Email Marketing and the Customer Lifecycle: A Roadmap

Email Marketing and the Customer Lifecycle

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You can only grow in business when you understand your customer’s requirements and send them messages accordingly. Building a relationship with the audience is very necessary. The customer lifecycle or journey narrates how a customer takes their preliminary steps towards conversion and purchase. There are different steps and ways in which they can choose and each may differ from one others. In this customers can face various complexions in various ways. For a very beginner, it is quite difficult to choose between these paths.

STAGES TO BEGIN THE PROCESS

There are a few stages that can be very helpful with beginning in marketing and can be very much beneficial to the customer lifecycle or journey.

Customer Acquiring:  Acquiring customers is very essential in starting the business and creating contact with the customer. Letting customers know about your brand and the opportunities they get from your brand will encourage customers to signup and build contact with you. Promote your social media pages so that maximum people can follow them and get to know about your company. It is equivalently important to build a good relationship with customers, send them welcome notes when they purchase your product for the first time, or signup for your service. You can share your offers and other deals available or provide them discount coupons at this time. Come to know what customers do expect from you and how can you fulfill that.

Consideration: In the consideration stage a prospect naturally becomes a customer. A customer will compare your products to your competitors and they will seek a reason to consider your products over others. When a customer visits your e-store and adds products to carts and leaves the cart without purchasing any item you can recognise that customer and remind them with an email about the left-out cart, a limited stock alert. That customer may find urgency in purchasing that and end up with a purchase. You can also add customer reviews with products for customer convincing. This can be a precious moment to prove your customer service. 

Purchase: There are a few points an email marketer needs to do after a customer completes his purchase. Firstly send them a thanksgiving note for making the purchase. If the business is retail goods live tracking feature or shipment notification can be shared via email they keep the customer aware of their product location and ETA of the product. Collect recommendations and review notes from the customers. For service-based businesses, a re-subscription reminder or new features alert is a must after purchase job to do. These emails provide reassurance to customers and they know they are taking service from safe hands.

Upsells and Cross-sells:  New customers provide more opportunities to go further in business and brands can showcase new products to them. Service providers can bring them under higher plans. If the personalisation and segmentation of customers are maintained properly then the email strategy can be brought up more effectively. The more you get to know your customer’s lifecycle or journey the more easily you will be able to make campaigns for them.

Retention: To keep continuing the customer’s journey retention is very necessary. Customers can sometimes doubt their choice of purchasing from you, email marketing and building personalized campaigns will keep customers engaged and help to create loyal customers. Some marketers use methods of using milestone or celebrating anniversary emails that anticipate moments with the customer. A smart marketer will also stay updated about their customer’s needs and look out for what are they searching for and send them notifications on its availability so the customer doesn’t move to their competitor.

Re-engagement: Sometimes customers might forget about your brand and move to another competitor this might happen due to dissatisfaction or any other issues. You need to re-engage such customers by reaching out. You can provide them special discounts and send personalised offers, and also remind them about your presence by showing them gratitude for being a customer of yours. Re-engagement has been proven very much effective for bringing back customers who went off in the middle or changed their platform.

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ANALYZING YOUR CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE JOURNEY FROM THE DATA

 The data you get can be very competent if you analyse them properly, you can do segmentation of customers by inspecting their behavior. There can be wide variation in this segmentation process simulating the circumstances but this will give a proper briefing on the customer lifecycle or journey and help in understanding best practices for customer retention and re-engagement.

Hindrances on the customer’s journey planner.

Motivational: Motivational obstacles occur when customers feel less interested or have different thoughts regarding the purchase. Such hurdles can be come across by more engagement with customers and using marketing strategies like discounts and abandoned cart emails. When the audience gets priority they feel a little motivated and get back on track.

Experiential:  User experience is a very important factor in marketing and you need to keep it smooth and user-friendly. If a customer receives a slow loading email or faulty links this can hamper the customer’s satisfactory point. It has been observed many audiences leave items in the cart just because slow payment process or laggy website, collecting reviews from them and working on such issues is necessary to re-engage those customers who left without the purchase. Reviews will give you a lot of information on customers’ choices, likes, and dislikes about your brand.

Competitive: If your competitors are having lower prices or an extensive product range than yours. Some of your would-be customers will consider moving to your competitors. You need to analyse data from a customer drop-off point to filter your letters and reduce customer objections. Analyse the data also with competitor research to gain insights into this type of hindrances.

MAINTAIN HUMANITY AT ALL STAGES

Though the data and analysis would provide you with all necessary information on obstacle situations and ways to handle them they will initially fail to provide you the human insight that the customer is thinking of. You need to fit in their shoes to watch this and experience the journey yourself. Because in real life human beings can think differently sometimes. But with the proper data and analysis, you can surely reach out for the records you want too.