How to Map Your Customer Journey Using Personalized Lifecycle Marketing Strategies

You’re probably familiar with lifecycle marketing. It looks at how a customer moves through each touchpoint of a marketing cycle from start to finish. The idea is to understand how a customer interacts with your brand at different stages.

When a customer lifecycle begins, for example, what kind of information is he or she looking for? What factors compel this customer to take action? These are just some of the questions that are answered when working on a lifecycle marketing strategy.

What’s the purpose of this kind of exercise? The more you know about your customers, the better you can serve them.

The 6 Lifecycle marketing stages

Let’s take a look at the different stages of lifecycle marketing:

1. Awareness. In this stage, a prospect becomes aware of your company.
2. Engagement. Interested prospects start engaging with your brand. They check out your website and view your social channels.
3. Evaluation. Prospects are doing their homework now. They want to know why they should pick your product or service over competitors. They’re comparing prices, reading reviews, and looking for the benefits of your product.
4. Purchase. You did it! You convinced the prospect to become a customer.
5. Support. After a purchase, customers need support. Providing a high level of support can increase retention throughout the customer lifecycle.
6. Loyalty. When a customer is so happy with their purchase that they tell others about your product or service, they’re considered loyal customers or advocates.

While a customer lifecycle may vary from industry to industry, these six stages are fairly common across the board.

Incorporate the customer journey into your lifecycle marketing

Lifecycle marketing looks at how a customer interacts with a brand from the brand’s perspective, not a customer’s perspective. Customers aren’t aware that they’re in an “evaluation phase,” for example. From a customer’s perspective, they’re simply doing research. To bolster your lifecycle marketing, you need to think through the customer journey too. Here’s how:

• Define the customer. Who are you trying to reach? Now isn’t the time to guess. It’s time to start data mining. Take a look at your customer data and use it to compile detailed customer personas. There are many resources online that can help you create a persona.
• What conflict is your customer facing? Take a look at your personas and compare them to your products or services. What conflicts are customers facing that you can solve for them? Maybe your accounting app saves business owners valuable time or maybe your kids’ education app keeps parents from hearing, “I’m bored!” all summer. Think of your product or service in terms of a solution, as opposed to something you sell.
• Position your brand as a problem solver. Now that you’ve thought about your product as a solution to a problem, start thinking of ways to market your app that way. Your ads, emails, and website copy should all address the customer’s problem and present your product or service as the fix.
• Call customers to act. Customers have a problem, you have a solution. Now you need to tell them how to get their hands on the solution. Do they need to buy a membership or subscription? Purchase a product? Tell customers exactly what they need to do.
  Be sure to streamline the process too. If customers need to buy a membership, the mobile checkout process to do so should be ridiculously simple. Remove any barriers that could cause customers to bail.
• Combine the customer journey with your lifecycle marketing. The information you’ve learned by mapping a customer journey can help fill in gaps in your lifecycle marketing. For example, when you defined your customers and examined the problems they face, you probably learned how they found your company. Are they finding you through online ads? From searching the App Store? Referrals? Email campaigns? Use that information to add more details to your awareness and engagement stages.

When you position your brand as a problem solver, you’ll likely have better insight into purchasing factors. When you pitched your app as a time-saver, was that more effective than when you pitched it as easy-to-use? This can bolster the information you have available during the customer’s evaluation and purchasing phase.

As you call customers to act, are they returning? Are they leaving positive ratings and reviews? Watch how your calls to action work and analyze them to better understand how a customer becomes an advocate.

Mapping your customer journey can be extremely helpful to your lifecycle marketing strategies. Of course, to be effective, you need a platform to help you mine customer data, engage customers, and track metrics. CleverTap ticks all of these boxes, and it’s a scalable tool that will grow with your brand. To learn more about CleverTap and how it can help you elevate your lifecycle marketing, get a quick, personalized demo with their mobile marketing experts today.