Lifecycle marketing campaign management isn’t too different from it’s predecessor, email marketing campaign management. After all, without email marketing and marketing automation, lifecycle marketing wouldn’t be possible. However, unlike most campaign management solutions, lifecycle marketing focuses on customer lifetime value and not lead generation.
Certainly, lead generation is an important step in creating a customer lifecycle; however, it’s not the sole purpose for lifecycle marketing software. Remember, 80 percent of your company’s revenue will come from just 20 percent of your existing customers. (Gartner Research) Lifecycle marketing campaign management emphasizes engagement and stage movement — an organization’s ability to move a contact or an account from a prospect stage into a customer stage.
Here are six steps marketers can take to better manage lifecycle marketing campaigns and increase their customer lifetime value.
- Grow your opt-in list. This should be a constant effort managed by marketing, sales and client success teams. Remember, in the case of lifecycle marketing, the collection of client email addresses is just as important (if not more) as growing your prospective customer email list. This takes a major mindset change: it’s not all about leads.
- Determine your campaign goal. Looking to up-sell or cross-sell current clients by the end of the quarter? What about scheduling 50 discovery meetings by the end of the month? The goal will directly impact content and audience. Set a clear goal and timeline.
- Define the audience and create your segment. Your campaign’s content should be dependent on who you are trying to reach. Customers should receive a completely different type of communication than prospects. Through lifecycle stages, the level of personalization should also increase as the contact shares more information over time.
- Create a nurturing campaign. Remember, campaigns are created with the intention of building engagement and moving contacts into the next stage of a business’s lifecycle. In order to do this, you’ll need to nurture and build engagement with contacts throughout the campaign. It’s much more than “drip.”
- Automate campaign tactics. Marketing automation is extremely helpful in helping marketers to reach the right people at the right time with the right message. Through automation, campaigns can run on their own and even provide daily or weekly reports to marketing and sales teams to prove their value.
- Track campaign effectiveness. How else can ROI be measured if you’re not checking to see if a campaign is working? Constant monitoring of campaign results is critical. NOTE: This is more than opens and click-through rates! Important metrics include campaign engagement growth and lifecycle stage conversion rates.
Are you interested in starting a lifecycle marketing campaign? Learn more here.
