In order to build more extensive relationships with your customer you need to engage them through their lifecycle phases, so apply these top essential keys to your campaign:
1. Determine the strategic lifecycle phases – You cannot implement any type of lifecycle marketing unless you have an in-depth understanding of what behaviors they apply in the entire purchase or conversion process. You have to know how your different marketing channels are influencing your customers at every point along the way to the checkout. To determine the phases of your consumer lifecycle you have to leverage every single statistic in your analytics of consumer data and dedicate those efforts to identifying the activities which serve as triggers to motivate a customer to go from one lifecycle phase to the next.

2. Laser-target your audience – Once you have determined the phase of the lifecycle your customer is experiencing, you should graduate to selecting the customers which fit the criteria for each specific lifecycle program. You can start by applying the data you have on the customer to adjust your program and craft a coherent migration plan which takes into consideration the fact that you will be constantly obtaining additional data which will allow you to further refine your entire lifecycle phase approach.

3. Define an engagement plan – It is necessary to determine the number of emails which you will require in order to lucidly communicate your marketing message in each and every lifecycle phase. You should not only have a profound understanding of how many messages your customer is willing to pay attention to, but also how to prioritize the ones which are the most important to both your customer and your brand. While it is necessary to avoid overwhelming your customer with too many emails, you should engage in more targeted messaging which responds to customer behavior such as browsing activity and whether they abandon your carts. Some programs can be very effective with a single message while others will require a prolonged series.

4. Engage through a cross-channel strategy – Email is the basis of any successful lifecycle phase plan, but there are various ways to further increase the bottom line results by utilizing cross-channel messaging such as push, social media, display ads, and SMS. Once you are aware of how your customers are interacting with the wide variety of all the channels which are available to you, the possibilities will spontaneously arise for greater lifecycle engagement and progress. In order to align your goals with your customer’s specific lifecycle situation you should experiment with messaging at various times of the day and in the full breadth of locations which are facilitated by your mobile marketing technology.

5. You have to test absolutely everything – In lifecycle phase marketing as in every other aspect of email marketing you literally have no choice but to keep testing every imaginable factor of your entire campaign. If you are not testing your calls to action, subject lines and other microcontent, templates, layouts, frequency, length, incentives, and every aspect of your offerings, you are failing at your stated requirement to implement a coherent lifecycle phase marketing program.

6. Identify metrics and KPI – If you do not have clearly delineated metric baselines you can never really know how your campaign is performing, so you need to define all of your basal hypotheses and business goals for each and every one of your lifecycle phase programs. Once that is done you can now progress to the identification of the metrics you require in order to make a clear and sustainable support of your marketing theory. The key campaign performance indicators (KPIs) are open rate, click to open rate, and conversion rate, but each brand has different prerequisites and determinants which translate into their own particular version of success and need to be taken into consideration.

7. Optimization is key – Keep tracking every aspect of customer involvement in your campaign ensuring that their behaviors and preferences are accounted for in order to guarantee maximum engagement!

The requirement to optimize all of these various elements is critical to the success of your lifecycle email marketing so apply them all!