By understanding the different customer lifecycle stages, you're building a solid platform for a longterm relationship with your customers.
When working with the customer lifecycle, you visualize the touchpoints from their perspective to ensure you are addressing them with an interesting and personal dialogue. Rather than a selfish monologue. Normally, a relationship will last longer when both parts are listening to and understand each other.
Voyado provides you with the necessary tools, such as customer data, channels, and triggers to enable a personal and real-time dialogue. With all prerequisites in place, you can focus on the fun part – talking to your customers in a personal and surprisingly relevant way.
Talk to the customers on their terms, and always meet them at the right time with a proper message. Don’t disturb them if you don’t have anything important to say.
In the world of Voyado, a customer lifecycle starts at recruitment and ends after several months (approx. 24-36) of inactivity. In between, there are lots of reward-and-retain activities you should perform so the customers don’t become inactive.
Before throwing yourself into Voyado and start building complex workflows through marketing automation, we recommend you to begin with the design phase. Define touch-points, objectives, segments, triggers, channels, content, and offers for prioritized journeys to ensure you have everything covered. Don’t think too big but start small and smart, to continuously learn what’s working and not. Use these insights as input when building the next workflow, to ensure opening rates and conversion. Always monitor, test, follow-up, and adapt your activities to improve conversions and customer satisfaction.
When the initial mapping is done, it’s time to start building. In our construction, there are 6 main phases that can be divided into numerous sub-categories depending on your defined objectives and design ideas. As mentioned earlier, don’t start too big, but start with the most important touch-points and journeys.
Why should customers join your loyalty program? Why will it benefit them? Be clear about what they can expect, what type of communication, and what benefits they will receive. Nominate store ambassadors who will be responsible for spreading the words in-store. Online – great information and UX are your ambassadors. The process to sign up must be both obvious and smooth.
Once a customer has signed up, send them an email to confirm they’ve made a good decision and remind them of their member benefits. It’s all about creating the most personal onboarding process possible.
After on-boarding, you really must put an effort into activating the customer. The sooner the better, since there’s a correlation between time to first re-purchase and profitability. Adapt communication and offers to customer profiles, to improve your chances of being the customer’s first choice.
This is one of the most important phases in the customer lifecycle. They should stay and grow here. Show appreciation by sprinkling surprises, offers, services, or tips around you. It will boost your relationship. But remember – we all have different preferences, so make an effort to personalize the gifts.
In this phase, you work with both ad-hoc campaigns and smart automation. For example, you can follow up on a purchase with tips on how to use something or accessories that go well with it, congratulate customers on birthdays with a promotion, or send a reminder if they’ve left something in their cart.
Read more: Create retail campaigns that will get you that online buzz!
Have you noticed a customer isn’t buying like they used to? It’s time to understand why the customer has become inactive and see if you can make any changes or improvements to keep them active. Perhaps they’d appreciate more information on your products, or maybe an offer will do the trick.
How long can you save customer data? Make one last attempt to activate the customer, but if you still don’t see them acting on it, it’s time to close their account. If it’s meant to be, they’ll come back.
We love all things customer and product data, and would love to chat about your brand’s individual challenges, and how our solutions can help.
