Mark is a San Francisco-based marketer and founder of Growth Marketing Pro, a blog he grew to 700,000 visitors a year in just 24 months.
If you want to have a successful marketing operation, then lifecycle marketing is something you need to be focused on. Establishing and managing customer relationships is crucial to the health of your business, because ultimately, keeping customers coming back is what keeps the doors open.
For those unfamiliar, lifecycle marketing is the term marketers use to define all strategies that businesses use to attract customers, convert them, and retain and leverage their business. All of this feeds into the ultimate goal of any business: boost revenue and increase brand awareness.
So how can you make sure you are optimizing your lifecycle marketing campaigns in 2020? We’ve got a few ideas.
1. Enrich your Leads with Data
Having a good understanding of who your leads are (and where they came from) is crucial to the success of your conversion efforts. Meet a smart tool like Zoho Zia.
Zoho Zia is an AI sales assistant that is consistently collecting and organizing your data, so that any time a customer comes through your marketing funnel, you can automatically enrich that lead’s information. That means that the system will automatically pull any other information that you have on the lead, as well as any publicly available data on the lead, so that you can proceed with the most effective and applicable marketing strategy possible.
Important information that data enrichment provides may include attributes like:
- Age: Knowing your customers’ ages will help you tailor the message to meet their needs.
- Job: Selling a marketing product? It’s probably a good idea to know whether or not you are selling to a marketer.
- Organization name, organization size, geographic location, and almost anything else you can think of.
Overall, enriching your data with publicly available information (as well as the information your company has collected on the given customer) will allow you to optimize your marketing funnel and tailor it to individual needs, ultimately improving your results.
2. Tell a Story During Onboarding
Storytelling is one of the best ways to optimize your lifecycle marketing. This isn’t new information for marketers out there, but it does feel particularly pertinent now.
People don’t just want to buy your product because of its functionality. They want to buy it because it will serve some greater purpose, or because you spent years developing this formula, or because you were inspired by an incident to create this product. This is especially true of consumer businesses and particularly emotional products.
Studies have shown that up to 95% of consumer purchases are made with an emotional driver behind them. That means that to get people to purchase your product, you need to tell your story in the most emotionally intelligent way possible. Of course, telling a story in onboarding may not be the right move for an enterprise cloud computing software customer. But it is one touchpoint in your bag of tricks, if the type of business you’re marketing has an emotional component to purchase.
3. Use Webinars for Engagement, Particularly for High Ticket Sales
Webinars: the secret marketing weapon you never knew about. Webinars are the perfect online platform to make your pitch to your customer, because they are a super-personalized way to engage with leads that are already warm. That’s right – if they clicked on your webinar, you know that they have some interest in your product. Which is, of course, going to lead to higher conversions.
Webinars are particularly useful when you are selling a high-ticket (read: pricey) product. People want to invest in something when they know that it is worth it. Webinars allow you to fast-forward to the point at which a customer decides to invest, because they help establish the “know, like, trust” factor very quickly.
By watching your webinar, your customer will grow to know your product and brand well, like what you are selling,and ultimately trust you to provide good services. This high-touch engagement will absolutely help accelerate your sales and increase conversions, ultimately leading to a more effective lifecycle marketing funnel.
Finally, the best webinars are ones that integrate with the rest of your marketing funnel seamlessly. Zoho Meeting is our favorite, because your webinar data will automatically integrate with Zoho CRM, which will allow you to customize your targeting to these leads and close the sale faster.
4. SMS: Change Up Your Communication Style
Take a moment to think about your different marketing channels. How many ways are you engaging with your customers on a day-to-day basis? Or even on a week-to-week, or month-to-month basis?
Chances are, you aren’t fully utilizing all of the channels available to you. One of the most overlooked marketing channels, for example, is SMS text-message marketing. Texting your marketing message straight to your consumer is an excellent way to communicate with your customer. In fact, studies show that SMS open rates are as high as 98%. Email, by comparison, has an average open rate of just 20%. This means that SMS texting is a huge opportunity to deliver a clear CTA and message to your leads and customers (and get them buying more of your product ASAP).
5. Create Customer Lifecycle Journeys that Make Miracle Moments
Miracle moments. You know what we’re talking about: those “aha” moments. The magical point at which your customer feels special. Like they are more than just a sale to you — they are part of something bigger.
Creating these moments is difficult, especially in the saturated marketing world that we live in. But that doesn’t mean it is impossible. And the best way to create these moments is to know your customers.
Understanding everything there is to know about your customer will help you create an experience that is unique to them, which will ultimately help you build trust.
So how can you and your marketing team do this optimally? No surprises here, but it involves having an awesome CRM in your toolbox, like Zoho CRM. Zoho CRM is a customer relationship manager. It is the tool of all tools when it comes to making sure you are creating those miracle moments for your users. Here is why: the CRM automatically analyzes the behavior and background of your customers, so that you know exactly how your customer ticks. It can help you identify the main pain point in your funnel or the crucial decision-making moment. This will, of course, allow you 1. wow them with a miracle, and 2. build long-lasting relationships on a foundation of trust, so that your customers are with you all the way through.
Making miracle moments often requires some creativity. Don’t shy away from more interesting activations like clever direct mail pieces during onboarding, handwritten notes at scale or even fun video greetings.
All of these tactics will allow you to become a more effective, more efficient, and all around better lifecycle marketer in 2020.
Comments