Maximising ROI with the Customer Lifecycle Marketing Approach

When companies fully adopt the customer lifecycle marketing approach they are able to create targeted marketing messages for each and every stage of a customer's lifecycle. The customer will have differing motivations, focusses, pain points, and goals at each stage throughout the journey. Let’s take a simplified example of a digital marketing agency who wishes to target small-medium sized B2B SaaS companies who are looking to increase their sales and revenue:

Stage 1 - Awareness

The digital marketing agency in question is targeting channels (paid, or otherwise), to place their brand and their services in full view of their ideal customer (in this case, B2B SaaS companies). 

Step 2 - Acquisition 

Now that ideal prospects are aware of the service provider in question, the next stage is to acquire them via efforts such as lead generation and direct email marketing. The customer lifecycle marketing approach means making the purchase straightforward through continual engagement.  

Step 3 - Onboarding

No matter who the client is, every customer lifecycle framework will include an onboarding phase, where the goal is to help the client to use a product or service in the most effective manner for them. This stage should be highly collaborative, with follow-up calls and even tuition packages, if team members have no experience of the offering. In the case of our digital marketing agency, this might be helping their B2B SaaS company to use digital marketing platforms such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, and email marketing software. 

Step 4 - Post-Purchase

Customer lifecycle marketing recognizes how important it is to continually engage with their customers after they’ve made their purchase. The aim here is retention. Showing eagerness to solve issues, as and when they arrive, and continue to provide value at all stages.

We’ve simplified the steps here for illustrative purposes, and each of the four steps above can be broken down into sub-stages. But purely from these four alone, you can see how the marketing approach will be vastly different at each point. 

With a clearly defined customer lifecycle framework in place, businesses are better placed to upsell their products and services, and retain their customers over a longer period of time.