If you have a product or service and invest in marketing, you are surely tired of hearing about the Sales Funnel, right? Along with the funnel, in order to have a well-structured strategy, it is important to have a deep understanding of the customer's life cycle, because it is this life cycle that will direct you to make more assertive decisions.
Do you want to better understand how the customer lifecycle works and know some essential strategies to manage this flow assertively? So continue with us!
What will you see in this post?
- What is the customer lifecycle?;
- Why is it important to track the customer lifecycle?;
- How to get your hands dirty
Enjoy it!
What is the customer lifecycle?
Have you ever noticed that before making a purchase, there is a way to go? Even if it's quick, like going to the bakery to buy bread, there are some steps to get to the time of purchase.
We can quickly identify some of them without much effort. Let's look at the example of bread:
- Identify the need (eat something);
- Choosing what to buy (bread);
- Choose where to buy (bakery/market);
- Travel to the location (or order via delivery);
- Choose the type of product (type of bread);
- Product quantity;
- Possible complements (such as cold cuts or pâtés);
- Payment;
- Returns to the home or place of consumption of the product;
- Phase of using the product (eating the bread);
- Approve or not the taste/consumption experience.
All these steps just to buy a loaf of bread, phew! A lot, right? The funny thing is that a good part of this step by step, sometimes, becomes so common that we don't even remember that we went through it, we end up doing it unconsciously. Is not true? Keep this information, we will use it later.
Consciously or unconsciously, each step of this is part of the consumer's purchase journey, or, as we mentioned earlier, the so-called consumer life cycle.
In practice, the consumer life cycle is nothing more than the different stages that the customer goes through along his journey with a company.
As a rule, we divide this cycle into a few steps:
- Qualification/Segmentation;
- Attraction/Acquisition;
- monetization;
- Retention;
- Reactivation/Recovery.
Within each step, it is important to analyze some specific metrics and KPIs to understand what can be improved and optimize the lifecycle consumer on your website).
And in case you don't know what metrics and KPIs are, clearly and objectively, metrics are a set of data that you pull from a certain place - the raw information so to speak. On the other KPIs, are key performance indicators that your organization's managers define to monitor the performance of the team, the organization, the actions taken, etc.
Even, in case you don't already know, the AARRR can help you analyze the correct metrics for each stage of the journey, in this way, you can focus on what really matters.
In parallel with the consumer life cycle, we have the sales funnel. This funnel is divided into three stages: top, middle and bottom.
- Top (ToFu): where your visitors are discovering they have a need;
- Middle (MoFu): here, he already knows he has a problem and is looking for a solution;
- Bottom (BoFu): where the most qualified leads become customers.
It is necessary to reinforce that the life cycle is directly linked to the sales funnel and that the opposite is also true, and that at each stage of them, the consumer must be approached in a different way, after all, the person who is in the retention phase (MoFu) is in a very different moment from the one that is still in the attraction phase (ToFu).
In this way, the production of content and the most diverse forms of marketing must be directed according to the specific steps.
Even if you have questions about how to use inbound marketing to produce assertive content, take the opportunity to take a look here on the blog, we have several content to help you in this mission!
Read too:
- CRO in Marketing: 4 benefits to apply in your business;
- How the CRO will help your consumer's experience on the web;
- UX writing: the importance of customer experience.
Why is it important to track the customer lifecycle?
Simple: who better than your own customer to tell them what they need?
When you know your customer's needs and wants in depth, it becomes easier to define strategies for those needs. This knowledge helps you work in a more targeted and even predictive way (the use of artificial intelligence can help you with this).
Another advantage of knowing the customer lifecycle well is that by identifying gaps and needs, you can unite your marketing team even more with the sales team, in addition to working together to generate more scalability for your business. It also generates a more efficient capture and conversion process.
Now, if all this is so important, how to work each step of this journey? Let's check it out!
Qualification/Targeting
This is the first stage of the funnel (top of the funnel stage). At this stage, your potential customer is still a visitor (he can't even be considered a lead yet) on your online pages. He is in the phase of learning and discovering that he has a problem to be solved.
