With the rise of online shopping and eCommerce, more people are taking a step back from just focusing on sales to viewing your customer life cycle marketing or CLM.
The eCommerce lifecycle is a process that all customers go through from their first engagement with the brand until they purchase. It describes an ideal way of interaction, like customer support, between the company and buyers, but firstly, from the company’s point of view.
What are the stages of the customer lifecycle?
Reach
Awareness or reach comes up with the first interaction with a potential customer. When they stumble upon your brand on a shopping ad, internet posting, or website, they enter the first stage called reach or awareness.
The customer tries to find the information related to their search criteria, and often they try to find additional information. This stage becomes effective when a consumer reaches out and tries to find more information and pricing for you.
You can increase your brand awareness by creating more content, running a paid or social media campaign, working on SEO, and sharing your story with a wider audience.
Consideration
The customer has moved beyond casually browsing your products and/or services in the consideration stage. Perhaps they are returning to your website again to revisit product pages or check out shipping and returns information.
At this point, your potential customers are on the brink of purchasing. You should personalize and target their marketing in order to get them more quickly into a purchase decision. Common lead nurturing tactics include:
Conversion
Now for the stage, every business wants customers to reach: purchase. This is when a prospective customer becomes a paying customer.
As exciting as this stage is, don’t rest on your laurels. You’ve talked the talk, but now you need to walk the walk to ensure you deliver on your promises. Everything from the quality of the product(s), order fulfillment, delivery/shipping, to customer service needs to hit the mark. Failure in any of these areas may risk a customer becoming dissatisfied, meaning you could lose money and your brand reputation could be damaged.
Retention
Your customer has reached the loyalty or retention stage, but the work doesn’t stop there. The goal now is to get them to come back again and again. It’s crucial to ask for feedback at this stage to gauge the customer’s experience and identify any potential drop-offs. Remember that even the most satisfied customers may not return if they don’t feel valued or appreciated. Send thank-you notes, offer exclusive discounts, and go the extra mile to show your appreciation.
Advocacy
The advocacy stage is hard to achieve, and it’s quite a leap from the retention stage. Your customers may be happy with your brand and your products, but turning them into brand advocates and ambassadors doesn’t happen automatically. Many long-term customers may sit in the retention stage and never make it to the advocacy stage.
Customers in the advocacy stage have a high level of engagement with your brand across multiple public channels, primarily your website and social media channels. They will be advocating for your brand and products on their own platforms and will write reviews on third-party websites, and will spread the word to their family and friends. Ultimately, they are the ideal customers.
Moving customers from the retention stage to the advocacy stage may involve offering incentives such as discounts – or simply reaching out to them directly – but customers may also become advocates organically after experiencing high-quality customer service and satisfaction with their purchases.
As any digital business activity is based on the customer life cycle, understanding how it works is essential for high performance. The customer life cycle shows the logic of clients’’ behavior and helps determine the next steps needed to motivate them to connect with you further and tailor your marketing and sales efforts to each stage in order to maximize conversion rate.
Measuring customer engagement is critical for any business, but it’s especially important in the early stages of the customer life cycle. By understanding how customers interact with your brand at each cycle stage, you can identify areas where there might be problems and adjust accordingly. So, for the reach phase, use traditional ad impressions. For surveying, the number of leads that turned into real customers utilizes the acquisition rate.
It’s hard to stay patient when you’re an eCommerce entrepreneur. You want sales to flood in right now. But earning people’s trust takes time and, most importantly, thoughtful messaging at every touchpoint across the consumer journey.
Customer lifecycle marketing shifts the focus from quick sales to long-term relationships that pay dividends over time. And that’s what distinguishes brands from commodities.