Lifecycle marketing is the foundation on which everything we do at Driftrock is built. Here we detail what it is that makes up the 3 pillars of lifecycle marketing, and how to change how you view your sales and lead funnel.

1. Restructure Your Funnel

Lifecycle marketing is not just thinking about a funnel with a top and a bottom, it is about viewing it as a complete cycle. Imagine your perfect customer - they don’t just work their way through your funnel once, and disappear after a single purchase - they keep returning, over and again. The customer should enter the cycle, and you nurture them through to purchase repeatedly. With your lifecycle marketing setup in this way, you are in a position to create brand evangelists.

It's also about treating the whole customer lifecycle as a self-fulfilling circle, rather a funnel.

The connection through which we close the lifecycle loop is through syncing audiences from your CRM to social. These audiences can be used to create new prospecting audiences of people that resemble your segments (i.e. lookalikes). They are powerful in that you are using your most high quality, seed data, to find and source new audiences. There is no better seed audience than your own customers. Period.

These lookalike audiences are then used in your lead generation, therefore giving you a lifecycle that feeds itself.

Lifecycle marketing transcends marketing channels too. Treat your marketing team as a whole, and not silos of Brand, Direct Response, CRM, Website etc. Linking up these areas enables you to reach every part of your lifecycle across multiple platforms, with consistent and relevant messages.

2. Deliver Value

Deliver real value throughout the whole customer lifecycle, whether that is top of the funnel content, or bottom of the funnel promo codes. While your goal might be sales or registrations, you shouldn’t expect something for nothing. Therefore it's important to build a relationship with your customers. Share insights, ebooks, product sneak previews, blog posts, newsletters - anything that adds value for your customers.

It can take as many as 7 touches with a customer before you are able to convert them to a sale. Therefore a well structured drip-feed content marketing campaign will enable you to push your leads through the lifecycle.

3. Measure Everything

It is imperative that you measure all stages in your lifecycle and understand downstream metrics with upstream touchpoints. If you don't, you can't optimise. With visibility of exactly where your leads came from (e.g. email, social), you can optimise your spend to those streams that convert the best.

Use tracking links like bit.ly, and add utm tags to your landing page url’s. In addition, if you are using an automatic lead sync platform like Driftrock Lead Response to pipe your social advertising leads to your CRM, tag your lead lists with unique identifiers. Additionally, ensure that your email marketing provider gives you the ability to track open and click rates.

Want to find out more how Driftrock can help with your lifecycle marketing?

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