GUIDES
Understanding customer lifecycle journey
Customer Lifecycle Journey
The customer lifecycle journey provides retail businesses with essential data on how to retain customers once they have indicated an interest in a brand. Over the customer lifetime journey, retail leaders must focus on engaging with their customers whenever possible over the customer lifetime journey to maintain a relationship with them and encourage brand loyalty.
What is the customer lifecycle? The customer lifecycle is the overall journey a retail customer takes with a brand, from initial awareness of a product to becoming a loyal, frequent customer. The customer lifecycle occurs in different stages, providing retail leaders unique opportunities to connect with their customers and leads.
To understand this process on a deeper level, retail leaders should look at an example of customer lifecycle. One can break down the customer lifecycle journey into five stages: lead generation, acquisition, 2nd order, growth, and retention. During each stage of the journey, a retail business must aim to engage with customers. For example, during the acquisition stage, retail leaders should focus on their highest-paying customers who have indicated brand satisfaction. By determining this, retail businesses can focus on the products that these customers typically purchase and redirect the company’s resources to fulfill this demand.
Tracking the customer lifecycle journey provides businesses with essential data to expand the customer’s lifetime with its brand. However, many retail businesses struggle to comprehend the importance of the customer lifecycle journey when looking at business metrics. Softwares like Lexer, a leading provider of customer data platforms for retail businesses, are essential to companies seeking methods of understanding the customer lifecycle journey. A vital aspect of increasing customer lifetime with your brand is tailoring content for each customer and creating personalized experiences that make customers feel valued and heard by your team. Lexer understands the importance of attracting high-value customers and how businesses can accomplish this through analyzing and understanding the customer lifecycle journey.
Customer Lifecycle Vs Customer Journey
While the two elements are tied together, retail businesses must understand the subtle differences between the customer lifecycle vs. customer journey process. One can essentially think of the customer lifecycle as the steps a retail marketing team takes to engage with customers during every stage of a lifecycle. The importance of customer lifecycle metrics ultimately comes down to the fact that a customer lifecycle helps marketing teams understand the typical actions customers take when interacting with their brand. A retail company’s marketing team uses customer lifecycle management to engage with leads and convert leads into loyal and returning customers.
On the other hand, the customer journey involves the actions taken by the customer instead of the retail business. The customer journey exists solely from the customer's perspective and how they interact with retail brands, including ways that the customer uses your brand’s products and services in their life. By understanding the importance of customer lifecycle management, retail marketing teams can make adjustments that improve the overall quality of the customer journey. Throughout your customer’s journey, your marketing team will seek ways to drive growth at every stage of the lifecycle.
Customer journeys are unique to each individual, making it essential for retail marketing teams to personalize the customer experience. Through personalization during a customer lifecycle, businesses can improve customer satisfaction and provide an engaging and enjoyable customer journey. Retail marketing teams must work to orchestrate a customer journey tailored to individual customers likely to engage with the brand. Data collected with software like Lexer highlights the importance of the customer journey and a complete overview of the journey that individual customers have. By doing this, Lexer’s software simplifies the process of personalizing customer experiences, identifying cross-selling opportunities, and improving overall marketing efforts. The customer journey must be understood for retail marketers collecting data about their customer lifecycle.
Customer Lifecycle Journey Mapping
An essential step that retail businesses must take to retain more customers is the process of lifecycle mapping. Customer lifecycle journey mapping provides retail marketing teams with a framework to understand customer lifecycle and the unique experiences customers have with their brand. Lifecycle mapping is critical to understanding where a retail business is thriving and what areas of the customer journey are lacking. Through mapping, retail marketers can better understand different customer journey milestones to prioritize when customizing content for individual customers.
Retail marketing teams will face challenges when they do not follow a customer lifecycle journey map. As previously mentioned, your customer success journey map template can be divided into five stages: lead generation, acquisition, 2nd order, growth, and retention. At each stage of this map, retail marketers can devise ways of customizing materials for individual customers based on essential lifecycle metrics. Lifecycle journey mapping is the best way retail marketers can create long-lasting relationships with their customers, especially when attempting to develop relationships with a larger volume of customers and leads. Lifecycle mapping is critical for retail marketing teams seeking ways to achieve overall customer success.
