A Guide to Consumer Lifecycle Marketing in Ecommerce

Introduction

Loyal customers are the bedrock of successful, sustainable ecommerce businesses.

But great customers that are valuable to your business don’t just appear overnight – there are a number of stages to go through to nurture them.

Customer lifecycle marketing is an approach that focuses on maximising the value for each customer throughout their customer journey.

This guide to customer lifecycle marketing will cover:

1. Definition
2. Benefits
3. Stages of the customer lifecycle
4. Implementation
5. Tactics and examples
6. Customer lifecycle software and other tools

The importance of customer retention

Customer lifecycle marketing (CLM) is an approach to customer communication that recognises that different stages on the journey to becoming a loyal, active customer require different marketing messages and strategies.

Moreover, it involves using what you know about each individual customer – from how they interact with your store to their transactional and demographic data – to develop campaigns that nurture them through their journey.

Put simply, customer lifecycle marketing comes down to three key principles:

   Insight

Using data from a number of sources to get a detailed view of the customer and their preferences, and identify where they are in their customer journey.

  Relevancy

Using these insights to decide which marketing messages will guide each customer through to the next stage of their journey.

   Timeliness

Delivering these message at the right time to encourage them to make that transition.

Customer Retention Strategies

We’ve covered what customer lifecycle marketing is, but why should you invest in it? Here are just a few of the benefits:

1. 1. Focusing on retaining existing customers is less costly than acquiring new ones.It’s often said that it is more costly to acquire a new customer than to retain an old one – according to Bain and Co. a 5 per cent increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75 per cent. With its concentration on extending a customer’s lifetime value, customer lifecycle marketing focuses on long term profitability.
   2. The conversion rates of your marketing campaigns are higher.Relevant marketing means higher response rates.
   3. Your customers are happy.Nobody enjoys being hounded with marketing that they’re not interested in. When you focus on delivering relevant messages at the right time, your customers are more likely to respond to them, and connect with your brand.

Happy customers stick around for longer: they’re more loyal and, ultimately, they spend more money with you.

1. You gain important insight into your customer base.By segmenting your customers into lifecycle stages, you have great insight into how your business is performing.

The stages of the customer lifecycle

We’ve talked about the customer lifecycle, but what exactly are the stages of the customer lifecycle and how do we define them? The following lifecycle stages should form the basis of any solid CLM strategy.

Implementing customer lifecycle marketing

Before we talk about some of the tactics that you can employ to nurture people on in their journey to becoming a loyal customer, it’s first important to get the broader context and understand how customer lifecycle marketing needs to align with other areas of your online retail business.

Marketing and sales strategy

Your CLM strategy should integrate with existing customer strategies, such as:

• Pricing and discount strategies
• ‘Hero customer’ or VIP retention schemes
• Attribution modeling

Merchandising strategy and product affinity

It’s also important to align your CLM strategy with broader business areas and objectives:

• Stock management and product availability
• Product affinity and personalisation – using customer data to personalise your marketing communications
• Category cross-selling priorities

Customer lifecycle marketing: tactics

We’ve talked a lot about ways of segmenting your customer base in order to market to them more effectively. But how do you build these segments into your actual marketing efforts? Here are some examples of tactics you might use.

Cart and browse abandonment retargeting

Emails and social/display ads triggered by a prospect or existing customer browsing products (or adding an item to their cart) and then leaving.

GOAL: drawing those who have shown purchase intent back to the store to make a purchase

Read more: An Introduction to Browse Abandonment Emails for Ecommerce

 

Customer lifecycle software

Customer lifecycle analytics

Successful customer lifecycle marketing hinges on detailed insight into your customer base to determine the status of each customer.

To achieve this you’ll need a tool that brings together data from a number of touchpoints, for example:

• Interaction data – how a customer interacts with your online store (i.e. their journey through your store, the products they view, the products they add to cart).
• Transactional data – information (usually from your ecommerce platform) about the transactions each customer has made.
• Demographic data – additional details about each customer (i.e. their age, location, gender etc.)

Segmentation

On top of this, you’ll need to be able to define each lifecycle stage (which will vary from online retailer to online retailer) and segment your customer base based on these definitions, as well as track and measure their flow from one stage to another.

While prospects and active customers are fairly easy to define, the boundaries for when you consider a customer to be ‘at risk’ or ‘lapsed’ should be calculated based on your business model and repurchase rates.

Automated lifecycle marketing

Once you’ve segmented your customer base into lifecycle stages, you’ll need a tool that can automate the process of getting these marketing messages in front of the right people, whether in the form of email marketing, social or display advertising, SMS, physical mail-outs etc.

Customer lifecycle marketing with Ometria