The customer lifecycle doesn’t just end when someone buys a product or service from you. One-shot deals and purchases are unlikely to keep a business afloat, so it’s vital that businesses make sure they keep customers coming back for more.

One way they can achieve is by analysing the customer lifecycle so they can attract initial prospects more effectively – and then turn them into repeat customers.

Below, we’ll look at the customer lifecycle in more detail, including the 5 stages that are involved over its course and some top tips to help improve managing it. Let’s get started…

What is a customer lifecycle?

The customer lifecycle is the journey your customers take as they move from becoming aware of you, purchasing something from you and then onto becoming repeat buyers. 

Since it’s a cycle, it’s an ongoing process. Ideally, acquiring and retaining customers should be happening every day. And equally as important to keep in mind: the cycle starts as customers drop out at certain stages of it.

The 5 stages of the customer lifecycle

Awareness

Also referred to as Reach, this first stage is where your customer initially becomes aware of your product, organically or through targeted ads on- and offline.

The step is considered successful when a prospect reaches out to you for more information.

Acquisition

Sometimes called Consideration, the Acquisition stage is where a prospective customer becomes a lead.

Whether they’ve contacted your business through phone, email, live chat or your website, they should receive a steady supply of relevant information, support or deals so they can make a purchasing decision.

Conversion

At this stage, your prospect becomes a customer – but things are far from done. That’s because it’s the start of a relationship, one that you want to nurture and foster so that you can retain them far into the future.

Retention

To help with the above, you want the customer to feel valued. So, try asking them for their feedback through surveys, and use their responses to make continuous improvements to the customer and site experience.

You should also offer them exclusive offers that only paying customers are privy to, such as product discounts, referral bonuses and loyalty programmes. These are simple but powerful incentives that can have a huge effect on improving customer relationships.

Loyalty

At this stage, your relationship with the customer is that strong that they may post about you on social media, tell their friends or leave a positive review about the experience they had with your brand.

These kinds of brand ambassadors take time and effort to nurture, but they’re well worth recognising so that they remain loyal to your far into the future.

What is customer lifecycle management?

Unsurprisingly, customer lifecycle management (or CLM) refers to what you’ll do to manage and optimise each of the above stages.

To do this, you’ll need to track and analyse each of these stages, assign them their respective metrics and then measure how successful every step is based on these same metrics.

Customer lifecycle management guidance

To optimise your customer lifecycle management, here’s what we’d recommend carrying out…

Analyse your customer lifecycle stages

Some in-depth investigation of each stage of the lifecycle can really help, allowing you to identify problem areas and solutions, to improve things across the board for your customers.

Try digging deeper into each stage by asking the following questions

The Awareness Stage

• When, how and why prospects are finding your company in the first place?
• How are you performing on the channels on the relevant channels in terms of reach?
• What are your competitors doing to reach prospects that you aren’t?
• What kind of reputation do you have?

The Acquisition Stage

• What kind of website content can currently lead customers to a decision
• If you have a blog, is it easy to navigate and read? (The same goes for your site, btw)
• Can customers call your sales team, should they need to?
• Is the pricing of your products and services on your website?

The Conversion Stage

• Is your purchasing process smooth and straightforward? Is there a guest checkout?
• Is there anything standing in the way of this process, such as a slow site or an unsecure domain?
• What privacy policy measures are in place?
• What is your business’ refund policy?

The Retention Stage

• Is it easy to make repeat purchases on your site, such as through a one-click reorder button?
• Do you send them product recommendations based on their previous activity or purchases?
• How do your customers view your business?
• How do your customers feel about their purchases once they’ve received them?

The Loyalty Stage

• Can your social media channels be reached and/or followed from your website and emails?
• Have you responding to customers’ comments on your social media channels?
• Do you offer exclusive offers, discounts or birthday gifts to your current customers?
• Do you have any sort of referral program in place?
• Can customers easily get in touch with you through email, phone and live chat?

Learn about your target audience

In managing the reach stage, the first thing you’ll want to do is identify your target audience. By narrowing down who you’re marketing to based on certain demographic and behavioural info, you’ll be able to better create content that’s relevant to them.

To do this, you can go about creating buyer personas – essentially fictionalised versions of your ideal customer base, each with their own backgrounds and hobbies that you’ll craft content around.

Create a content strategy

Still at the awareness stage, you’ll also want to come up with a content strategy that’s packed with relevant topics and subjects across your website, blog and social media. By making it optimised for search engines, your name will appear more frequently when customers search for the topics you’ve targeted.

Be sure to measure the kinds of content that are proving popular with your audience too, so you can dig into things like time spent on page, whether video content is viewed, and whether your audience are clicking through to other pages through internal links. Using the data you gather here, you’ll then be able to see what needs refining across your strategy.

Be proactive and support leads

Although customer service feels like something that comes into play after the purchase, it’s really something you should be making apparent at the Acquisition stage. As well as self-service resources like blog posts and FAQs, let your customers know you’re on hand to actively answer any questions they might have about your products.

Live chat, easy access to a customer service rep, and email support lets your customers know you’re easy to reach out should they have any problems.

Discover and manage points of friction

At the Conversion stage, customers don’t want to be faced with reasons to back out of a purchase. A smooth, simple ordering system that’s easy to follow will streamline the whole process, reducing their chances of thinking twice about checkout.

Use marketing automation

Personalisation goes a long way at the Retention stage. But as your customers start growing in number, manually sending them a personalised message becomes a lot more time consuming.

Investing in automation makes the process a lot simpler, letting you send personalised thank you emails, discounts and other relevant messaging to your contacts automatically – so you can stay in touch with them at all times.

Encourage customer reviews

Once they’re at the loyalty stage, increase that brand loyalty by inviting your customers to leave reviews and share their experiences. Surveys and links to your Yelp and Google Reviews pages can help out here, but if you need to give them more of a push, then try offering incentives in the form of discounts off their next purchase. This way, both of you benefit.

How can your business develop its digital marketing?

The maturity of your digital marketing has a huge part to play in how successful your customer lifecycle management activity is. If you rush in without the right level of maturity, it can make for some major setbacks.

The good news is we can help you work out where your digital marketing maturity is currently at, and what you need to do to get to the next stage – take our Digital Marketing Maturity Quiz to find out for yourself.

Customer lifecycle management takes time, but it can make for some huge results. Don’t have the resource to do it yourself? We’ll help you find, and hold onto, a steady stream of customers for you. Head here for more info or give us a call on 0345 459 0558.