The customer lifecycle is the journey that a customer has with a brand when browsing, purchasing and using products, or maintaining loyalty!

Nowadays with the sheer scale of available data, marketers can use BlueVenn to be better equipped to understand the customer lifecycle and act on the insights for better planning, prioritization and forecasting of future marketing decisions.

The five stages of a customer's lifecycle

The customer lifecycle can be broken up into five stages:

1. Awareness – This stage applies to the recognition of a need or problem (for example, running out of shampoo, wanting to upgrade a TV, a desire to be healthier) and the impulsion to act upon or buy a product that will meet this need.
2. Consideration – With a need identified, a customer will start to research the best solution. This process can be influenced by marketers through print, visual and online media, word of mouth, showrooms, sales reps, exhibitions etc.
3. Purchase - A customer will decide on a product (eg. a holiday package). However, before the customer completes the purchase, there are potentially disrupting factors, such as the attitude of others (eg. negative reviews), inconsistent offers or difficult online checkout processes.
4. Advocacy – This is where customers choose to spread the word about your products, thus turning them into fans of your brand. Marketers can look to encourage their customers to leave product reviews, share your content, join your social media channels or referral schemes. Advocates (eg. Social Media Influencers) are an effective way of driving more sales.
5. Loyalty – This stage is to encourage repurchase intention – because they are pleased with the product and your service – or an awareness that the product may need to be upgraded or replaced in the future. Loyalty and retention require maintaining interactions with your customers through subscriptions, loyalty schemes email marketing, gamification and so on.

It is imperative that marketers use analytics and automated campaign workflows for every stage of the customer lifecycle, and put in place strategies to maximize the potential at each stage - from when they first interact with your brand to when they become a loyal customer.

Intervening in the customer lifecycle

In a modern customer's lifecycle, they are in control - not the marketer! It's therefore important for marketers to ensure that they can effectively intervene, at the right moment, when the customer is moving (or not moving) between stages. For example, when the customer makes a purchase it's important to activate your advocacy campaigns and provide incentives for a product review. How long, therefore does the product take to arrive? How quickly might they start using it? These will impact the right moment for the intervention. Or when in consideration does it make sense to throw up a live chat message in real-time? Or when abandoning your site, or an online cart, can you nudge them back with a recovery email and 5% discount, using a 24 hour delay in case they purchase anyway?

A contextual experience should be at the centre of your customer lifecycle strategy. By investing in a customer lifecycle solution like BlueVenn, you will better understand which stage of the lifecycle each customer is in at any one time, and treat them accordingly.

Use BlueVenn for optimized customer lifecycle marketing

BlueVenn enables you to measure the progression of your customers along their customer journey with you, helping to analyze the stage they are in through a range of visual, drag & drop analytics tools. With embedded multi-channel marketing automation functionality, and by plugging into your existing technology stack, it also enables you to act on the insights and deliver the right message, at the right time.

BlueVenn creates a Single Customer View that plugs into all your marketing channels and systems to monitor every touchpoint along the customer journey, whether offline and online, to give multi-channel marketers a better understanding of the customer journey for more effective customer lifecycle marketing.

If you’d like to find out more about how BlueVenn allows you to optimize customer lifecycle marketing, contact our team today or book a demo