How to target your customers wisely using life-cycle stages
Different customer life-cycle stages should have different objectives, right? You need to treat customers in each group to separate promotions, offers, and communication frequencies to continue exciting them and adequately engage with them over time. To easily monitor and measure KPIs along the way, it’s much easier to automate your entire customer base when you have a life-cycle-first strategy in place as it ensures optimal coverage rates.
So, how do you go about planning a life-cycle-first strategy? Establishing objectives per customer life-cycle
- Prospect or New Customer: You want to make sure to retain new customers and overcome the challenge of a single purchase or single deposit. You also want to build brand awareness and educate your customers about your product. And finally, expose them to the promotions you run.
- Active/Engaged Customer: With active customers, you want to retain them too, but you also want to maximize their value by implementing up-sell and cross-sell strategies.
- Churn / Terminated Customer: The goal is to re-active your churned customers and bring them back to your platform to use your product or service.
The LEO CDP has a customer life-cycle report (or Customer Journey Report), which could support your marketing team to get more insights.
After you get insights from the data, you will collectively get more than 100 ideas about how can you solve a specific problem. The marketing strategy should your next step. The strategy should mix automated cycles, behavior-based, and ad-hoc events.
- Automated Cycles: These campaigns that are sent on a predefined recurring basis should be the majority of campaigns that your customers receive.
- Behavior-Based: These campaigns are sent following a specific action that your clients take.
- Ad-Hoc Campaigns: These campaigns are very time-sensitive and are usually sent around holidays, special events, announcements, etc. They should not be automated.
That’s it! These are the fundamentals of a marketing plan. Remember, when planning a strategy: Always use your common sense, best practices, campaigns that have worked in the past, and tailored analysis to get to data-driven decisions.