In this step, you must produce content and generate strategies that generate the interest of this audience on a certain topic. It's not the time to show your brand with the sales pitch yet, it's time to become friends, to bring things that say "you have a problem" in a subtle way.
For this, you can actively use SEO strategies (website and blog), massively use social media bringing "curiosity" content related to the universe of your products, you can even use Google ADS and Meta ADS to expose your brand to a colder audience.
When we talk about the acquisition phase, it is important to analyze how your users arrive at your site and how qualified these visitors are, that is, it is not just understanding if you have leads entering the site, but what actions they are taking. .
We often fail to analyze this data, which is extremely important in the fundraising strategy, especially when the result is satisfactory. It turns out that when we fail to analyze this data, we fail to understand what we can improve to capture even more leads.
Attraction/Acquisition
We're in the middle to the bottom and it's time to convert. For this, our actions must generate more and more interest from the lead in your products and services, so that they interact with your offers more and more.
Here, we're going to talk about actions. It is not enough to take the lead to your page, it is necessary to evaluate and understand if this lead is actually being activated to the point of performing the actions that you expect it to perform on your website.
The most used way for this moment to convert continues to be email marketing. But, currently, we can also include social networks, WhatsApp messages and even Telegram (if your capture strategy has been used to forward the lead to internal groups on these networks).
Make content touching more deeply your customer's pain, offer discount coupons or "member get member" promotions. Think about conversion strategies, here, your marketing team and the commercial team should literally be best friends.
While the marketing team actively works to keep the public warm, its commercial team works to serve customers who are looking for a more personalized service.
Revenue
Well, there is no business without revenue, right? Knowing the revenue generated through your actions is one of the most important parts of any business. It is this metric that justifies (or not) all the actions taken so far.
Here, we have already left the funnel and are focusing on the life cycle. After all, it is not just about selling, but analyzing whether this sale is actually bringing a return to the company. For this, you must analyze several indicators and always keep in mind that the lower the cost per customer acquisition (CAC), the better the result of your revenue.
Here are some KPIs that can be analyzed:
- How the user generates revenue for your company;
- How much did the new customer cost your business?
- Conversion amount x free templates membership amount (if your business offers it);
- If you have partnered (with influencers, for example), what was the return of these partnerships in conversion?
Retention
You already have a customer, but you need to keep them so that they continue to buy your products and services, in addition to becoming a brand advocate and starting to refer you to other people.
In this step, take the opportunity to measure your customer's satisfaction. There are several KPIs that you can adopt to collect this data, some of them are:
- NPS;
- Blacklists pointing to your site;
- Mentions in social networks;
- Reviews on recommendation sites and even Google;
- Customer testimonials;
- Number of users who indicate your service;
- Number of leads/customers that were generated from a referral action (such as using discount coupons).
Here, we need to focus on nutrition strategies. At this stage, you must invest in the "pleasures" and in enchanting. For this, nutrition email marketing is used a lot with personalized content, discount coupons - the famous: come back here! You can also offer freebies or new experiences to your customers.
Oh, of course we can't forget: customer service is part of the retention process! If he has any post-purchase questions, it is very important to give him the attention he deserves.
Recovery
After going through all the stages of the lifecycle, it's important to understand why some leads became customers and others didn't.
The recovery phase is what we call remarketing, in which you can analyze the reasons why not everyone has reached the end of the purchase cycle and work punctually with strategies for this.
Analyze the profile of your customers and your leads, if possible, do a study personas, understand if the communication was assertive for the audience you are really interested in reaching and then, produce materials that catch their attention.
How to get your hands dirty?
Now that you know a little more about the consumer life cycle, you must be wondering: and how to put all this into practice?
To implement this strategy within your business, you can study the strategies in depth at each stage and adapt them to the reality of your business. Here on our blog, you will find several content to help you.
By the way, did you know that CRO, SEO and UX strategies are essential for all this to work? Learn a little more about them in this post that we recently posted here on the blog: CRO, SEO AND UX: Learn about these optimization techniques.
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