Lifecycle marketing is essential for maintaining a consistent and meaningful connection with your audience as they interact with your product or platform. As users progress from prospects to customers and eventually become brand advocates, it is crucial for your team to adjust marketing strategies to align with their specific lifecycle stage. Building a loyal customer base that turns into brand ambassadors depends on fostering strong and meaningful relationships with your audience.
Matt Dyson, Head of CRM Tech at Delivery Hero, along with Will Crocker, VP of Customer & Partner Marketing at Braze, shared valuable insights into how they approach acquisition strategies and how brands can improve them. Below are some key takeaways from their discussion:
Align Your Campaigns with the Customer Lifecycle
Turning new users into engaged and loyal customers requires nurturing them and keeping them informed from their first interaction with your brand. Some of the most important campaigns throughout the customer lifecycle include:
- Awareness campaigns: Targeting top-of-funnel (TOFU) audiences who are aware of your brand but need to understand its value.
- Consideration campaigns: Focused on mid-funnel (MOFU) prospects who have shown interest but need more information to distinguish your offering from competitors.
- Conversion campaigns: Aimed at bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) users who are close to making a purchase or are already customers.
- Retention campaigns: Designed to ensure customers continue purchasing your products or renewing your services.
Focus on KPIs and Best Practices for Acquisition
To measure the effectiveness of your acquisition strategies, it is crucial to track key metrics such as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
- CAC includes all digital and non-digital efforts to acquire new customers and is calculated by dividing total marketing and sales expenses by the number of new customers acquired.
- CLV estimates the long-term value of a customer based on the revenue they will generate throughout their relationship with your brand.
Comparing CAC with CLV is essential in deciding how much to invest in acquiring new customers. Additionally, CLV should be analyzed alongside other key metrics like Cost per Acquisition (CPA). Benchmarking your organization’s CPA against industry standards can help you fine-tune your strategy to maximize ROI.
Among best practices, post-acquisition experiences play a key role in deepening loyalty and engagement. For example, it’s important to tailor marketing strategies for customers acquired through paid channels and avoid sending promotional messages to recent buyers, as this could negatively impact their experience.
Diversify Your Strategies to Drive Acquisition
At Delivery Hero, paid channels are leveraged for customer acquisition in two main ways: attracting new users to the platform and re-engaging those who have not yet reached loyalty. These campaigns are personalized through segmentation, considering users’ funnel stage and past interactions with the brand.
It is important to note that not all paid channels deliver the same results. Most companies benefit from using a mix of paid channels depending on their business model and industry. For instance, a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand might achieve better results with audio advertising. Experimenting with different channels and evaluating their effectiveness for your goals is crucial to optimizing customer acquisition.
Additionally, implementing a referral program can be an effective strategy to increase acquisition rates. Referred customers tend to have higher quality and lifetime value. However, it is essential to safeguard these programs against potential abuse by using fraud prevention measures such as single-use promo codes.
Other strategies to boost acquisition include:
- Investing in strong SEO to improve organic visibility in search engines.
- Being active on relevant social media platforms for your audience.
- Leveraging content marketing through blogs, eBooks, educational videos, and case studies to diversify efforts and attract new users.
Integrate Retention and Acquisition for Maximum Results
While retention and acquisition are both critical, they should not be approached in isolation. It’s not enough to attract new customers—you must ensure they remain loyal and evolve into brand advocates. Collaborating with the retention team to offer personalized onboarding experiences is an effective way to improve outcomes.
A study found that 8 out of 10 people delete an app because they don’t know how to use it, and more than half have returned a product for the same reason. Failing to invest in an effective onboarding strategy can result in wasted acquisition efforts and resources.
Source: Braze.
