Why Growth Marketers Can’t Live Without Lifecycle Marketing

For every marketing team that invests in acquisition marketing via paid, owned, and earned channels, there’s another, equally important, half of the marketing equation they can’t afford to overlook: Lifecycle marketing. This data-driven approach optimizes customer engagement, boosts retention, and strengthens brand loyalty.

Customer lifecycle management focuses on onboarding and engaging potential customers and newly acquired customers and nurturing them across their customer lifecycles.

Effective lifecycle marketing strategies help brands minimize customer acquisition costs and increase customer lifetime value by delivering tailored lifecycle marketing campaigns that are specific to customers’ unique lifecycle stages that speak to continued engagement and recognition of key milestones during their journey.

In this guide we’ll walk you through both the process of lifecycle marketing, share examples of popular lifecycle marketing campaigns, explain the benefits of lifecycle marketing for your brand, and provide the steps you can follow to build out an effective customer lifecycle marketing strategy.

Let’s get started.

What Is Lifecycle Marketing?

You wouldn’t introduce yourself to an old friend as if you’re meeting them for the very first time and, conversely, you wouldn’t assume a new friend already knows a lot about you. You know how to tailor your interactions with people based on how long you’ve known someone for and how well you know them.

When brands do the same thing, there’s a name for that—it’s called lifecycle marketing.

Lifecycle marketing is a targeted marketing approach that’s designed to best meet and serve the needs of customers wherever they are in their relationship with your brand, whether they’re still getting to know your brand, first-time customers, or loyal brand advocates.

Brands that use a lifecycle marketing strategy recognize that not all customers are at the same stage in their customer journey and that the best way to serve these customers is to understand where they are in their lifecycle and deliver them tailored content, resources, offers, experiences, and value based on their unique lifecycle stage and needs.

What is a lifecycle strategy?

A lifecycle strategy is a marketing strategy that engages customers based on where they are in their journey.

Instead of using a one-size-fits-all marketing approach that treats all customers the same, brands that take a lifecycle marketing approach have the data and insights to recognize and distinguish prospects at each stage of their journey.

Companies that have a lifecycle marketing strategy in place harness their zero-party data and first-party data and insights to create more meaningful, segmented, targeted campaigns to nurture and engage customers based on their unique lifecycle and to ultimately encourage them to deepen their relationships with the brand.

Why Lifecycle Marketing Matters: The Benefits of Customer Lifecycle Management

Great lifecycle marketing allows you to transform every customer touchpoint into a unique and timely experience that fuels movement across the marketing funnel, improves marketing KPIs, keeps customer acquisition costs (CAC) in check, and fosters sustainable growth.

Create more relevant campaigns

With detailed analysis around your customer lifecycles, you can identify and optimize specific marketing actions to take to keep your users engaged for the long haul. Rather than trying to push people through an abstract funnel, meet users where they are on their unique journey and guide them to the most relevant and value-adding experiences.The end result will be more effective cross-channel strategies and more efficient campaigns.

How to Build a Lifecycle Marketing Strategy

Effective lifecycle marketing requires having the full picture of your customer’s experience—collecting the right data from the start of and throughout their journey, and having the right technology in place to capture, react, and constantly iterate based on this information (likely many systems that need to speak to each other and share data efficiently and in real time). Follow these steps and put these best practices into place to create a lifecycle marketing program that delivers results.

Understand who your customers are

It all begins with having a complete picture of your customer’s experience and the phases that shape their journeys. To determine your key marketing lifecycle stages, you can conduct some research using the following methods.

Build better context for who customers are, what they are interested in, and where they are on their journey

Jump into your customer engagement platform, data platform, or analytics software to analyze segments of your customers and note how their behaviors differ.

What to do: You can segment by attributes like age, location, and any preferences, and also by levels of engagement with your content, features, messaging, or products on your app or website. Segment by channel, by attribution source, by the date they became a customer.

What to look for: Broadly, how these segments might turn out to be different from each other in their interactions with your brand. You might find that your email subscribers are more likely to buy during a sale, or that your younger customers come back to your social app more often if their friends are active on it. Look for what high-value actions take place before key conversions, like a user signing up for your email list, redeeming an offer, and signing up for a loyalty program.

Create user segments that are most useful to your business

Your customers may or may not pass through all four stages of the customer lifecycle described above—and how they advance in their journeys may not always be a linear progression. Recognize that customer journeys today are complex, intricate, and personal and your company’s specific customer lifecycle phases are likely unique.

