Mastering the 4 Stages of Lifecycle Marketing — A Series
Last week, while speaking with a colleague, I made an off-hand comment about my approach to thinking about our marketing database. My comment was simply “I like to think of things in terms of a lifecycle” but at that moment, I could see a light bulb go off in her head.
It made me realize that a lot of marketers are so caught up in running their campaigns that they tend to overlook or completely forget the basics of lifecycle marketing.
What is lifecycle marketing?
If you are looking at your marketing database critically, and trying to form meaningful, actionable segments for marketing campaigns — look at things from your contacts’ perspective. Someone who just signed up for your newsletter versus someone who became a customer three years ago — these are very different people and should be treated as such.
Perhaps somewhat of a controversial statement in the marketing automation world, but lifecycle marketing is different from a buyers’ journey. That doesn’t mean that they are not related — but they are different. The buyer’s journey is about delivering the right content at the right time, whereas lifecycle marketing is more about marketing database management.
In this series, I’ll dive into the stages in lifecycle marketing and will work in some examples of weaving content specific to a person’s place in the buyer’s journey.
What are the 4 stages of lifecycle marketing?
In this post, I’ll provide a high-level overview of the 4 stages in lifecycle marketing and will dive into each of the 4 stages in subsequent articles.
Acquisition
Put simply, acquisition is the means by which you grow your marketing database with relevant contacts. Different companies may choose different tactics, but every marketing organization should have someone or some team that is thinking about how to capture contacts within your target audience(s).
For example, at Red Hat, we mostly sell to leaders in the IT department. So when crafting our different marketing campaigns, the content should be aligned to how IT leaders think / search online and our tactics should be in places where IT leaders search for information.
You’ll also need to examine your conversion points on your website and landing pages. It won’t matter that you are driving the most qualified traffic to these conversion points if the form is too long or onerous.
Want to read more on how to get the hand raise? I’ve outlined 5 tips to acquire new contacts for your marketing efforts.
Onboarding
After you’ve spent time and money crafting and optimizing your marketing campaigns to capture new contacts, how do you treat them? Onboarding, the second stage in lifecycle marketing, means having campaigns in place to acknowledge your new subscribers in a way that’s relevant to them.
There are different strategies for onboarding, and there are many good reasons to utilize several different ones (especially within enterprise organizations with multiple acquisition methods).
For example, you may wish to send a simple “welcome” message to new contacts who sign up to receive your corporate newsletter. However, you may wish to “warm up” contacts that you acquired from the industry tradeshow you attended.
Targeting
The third stage of lifecycle marketing really strikes at the heart of marketing 101 or marketing best practices. This stage is all about sending really targeted, personalized content to your contact’s based on where they may be in the buyer’s journey, the contact’s interests, etc.
In this stage, marketers can really get creative and have the most fun. Here’s where you want your contacts to stay, and you can accomplish that by ensuring you aren’t drowning them in irrelevant content or completely ignoring them.
Nurture campaigns, drip campaigns, newsletters — these marketing tactics all live in this stage.
Retaining or Reactivating
Depending on how well your Targeting campaigns perform, you may find a portion of your marketing contacts that begin to lose interest. They stop opening your emails, or visiting your site.
If you’ve spent the time to acquire appropriate contacts for your organization, then it can be a lot cheaper to retain or reactivate contacts with waning interest; compared to always acquire new names.
As with Onboarding, there are different strategies your organization can employ to re-engage a lapsing contact. You may choose to send special offers such as discounts. It’s in this stage where your focus should be on separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Figure out which contacts you want to hold on to, which ones aren’t the right fit, and which ones you should remove from your marketing database.
