So I piqued your interest in Lifecycle Marketing! Let me break it down for you. Lifecycle uses marketing strategies to engage with potential customers, nurture them into customers and retain them as customers. The most common marketing channels to implement lifecycle marketing strategies are email marketing, SMS marketing, in-app/app marketing, and direct-mail marketing but other tools and channels also aid in nurturing and retaining a customer, including, social media, content marketing, retargeting, and more.
My favorite and tried & true lifecycle marketing channel is email marketing. “Email marketing is a powerful marketing channel, a form of direct marketing as well as digital marketing, that uses email to promote your business’s products or services…It can also play a pivotal role in your marketing strategy with lead generation, brand awareness, building relationships or keeping customers engaged between purchases through different types of marketing emails.*”
It’s my favorite because it lets you be both strategic and creative at the same time. You can decide on how and when and who to target for a particular email, be it about a new product, a blog post or a promotional sale, while also working to establish a relationship with a customer. For the email, you can work on the copy/content and creative design to bring it all together deciding what and how the email looks like. Email marketing is also cost effective as the main cost is for a platform tool like Klaviyo, MailChimp, Braze, Iterable or the many others out there.
In addition to developing the content, once an email goes out to its intended audience, you can review the analytics to see how it performed, such as seeing how many people the email was sent to, how many people opened the email, clicked and/or purchased an item(s), plus more.
Email automation is also a tactic. With this, emails are sent automatically after a subscriber/customer performs a specific action. For example, a user visits a website and signs up to receive emails from a company. After signing up, a warm welcome email is sent shortly after telling the subscriber more about the company, what to expect and products or services to check out. Then, a day later, another email is sent. Three days later, another email goes out and so on as decided. This is called a Welcome Series. All emails can and should have different content and a stated goal or outcome. Is the goal of the welcome series intended to get a subscriber to click and read content or find out more information about a product, or is it to make a purchase?
Whew! You made it to the end. Still interested in learning more? Well there’s more where that comes from so stay tuned.
*Source: https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/email-marketing/
Up Close & Polished 