Let’s say that you’re running a company with an on-demand ride-sharing service. You might notice substantial variation in the way that users are engaging with your brand. For instance, user A may be a casual rider who is looking for inexpensive carpool options, from time to time. User B, on the other hand, may be a consultant or small business owner who needs a consistent black car service.

What these trends may show you is that a one-size-fits-all customer lifecycle just doesn’t exist for your brand: Since users likely come to your company with a variety of pain points and needs, you need frameworks that represent the diversity of your customers’ buying and engagement journeys.

1. Analyze user trends over time

2. List and map out the different lifecycles that your users are following

3. Create an ideal lifecycle funnel that maps out the steps you’d like your customers to take. For instance, if you’re a retail brand that has a paid membership level that offers perks like discounts, members-only access, and free shipping, your funnel stages may look like this:

• Awareness: Customer becomes aware of your brand
• Interest: Customer visits your website or app
• Activation: Signs up for a free account
• Monetization: Completes a transaction
• Retention: Is active for up to X days, weeks, or months
• Loyalty: Pays to join your membership program

4. Put together some diagrams to help visualize your user journey.

Define your lifecycle marketing campaign goals and KPIs

Every marketing initiative you come up with should guide your users toward a specific goal or set of goals. Use your key marketing lifecycle stages as a starting point. Ask yourself who are your customers, where are they in their journey, and what information or offers they might find compelling to get them to increase their engagement?

Getting your users to the next, more advanced marketing lifecycle stages should be the goal of each campaign. And these goals should have measurable KPIs so that you can review and optimize your campaigns over time.

By choosing metrics that pertain to each specific goal, you’ll be better able to optimize your campaigns to drive action.

Orchestrating experiences that resonate across channels and touchpoints

You’ll need a platform like Braze that enables you to collect the right data from the start of and throughout your customers’ journeys and respond to their behaviors and interests in the moment with the right outreach—timely, personalized lifecycle marketing campaigns.

Now comes the fun part. Instead of delivering one-size-fits-all campaigns to your customers, you can build your marketing efforts to target smaller segments of customers, each with specific next steps in mind. It’s all about making sure that the right audiences are getting the right messages at the right points in their customer lifecycles.

Here’s an example of how this concept would look, in action.

Let’s say that you’re running lifecycle marketing at a retail company, and you’re looking to increase purchases among your users who are currently browsing but not buying. You’ve analyzed the data and seen in the past, these customers are likely to make a purchase when a new release or campaign drops. Armed with the knowledge of this pattern, you can send push notifications or other messages each morning that notify customers of your newest item releases or those that come back in stock. You can personalize further with send-time optimization to be sure each customer gets the notification when they’re most likely to engage with the message. You can also tailor the content of your notifications with a personalized recommendation for a product based on what they’ve bought in the past.

Iterate and evolve lifecycle strategies based on results, feedback, and learnings

It can be easy to agonize over every decision and every step in this process of building out a lifecycle marketing strategy and corresponding lifecycle marketing campaigns, but of course that only means it’ll take you longer to get up and running.

Remember it’s all about deepening your relationships with as many of your users as you can

It’s better to get started, run some campaigns, run some tests, and look at those results.

Test to learn and iterate

Use multivariate testing to figure out which types of messages (tone, length, format, send cadence) are resonating most, and adjust your campaigns from there.

10+ examples of lifecycle marketing campaigns

Here are some of the most popular lifecycle marketing campaigns brands create to deepen customer relationships and engagement across the four marketing lifecycle stages and channels like email, SMS, in-app messaging, in-browser messaging, web and mobile push notifications, and via messaging apps like WhatsApp.

Awareness lifecycle marketing campaigns

Use these campaigns to activate and educate users at the beginning of their customer journey with your brand.

• Lead gen and account creation campaigns to grow your audience: For users who are actively browsing your website or app but haven’t created an account, you can encourage these anonymous users to sign up by leveraging in-product messages (e.g. landing pages, in-app messages, in-browser messages, and Content Cards) that explain the benefits of having an account and encourage users to directly enter their contact details. Onboarding and welcome series are massively important at this stage to get people started on the right note and ensure they understand and see value early on.
• Holiday and cultural tentpole marketing: Think seasonal, brand-relevant messaging tied to specific days of the year.
• Free trial campaigns: Get users to advance to the consideration stage by giving them a (free) preview of what your brand, products, and services are all about.

Consideration lifecycle marketing campaigns

These campaigns can help you learn more about your newly acquired customers and send the perfect nudge when they’re primed to convert.

