Email is one of the most powerful channels of communication between companies and clients. But businesses often get stuck in the trap of using email primarily as a marketing tool for people at the top of the funnel or at the starting phase of a buyer’s journey.

Lifecycle emails help your campaign achieve success at every stage.

It’s time to begin thinking about emails past the point of SignUp and from a product perspective.

Instead, a majority of your emails should be segmented various customer groups. There are several ways to segment your email campaigns, but the best way to send personalized content is to organize your emails according to the customer’s lifecycle.

Why Is Customer Lifecycle Important? 

The customer lifecycle email marketing describes the journey your customers take before, during, and after they complete a transaction and emails sent according to each stage. It’s a trope for the relationship your customers have with your brand.

At any given time, every customer is at some point in the lifecycle. They generally move forward through the lifecycle, but it’s possible to move backward.

Understanding the customer lifecycle email marketing helps you craft messages, images, and offers to have a maximum impact on your conversions. By mapping your customer lifecycle, you'll be able to create email campaigns that target your customers in their specific part of the journey.

You can use lifecycle email marketing to influence all of your marketing campaigns (like your blog posts, Facebook ads, and even your product creation), but it’s especially useful for email marketing.

Why Should You Base Your Emails On The Client Lifecycle?

• They produce higher conversions because the email content targets the client well.
• Even if your client doesn’t convert, they still find the emails valuable.
• Emails are more likely to be relevant to the customer that receives them, so customers never feel like you wasted their time.  

In fact, email has higher conversion rates than social media or search and drives higher average order value than they.

The Different Stages of a Customer In Lifecycle Email Marketing

You can define your customer stage in lifecycle email marketing any way you like. When many businesses start to really consider how their customers interact with their brand, they often find unique events or milestones that define their customers’ journey.

Most brands use fairly standard customer lifecycle email marketing stages mentioned below:

1. Prospects

These are people who aren’t customers yet, but they definitely can be. They fit your buyer personas and they’ve taken some action to engage with your brand.  

What kind of actions count as engagement?  

• Visiting your website  
• Clicking a Facebook ad
• Liking a social media post
• Subscribing to your newsletter
• Creating an account on your website  

Push them to create that initial purchase, even if you have to incentivize them with a discount. Once they make that initial purchase, getting them to make subsequent purchases becomes a lot easier.

Sending lifecycle email marketing content to prospects is tough because you usually don’t have their email address (you gain most of your email addresses through transactions). Sometimes prospects subscribe somewhere on your website or provide their address through a giveaway, promotion, or partnership with another brand.

If you've got their email address, send content that introduces them to your brand - sending cart abandonment emails is a great way to do this, especially within your first email in a series. Start the process of building a relationship by giving the prospect some value, like the free content or a coupon.

You should also assist them to check out your best-selling products. (Ideally, you’d want to customise your product offerings to their preferences, but you probably don’t have that info at this point).

2. Active Customers

These are people who have already made at least one purchase, but it also represents people who make lots of purchases.

Depending on your clientele, you might split this group into several groups that higher depict their buying habits. For instance, you might consider active customers who purchase yearly gifts in a different segment than active customers who purchase weekly consumable products. Keep those customers engaged so they continue to purchase.

The best way to keep customers engaged is by serving regular, personalized email content that meets their needs and preferences. It’s also important to constantly test your open and click-through rates (CTR) to maximize your campaign’s performance.

Furthermore, you’ll want to send these customers transactional emails (order confirmations, follow-up emails, product review requests, purchase receipts, cart abandonment emails, etc.) and replenishment campaigns (reminders to re-purchase consumable items).

Here’s an example of how Huckberry stays connected with their active customers:

3. At-risk Customers

These are customers who were active at one point, but they missed the time they were supposed to build other purchase.

How you determine when a client moves from “active” to “at-risk” depends on your products and customers. For example, if you sell one variety of aftermarket car parts, a client may only buy once during their car’s life – every five or seven years.

But if you sell a big line of consumable products (makeup, for instance), you may consider someone at-risk if they fail to make a purchase every thirty days. Turn at-risk customers back into active customers before they blunder.

Re-engaging cold email subscribers is tough unless you know specifically why they lost interest. Plus, the only way to contact them is through email, which doesn’t help if they have learned to ignore your emails.

There are a few ways to re-engage your email subscribers, like retargeting them on another platform or offering Tripwire deals or coupons. You’ll need to find the best technique for your customers.

Here’s an example of how Sephora tried to win back some of their inactive customers:

4. Lapsed Customers

These are people have gone long past the point they were assumed to make a purchase and don’t respond to your outreach (emails, retargeting ads, etc.). Reactivate these customers into active customers.

Similar to re-engaging at-risk customers, you have got to run win-back campaigns to turn lapsed customers into active customers.

Unfortunately, this is even tougher than re-acquiring at-risk customers because lapsed customers have gotten far away from your brand. It’s not impossible, but it’s difficult. You can strategize to win them back by holding a conversation, get personal, prompt a purchase, lay off the hard sell, send timely reminders, reward customer loyalty, ask for customer feedback, create re-engagement campaigns, etc.

5. Advocates

These are people who not only purchase the product regularly, they actively promote your brand for you. They might post on social media, the benefit of your referral marketing feature, or simply share your name via word-of-mouth.

Nurture and reward these customers so they keep engaged and continue to promote for you.

Keep your advocates within the loop by sending them special content that acknowledges their contributions. Instead of your typical branded HTML styles, you might send them something simpler and more personal that appears to come directly from a human.

It also helps to feature some exclusivity copy to your emails to drive home the point that your recipients aren’t like regular customers.

Here is an example of Aerosole's rewards their VIP club:

The Right Message Always Wins

Sending email blasts to your entire list can compel your subscribers to unsubscribe. Plus, it’s just not effective. By mapping your customer phase in lifecycle email marketing and creating emails for customers at each stage, you’ll improve your conversion rates and build a stronger brand following.

Have You Scaled The Revolution of Email Marketing?

We have all read countless articles claiming that email Armageddon is near. But, it’s 2018 and email marketing shows signs of expanding.

In fact, 73 of marketers agree its core to their business. And over 55th of marketers set up on increasing their email marketing budget this year because it continues to provide the most ROI for the marketing investment. Email marketing is changing the face of digital marketing. Email marketing has caused a huge upswing in consumer marketing. Estimates say that by 2019, 162 billion people will be marketed businesses from their emails.

Also, email marketing is getting easier. Mobile has complicated matters, and email marketers are on the hook to make personalized experiences that transcend channels and devices. The new marketing intelligence technology for email marketers makes it easy and scalable to track relevant leads, capture relevant information from each lead, and apply those insights to each aspect of your email marketing.  

When you combine Emailidea with your email marketing journey, you will:

• Drive more engagement – especially for your target audience.
• Get a whole new layer of data regarding your prospects.
• Improve audience segmentation and email personalization.
• Get a clear picture of email ROI for the 1st campaign.

Here’s How It Works

Emailidea makes it easy to put trackable leads and click to call buttons in your email campaigns. This way, you provide your audience with an easy way to get personal service.  

Emailidea not only improves email engagement, but it also gives you a whole new layer of data about your customers that you can use to segment your targeted audience and personalize every step of the customer’s journey. With email intelligence, marketers can trigger follow-up campaigns based on inbound calls from emails, deliver journeys that adapt to caller behaviour, and even improve conversions with insight into customer conversations.

Emailidea gets you one giant step closer to email marketing success. Hope this blog for Lifecycle Email Marketing: Revolution in Email Marketing helped you. In case you want to avail any of our services, please visit our services page. Have any questions? Don’t hesitate to contact us.