Email marketing is one of the important parts of any marketing strategy & cost effective way to promote your products & services. Email marketing has the power to outperform all other activities SEO, PPC, content marketing & more. Email has ability to communicate with your customers effectively & reach your business goals effectively.
For every $1 spent on email marketing, you can expect a return of $51. Good deal isn’t it?
Take your email marketing strategy to the next level with effective lifecycle marketing. By doing this you can improve your conversion rate &revenue.
What is Lifecycle Email Marketing?
Ultimate goal of educating prospect is to understand what a company offers & how it can help them to succeed in their business goals. In simple lifecycle marketing helps to improve the purchasing, customer retention & their business relationship.
Taking potential customer through specific or targeted milestone in the sales funnel is often referred as Lifecycle Email Marketing.With the advancement & improved accessibility in AI technology, email marketing had made lifecycle email marketing possible. With the right tool & techniques you can pull data & trigger emails accordingly.With the collected information from prospects, B2B marketers can send them directly proposal with the goal of making a sale.
In blog we will be discussing about Email Lifecycle Marketing Strategies:
In order to create an effective email lifecycle marketing strategy, we need to have a crystal clear understanding what is happening within each & every stage of the funnel. So to master customer lifecycle one must have a genuine understanding of their target audience & ready to grow their customer value.
Brand Awareness:
This is one of the first & foremost stage is creating awareness. In this stage you no need to email to leads. Ultimate aim of entry sales funnel is building awareness. Creating good quality content attracts potentials leads or customers. In this stage B2B marketers promote their products & services.
Awareness strategies include:
- Create targeted audience for each buyer, so that you can fit into the buyers profile more accurately.
- Invest time & do key research on keywords, which can promote your business when searched online.
- Conduct FAQs or post regular blogs addressing the audience about their common problems.
- Put up billboards or banner ads in the common place where your customer visit.
- Collaborate with guest or influencers to promote content across all marketing channels.
Brand Engagement:
This stage is often referred as success of first step mentioned above. In this stage prospect begins their interaction with the brand probably they can be added to the subscribers list.
Brand Engagement strategies include:
- Design an engaging landing pages which are simple to navigate
- Promote videos or demos showcasing product services
- Promote blog post or templates or offer a common solution for most frequently asked question.
- Highlight case studies showing the importance of providing a solution to the common problems
- Publish a white paper covering the insights of industry research
Conversion:
If you’ve impressed the potential buyers time has come to move forward in transitioning them from a prospect into a customer. Check with audience & decide what is missing or what needs to be included in your product when compared to your product.
Common conversion strategies include:
- Give crystal clear information about pricing & feature information on your website
- Build trust among customer by sharing testimonials
- Create a demo or free trial address the customer question
Support:
It is important to meet any customers need & maximize the value of their purchase. As people tend to drop off at their first buy, this stage is considered as one of the best important stages for following up with customer get them delivered what they want.
Loyalty:
This is a crucial stage of customer lifecycle where customers can let out everyone to know about their brand & want to bring new buyers to their business. With a thoughtful plan you can stay connected existing customers meet the marketing, sales & company goals.
- Promote exclusive in app features
- Have loyalty club membership for the customer
- Conduct events or webinars with industry experts
- Conduct referral programs for expanding customer base
- Connect with lapsed customers by reactivating campaign
Brand Evaluation By Customers:
Prospect will evaluate what you offer them & decide if it is worth making certain connection.
Customer purchase: on the success of brand evaluation by customer they may purchase your product.
Sharing post purchase experience: Every brand will reach out to you to ensure their expectations are met & to know if anything need to be improved.
Here are six lifecycle points that can be rolled out to improve sales with effective email strategy:
Customer visiting for the very first time:
When a customer visits your store for the first time, they create an opportunity for your brand, build a strong business relationship at first visit & turn them into a customer. Hereyou can nurture first time visitor by sending a series of welcome mails which provides opportunities to tell your story & ensure trust. The key take away strategy is capturing first time visitors email addresses & welcome them with a series of good content.
Customer browsing some products & leaving your website:
If a customer holds back for a long time, address this by email. Brainstorm with customer to understand what stops them by purchasing & try to understand the perspective from the customer.Whatever the finding may be, it is important to analyze, create win win situation for your business & customer.Make use of browse abandonment which can pinpoint exact product customer interested.
Lifecycle Marketing Strategy:
Having good strategy is one of the core aspects of any successful marketing lifecycle marketing. Without it, wrong leads won’t turn your brand into advocates. With successful strategy hits, you have the highest probability to:
- Grow your customer base
- Get better buying experience
- Improve sales
- Turning buyers into brand advocates
- Improve marketing ROI
- Improves lifetime value of customer
Here are few examples of how to use different marketing channels throughout the entire lifecycle.
Though the simple strategy may work well for your company, having touch point & different types of channel is highly recommended. For instance, a small business may use social media, a website & events to collaborate with potential buyers. Similarly a major or well established art museum with require a more complex marketing strategy to reach out to its thousands of visitors, attract new customers, retain membership, host events & etc.
No matter the size of lifecycle marketing strategies, all are fueled by high quality content. A survey by HubSpot shows nearly 70% of the marketers actively invest in content marketing, so big take away is if you don’t invest on potential buyers you won’t create relevant content at every stage of lifecycle marketing.
Here are few tips on improving your email marketing strategy:
- Send a welcome mail
- Segment based on their behaviors
- Send milestone emails
- Send re-engagement campaigns
- Reward loyal customers
- Send emails from directly from subscribers form
- Provide offers or custom deals for exchange of an email address
Wrapping up:
With the above detailing hope now you’re aware of all benefits, stages & ways to incorporate lifecycle marketing into your company’s strategy. Now you can roll out effective ways to map customer segments & managing people from different aspects you bring in. Once this mapping is done, you can save time & energy in simplifying the task of setting up email campaigns, monitoring or tracking analytics. So with proper planning & execution lifecycle marketing provides all kinds of communication & experience required for your prospects that need along with identifying growth opportunities for your business.