Would you like a 25% increase in your profits? What if your existing customers could fetch that? Well, research tells us that a 5% increase in retaining existing customers can increase profitability by 25%. Furthermore, the Dallas digital marketing agency agrees that lifecycle marketing could be the answer that the traditional aggressive sales funnel missed.
What is Lifecycle Marketing?
Lifecycle marketing is a mixture of various business marketing activities and strategies used by a company to influence positively, attract and retain customers and eventually turn them into brand loyalists. Customers who become loyal to the brands further become brand advocates who go on to spread awareness of the brand and its products to others.
What Is the Need for Lifecycle Marketing?
It has been observed that advertising and marketing campaigns focused solely on driving sales may increase sales, but only produce a short-lasting relationship with customers. On the contrary, a brand that concentrates on enticing the customers throughout the customer’s life cycle is likely to retain them and eventually share a long, cordial, and successful relationship.
According to the best digital marketing company in Dallas, this translates into an influx of revenues, a sizable market share, and considerable market standing.
What Are the Benefits of Lifecycle Marketing?
When we understand a customer’s lifecycle, we can derive the following benefits by churning a customer’s perception in the favor of the brand.
1. Builds Long-lasting Relationships
When a customer willingly purchases your products and services, without feeling inundated with aggressive sales messages, they feel that their choice was independent, regardless of any other competing brand’s presence.
According to the best marketers in the top digital marketing agency in Dalla, the customer’s brand choice is subtle and takes place at a subconscious level. Only the companies that can provide value to the customer based on a true understanding and appreciation of their intrinsic needs will win their business. It is not a one-time bargain.
Rather, the moment a customer buys once, a lifecycle marketing strategy will try to win that customer for many such buying sprees in the future.
There are good reasons for this since research shows that:
- Repeat customers eventually accomplish larger purchases every time they come back to shop.
- Repeat customers bring along more customers with them. If they find value in your products and services, they obviously will want their loved ones to derive the same value for themselves with your offerings.
- Repeat customers will not only make larger purchases, but the next time they shop they will also purchase other products and services from your catalog.
2. Improves Brand Image
Repeat purchases build trust with your customers. Every subsequent purchase or customer visit to your store or website is a sign that the previous experience had been good. Keeping a good track of a series of positive customer experiences throughout their customer lifetime increases their faith in your brand. It has a direct impact on the brand’s image.
The appreciation a customer feels every time they interact with the brand enhances the perceived value of the brand in their minds. The Dallas digital marketing agency observes that it translates into buying behavior and reverence for the brand.
3. Increases Chances of Getting Brand Advocates
Good customer experience often transforms a customer into a brand loyalist and further into a brand fan or brand advocate.
Brand loyalists often might make more purchases or try other products and services from your brand. However, a brand fan, brand ambassador, or brand advocate will go on to spread the positive experience through word of mouth to others. This becomes a very important and authentic source of reaching out to potential customers.
Your existing customers can bring you so many more valuable customers if only their individual experience had been a good one.
Oftentimes, it was seen that a satisfied customer had convinced a prospect to buy with very little effort from the company toward the new prospect.
A positive lifecycle marketing approach can deliver such customer experiences during their journey as a customer that your company can get an array of invaluable brand advocates that makes the entire business smooth.
Stages in Lifecycle Marketing:
Lifecycle marketing involves visualizing the cycle of a customer’s lifetime with the brand in varying details. It involves preparing a holistic marketing strategy to reach and address each of the touch points in the customer journey.
Furthermore, if done correctly, these can bring not only repeat customers, increasing sales from repeat business, but also transform the customers into your brand advocates. The more the number of brand advocates increases, the more the success of lifecycle marketing strategies.
Let’s look at the various stages at which a customer offers touchpoints for the company to address during the customer lifecycle.
1. Attract Attention
It is akin to making a big announcement in a crowded place, and it conforms to the opinions of the best Digital marketing company in Dallas. The sales message here is more generalized and should attract the attention of potential customers.
Digital marketers approach this stage with a clean slate. They do not yet know who their prospects are, what their preferences are etc. Nor do they have any prior information about the prospects. Digital marketers at this stage merely send informational messages that cover the best features of the brand, its products, and services, expecting to attract the attention of prospective customers.
Marketers run various advertising campaigns on various platforms including social media such as YouTube advertisements, or Facebook ads. They also make the best use of SEO-optimized content to deliver messages to any relevant audience.
2. Generate Leads
Once the message is delivered, the potential customers show signs of positive interest in the brand. These signs could be subtle and myriad. For example, signing up for a newsletter or a webinar could be a sign that the prospect is genuinely interested in becoming a customer of the company.
3. Nurture
When a business knows whom they are talking to, what their needs are, and how they want to be treated, their job now is to nurture these needs and wants and eventually take the prospects closer to the deal. According to the Dallas digital marketing company, many marketers do not even offer products or services until they have reached the nurturing stage.
4. Convert
Generally, the sales funnel for the prospect ends here, however, lifecycle marketing tells that the experience during conversion is often the reason that leads a customer to come back next time.
A prospect always remembers smooth navigation, a safe and secure transaction, and a marvelous overall user experience. If you can make the conversion smooth and enticing, you have won the game to woo back the same customer for a repeat purchase.
5. Retain
It is where lifecycle marketing differs from aggressive sales funnels. Modern digital marketers tend to treat their customers as assets and not as mere transactions. Brands realize their long-term yields when companies treat their customers as assets.
The company begins to deepen its empathy and commitment toward its customers, elongating their lifetime with the company. A reputed Dallas digital marketing companyconcludes that, as a result, the once one-time purchasers have now become repeat customers.
And why should a brand be delighted? Statistics show that a repeat purchase often amounts to a 33% additional value per order compared to others.
6. Transform Them Into Brand Advocates
It is where lifecycle marketing becomes increasingly fascinating. Brands continue nurturing the clients with empathy and care throughout the retaining stage such that the customers have now transformed into fans of the brand.
They are now not only loyal to the brand, but they also want others to follow suit. It is where the pull of the brand nurture and value is felt. The most successful lifecycle marketing campaign will create a whirlwind pull of brand loyalists and advocates for the company.
Wrap Up
Traditional sales marketing ends when a prospect converts into a customer, but lifecycle marketing becomes all the more fascinating and intense at the conversion stage.
All digital marketing agency in Dallas observe that many traditional marketers and business owners may find it difficult to draw up a successful lifecycle marketing campaign.
Rather, they should approach a professional digital marketing agency to reap the best benefits and not only drive sales but turn their customers into their brand advocates.
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