Lifecycle Email Marketing
Reach your customers with sustainably successful email campaigns
- Lifecycle campaigns are designed to react to the various stages of a customer’s lifecycle. New customers want to know other things than repeat customers. Lifecycle campaigns respond to their respective needs.
Customers receive perfectly designed mailings at the right time with the right content to improve customer loyalty in the long run. That might sound time consuming, but CleverReach® offers you everything you need for a quick creation of those campaigns:
- Create single-track or multi-level email campaigns with THEA
- Define placeholders, personalize your newsletters and increase your relevance
- Always have up-to-date content with dynamic elements and RSS feeds
Customer Journey, Life Cycle, Influencer - what it means
And why you should deal with that topic
1. Before you start: Customer journey and stages of buying decision
To develop a lifecycle campaign, we recommend looking at your customers’ journey when deciding to buy items from your shop. With lifecycle email marketing, you can create and send customized newsletters for exactly these stages, combined with your business model.
Goals:
- Long-term customer loyalty
- More engagement
- And of course: more purchases
This requires a detailed analysis. Think about the central questions:
- Who is your target group?
- What stage is your customer at? Prospect, new customer, repeat or inactive customer?
- What is the trigger action for your mailing? Subscription, purchase, abandoned cart, etc.?
- Personal data (gender, age, etc.) can also influence your campaigns
Once created, every recipient automatically gets the right emails at the right time with personalized and relevant content. Easily set the delivery conditions in your CleverReach® account. You’ll see that the effort for the creation and adjustment of automated mailings pays off right from the start.
Tip: The oldest model describing the Customer Journey is the AIDA formula that still applies today:
- Attention: Customers becomes aware of a product or solution
- Interest: They start getting interested in the product or solution
- Desire: They are convinced of the product’s/solution’s quality and desires it
- Action: They buy the product/solution
2. Create campaigns: Automated emails - and yet still individualized
In Lifecycle email marketing, personalized content is created for the respective stages that take the life situation and personal preferences of the customer into account. Aim at getting to your customer in a way that they receive the maximum of relevance from your mailings.
Universal stages for your email marketing are:
Prospects: receive offers based on the present data:
- Newsletter
- Welcome mailings/ onboarding campaigns
- Trigger mails, e.g. welcome coupons
New customers: get exclusive offers
- Thank you mailing
- Structured transaction emails (shipment status)
- Multi-level campaigns
- Cross- and Up-Selling offers
- Emails on specific topics
- Satisfaction surveys
Repeat customers: receive regular and personalized emails
- Follow-up mailings
- Exclusive offers
- Birthday and anniversary emails
- Product recommendations
- Service reminders
Inactive customers: get personalized content with purchase incentives
- Re-engagement emails with special offers
- Reminder mailings
- surveys
The goal is to make sure your repeat customers don’t become inactive. Increase the success of your lifecycle campaigns with personalized emails that combine the present status and various preferences of your recipients.
3. Example: win back inactive subscribers
Sometimes, even the most perfect lifecycle campaigns won’t work: the recipient is inactive and doesn’t react to your mailings. You’ll have to respect that. He or she didn’t unsubscribe from your newsletter, but hasn’t been opening them for months either. That’s not entirely dramatic, but too many non-openers can have a bad influence on your reputation.
So, what can you do instead? Start a re-engagement campaign! This is how it could look like:
- Identify your inactive recipients: Define a point in time when you set your customer to inactive – e.g. after not opening your newsletters for six months
- Exclude inactive recipients from certain campaigns: Remove them from your regular campaigns.
- Create a campaign exclusively designed for inactive recipients: Create exciting and personalized subject lines for higher relevance
- Repeat your re-engagement campaign: Many inactive recipients won’t open your mailings the first time, but maybe the second or third time. Change subject and content. Experience shows that inactive customers can be won back – and start generating turnover again.
- Say goodbye to recipients remaining inactive: Clear up your list of recipients and set those who haven’t reacted to your re-engagement campaign to “inactive”. This will get you higher open rates with your next mailing – and a better reputation!
4. Supreme discipline: Turning customers into influencers
There are lots of ways to organize the Customer Journey. As different as they might be, they still have one thing in common: it is assumed that a buying decision is only made after several stages. Also, the journey doesn’t end with the purchase:
- The first step is the research period
- It is followed by the presales stage
- The purchase stage completes the purchase, but doesn’t end the journey yet
- It is followed by the loyalty stage
- Ideally, it’s followed by the influencer stage
The research process is by no means linear, but rather complex. The customer is looking for information not only in classic sources like ads, PR or manufacturer information, but also in forums, blogs and social networks. That’s why it’s essential to include your customers in this cycle and to inspire them. That’s how you turn regular customers into valuable influencers who positively inspire new customers. Ideally, this happens in a cycle.
Lifecycle email marketing is an essential element to communicate with your customers. The long-term goal is to get your customers engaged and turn them into messengers.
Get started for free with CleverReach®!
Manage
- up to 2,500 recipients
- and send up to 10,000 emails per month for free!
Our Lite Plan has no limited running-term. There is no setup fee and no contractual obligations.
For more emails and features, choose between our Flex, Essential or Enterprise plans. Our price plan calculator will tell you which plan is the best for you!
