is two-fold: you can see how they are performing in comparison to your other campaigns, and you can prioritize and optimize these campaigns based on business objectives. These campaigns are typically automated, which requires less time on your end once you have these high engagement and high conversion campaigns created.

Reviewing Campaign Execution

Once you have these Lifecycle Marketing campaigns built out and running in the background, you will spend most of your time reviewing analytics and engaging in A/B testing to try to improve your KPIs - clicks, conversions, average order value, items per order, etc. Always frame your review of your analytics by keeping the big picture goal in mind: growing customer lifetime value.

For instance, it can be easy to game engagement, but you must always ask yourself at what cost are you moving the needle? Customers can be turned off by tactics that they deem onerous, so be sure to use segmentation to understand which contacts are actively shopping with your brand and which are not.

By building a brand that has favorable sentiment and focusing your Lifecycle Marketing on those who fit your customer segments and the stages of your customer journey, you should be well on your way to building a successful business.