What do we mean when we say customer lifecycle? At its core, the customer lifecycle is a framework for conceiving of the end-to-end customer experience. There are many ways to utilize the customer lifecycle for marketing strategy and decisions, but it’s important that we not conflate execution with a base understanding of the lifecycle’s fundamental principles. For the former to succeed, one must master the latter. I’ll spend the majority of this post in the abstract world of marketing theory. In doing so, I hope to empower you with an understanding of the basics so that you can start ideating on how the customer lifecycle applies to you!
While different explanations of the customer lifecycle might use different terminology and contain structural variations, they will all typically address the following stages in some form or fashion: Attract, Nurture, Qualify, Convert, Grow, and Retain. I’ll start by diving into “Attract,” but before I do, I want to mention a little aside that can be easy to overlook – namely that a customer can progress through all of the lifecycle stages with variable speed, ranging from very slow to almost instantaneous. As part of this, the stages can be more or less involved depending on things like the customer’s mindset, what types of products are sold, and what type of sales models are used (e.g., subscription vs. one-time purchases). Consider the research and negotiation that (hopefully) goes into buying a car vs. the split-second purchases afforded by Amazon’s dangerously convenient “Buy Now” button.
Attract
Nurture
Qualify
A quick note -
Some actually consider “Qualify” to be a precursor to “Nurture.” Their question might be - why would you spend resources nurturing a client that is determined to be an unsuitable prospect? Let’s ask a counter question: how do you “Qualify” a customer if you haven’t established a basic rapport/relationship first? Even if you’re just obtaining a client’s email address, that initial element of nurturing must typically precede qualification. This might seem like a prohibitively rigid border between the two stages, but a customer can actually exist in the “Nurture” and “Qualify” stages simultaneously. You could very well want to maintain a bevy of nurturing activities while waiting for a customer to become qualified so that you don’t lose the momentum of your engagement. We break the customer lifecycle stages into a linear sequence for ease of consumption and communication, but it helps to remember that this lifecycle depicts a rough timeline of progression that doesn’t fully capture the nuance of how a customer can flow back and forth or exist in two stages at once.
Convert
Grow
Retain
- This flow is intended as a general guide – the specifics of your execution will vary depending on things like your products, sales model, and marketing capabilities.
- The three aforementioned factors can also inform how quickly a customer progresses through the lifecycle.
- As a reminder, this lifecycle can be navigated at variable speeds. Some customers will complete this process almost instantaneously. Others can take days, weeks, and even months to buy.