• Preference campaigns: Get to know your early-stage users better by delivering surveys via in-product channels like in-app messages to get additional information about their preferences and goals; explain how you will use their responses to improve their experience
• Recommendation campaigns: Send recommendations and other content personalized based on customer preferences.
• Cart or intent abandonment notifications: About 70% of people who start off making a purchase quit before they complete the transaction. It’s also a useful tactic to help bring people back into the flow after they stop interacting with your offerings (such as stop viewing content.)
• Free-to-paid campaigns: Give a preview of content only available through paid subscriptions, and follow up with prompts to sign up to continue viewing the content.

Satisfaction lifecycle marketing campaigns

The satisfied customer, who could be converted to a loyal advocate who evangelizes your brand to new customers, is not one to be ignored. Consider these campaigns that could help spread the good word and bring down ad costs.

• Ratings and review prompts: Reviews don’t always happen organically. Sometimes you have to ask. For best results, use segmentation and other tools to target only loyal, active, and satisfied users for these messages.
• Continue-your-streak campaigns: Think of any kind of updates that happen on an ongoing basis.
• Refer-a-friend campaigns: Timing makes all the difference. Don’t ask too soon. You have to earn the right to ask, and it helps to sweeten it with a reward.
• Community building campaigns: Send tailored messaging to your power users showing them the value of joining your brand’s online or in-person events and group.

Retention and loyalty lifecycle marketing campaigns

Here are some campaigns that can help your company foster a committed base of brand advocates.

• Reward and perk campaigns: Send targeted communications to the top tier of your customers with a special offer or perk that rewards them for staying active.
• Gamification and milestone messaging: Behind the activities your customers achieve with your brand—whether that’s ordering their 100th delivery or reaching their savings goal—is an accomplishment that should be acknowledged.
• Year-in-review campaigns: Communicate the value you bring to loyal customers in a fun and memorable way by recapping the ways they’ve engaged with and benefited from your brand over the past year.
• Loyalty member messaging: Send personalized messaging when customers hit redemption opportunities or earn a certain amount of points.

For even more examples of campaigns you can use across different marketing lifecycle stages, check out the Braze Inspiration Guide.

Lifecycle Marketing and Customer Lifecycle Management FAQs

What happens when brands don’t nurture customer relationships across the lifecycle?

There’s a cost to not implementing an effective lifecycle marketing strategy. What happens when your team doesn’t fully take customer journeys into consideration or doesn’t have the marketing technology in place to execute effective customer lifecycle management? Failing to have a lifecycle-centric view of customer engagement can lead to these negative KPIs:

• Poor engagement
• Low conversions
• Spotty retention
• Reduced lifetime value

What is the difference between CRM and CLM?

CRM is an acronym that stands for customer relationship management, while CLM stands for customer lifecycle management. When people refer to CRM, they’re usually referring to a specific type of marketing technology platform—CRM systems. These platforms are used to store details about a company’s customers all in one place with a goal of giving teams a better understanding of the customer, insights that can then be applied to nurture personal relationships with each of these individuals.

Customer lifecycle management, on the other hand, is a marketing practice that’s focused on nurturing all of the potential customers and customers that a company has acquired and getting these individuals to progress further down the marketing funnel, moving from top of the funnel marketing lifecycle stages to middle or bottom of the funnel marketing lifecycle stages, such as going from awareness to interest or from interest to conversion.

What are the four stages of the customer lifecycle?

In general, customer journeys across industries can be broken down into marketing lifecycle stages that commonly occur across the marketing funnel:

• At the top of the funnel, individuals become aware of or educated about a brand and its products or services.
• In the middle of the funnel, individuals are considering or indicating interest in a brand and its products or services.
• At the bottom of the funnel, we have customers that are satisfied, retained, or loyal.

While this might be a helpful model, it’s important to note that a customer’s journey with a brand and their lifecycle is anything but linear. The reality is that customer behaviors, interests, wants, and needs are changing dynamically—and that's exactly why they need a CEP that offers deep customer understanding and real-time journey orchestration.

What your customers’ exact phases are will likely be unique to your brand, but traditionally, marketers have categorized these into the following four stages of the customer lifecycle:

• Awareness (also referred to as discovery or education)
• Consideration (also referred to as interest or evaluation)
• Satisfaction (also referred to as conversion, action, or decision)
• Retention and loyalty

Forward Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the performance of and expected benefits from Braze and its products. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in the Braze Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended October 31, 2024, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on December 10, 2024, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.