Every customer goes through different phases before they finally buy a product from a brand. Generally, these phases are categorized as: reach, acquisition, conversion, retention, and loyalty. This entire journey of a customer from discovering a brand to reaching it out, buying a product, and eventually becoming a loyal customer is known as the customer lifecycle.
Understanding the customer lifecycle helps retailers in many ways. They can use more attractive marketing tactics to engage new customers, reduce friction, and create loyal fans and advocates for their brands. Nowadays, retailers use customer lifecycle platforms to gather data regarding every phase of the customer lifecycle and leverage it for their benefit.
Customer lifecycle importance:
1. Understanding the customer lifecycle enables retailers to make changes to their marketing campaigns
Retailers can find out whether their marketing campaigns are working or not at every stage of the customer lifecycle. For example, if your advertisements are not running properly, it might be difficult for you to reach out to customers. Similarly, if customers are abandoning the cart and you are not following them up, it might be difficult to make sales.
2. Understanding customer lifecycle helps in identifying friction in every stage
This is similar to the first point, but it includes every aspect of the customer lifecycle and not just marketing. This means overall user experience, content marketing, advertisements, email marketing, and interaction with the customers. For instance, if your brand gets a huge attraction yet not many customers make a purchase. You know there is a glitch in the phases of reach, acquisition, and conversion.
3. Understanding customer lifecycle tells how customers interact with a brand
Customer lifecycle data helps you understand the various touch points through which customers interact with your brand and you can enhance those areas to increase customer engagement, conversion, and retention. For example, you can find out which products are being liked/ disliked the most.
4. Understanding customer lifecycle can help in building brand loyalty
Once retailers understand how customers interact with their brand, and what their preferences, interests, and choices are, it becomes easier for them to run loyalty programs. They can personalize communications with customers and provide them with what they actually need at every stage of the life cycle. This can help in increasing brand loyalty by retaining customers for the long haul.
Understanding the customer lifecycle is imperative for every retail business these days. Marketing automation and customer journey are two important aspects of retailing that can help in tracking customer insights. This can further help in increasing the customer attraction, engagement, retention, and loyalty.
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