Because lifecycle journey mapping is essential to dissecting the stages of the customer’s unique experience with your company, software aimed at discovering data regarding customer journeys is critical. Lexer helps retail marketing teams create a SaaS customer journey map template that covers all customer lifecycle bases. Because Lexer offers retail businesses high-quality metrics about the customer lifecycle journey, marketing teams can significantly benefit when implementing Lexer’s software. Lexer’s features offer retail marketers numerous ways to understand the customer lifecycle and create an effective customer journey mapping template. For example, Lexer’s solutions allow retail marketers to connect their customer data to create a single customer view, standardize their data for consistent and confident decision-making, create well-rounded customer profiles, and predict customer behavior.
Customer Lifecycle in CRM
Lexer’s software looks at different data types to help retail businesses adjust their marketing tactics to improve customer retention and provide an engaging, successful customer journey. Some of the most important data that Lexer analyzes is Customer Relationship Management data (CRM). The customer life cycle in CRM consists of individual steps that customers and potential leads navigate throughout their entire customer journey. The stages of customer lifecycle in CRM are critical for retail marketing teams attempting to fully understand their data and make adjustments to personalize each customer experience.
The 4 stages of customer lifecycle are as follows: acquisition, conversion, retention, and advocacy. In each stage, marketing teams can take unique approaches to engage with customers and improve their CRM. For example, the acquisition stage begins when a lead first becomes aware of your brand and considers making a purchase. In the acquisition stage, retail marketing teams must present their brand to make a strong, positive first impression. This first impression is critical to CRM as it sets the tone for the remainder of the customer lifecycle. During acquisition, marketing teams should focus on customizing messages for their leads to move on to the next stage of the customer lifecycle.
Conversion occurs when a customer makes their first purchase and indicates that the initial acquisition was prosperous. However, marketing teams must put in additional effort following conversion to improve their CRM. The retention stage is critical to the customer lifecycle in CRM as this is the stage where customers will have begun using your products. The retention stage marks the difference between a first-time buyer and a loyal customer who returns to your brand. Personalizing content for individual customers is crucial at this stage to ensure that your buyers become repeat customers. Finally, the advocacy stage emphasizes the importance of customer loyalty in CRM. During this final stage, customers will ideally become ambassadors for your brand by spreading the word about your products and services.
Customer Life Cycle Marketing
Customer life cycle marketing is essential for retail businesses struggling to retain customers after the first purchase or to convert leads in the first place. Because CRM data is critical to a successful customer journey, retail marketing teams need a customer lifecycle management framework, such as the framework found in customer journey mapping templates. Managing the different functions of your business is possible with customer lifecycle management software such as Lexer.
Lexer understands the importance of solid customer lifestyle management for retail marketing teams. To begin, retail marketers should determine some of the customer lifecycle management best practices to engage with and retain customers. Among the best customer lifecycle management examples are marketing tactics that use data to create individualized and unique content for all customers. Customer lifecycle management marketing is essential during the initial customer acquisition and the remainder of the lifecycle stages. By paying attention to methods of engaging with customers at every stage of their journey, retail marketing teams can craft positive experiences that improve the chances of customers becoming advocates.
Retail marketers should implement unique tactics to connect with their customers during the customer lifecycle management stages. For example, the acquisition stage should provide leads with detailed, personalized answers and suggestions depending on the customer’s needs. Customers unfamiliar with your brand will need reassurance that purchasing from you is a practical and intelligent use of their money. Given this, your brand should be easily accessible to customers looking for answers that will help them feel valued. Following the initial acquisition, marketing teams must use software like Lexer to continue delivering a positive customer journey that shows your brand's genuine care for its customers. Retail businesses must consider Lexer’s software as their primary platform for gathering customer data and improving the customer lifecycle journey. Using Lexer’s software, retail businesses can significantly improve the customer journey with high-quality and practical tools.
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