Thread by @SantiagoCruz02

THIS IS HOW BIG BRANDS GROW

Understanding The Customer Life Cycle

Thread 👇

As an eCommerce business owner, you've likely heard a lot about managing customer relationships and that successful businesses have the most loyal customers…

And yeah.. in my experience, that’s completely true!

Having a complete understanding of your customer life cycle it’s IMPERATIVE to create brand allegiance among your clientele and send the right messages at the right time!

In this thread, I’ll show you the 5 main stages of your customer life cycle and how to pair it with email marketing flows!

WHAT IS THE CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE?

The customer lifecycle describes the various stages a consumer goes through before, during, and after completing a transaction.

Simply put

It's the Point A to Point B journey a customer takes until they make the final purchase.

There are 5 main stages which each person goes through on their buying journey

1. AWARENESS

The first stage in the customer life cycle is the awareness phase.

This is where a consumer first becomes aware of your business offerings and wants to learn more about your business

So it is typically considered the most important phase in the customer life cycle.

In this stage, you want to send automation such as:

Welcome and browse abandonment flows.

These will introduce your brand to the prospect and take advantage of that first interest to make them buy!

2. CONSIDERATION

By now, your prospects have done their initial research and are aware of some of the options they can choose from. However, the research phase isn’t over yet.

They have narrowed down their options, even added a product to the cart, but they are still skeptical about your products.

This is the stage where they are comparing your product to other solutions on the market.

This is where they are doing:

- Price comparisons
- Reading customer reviews
- Checking out competitors
- And learning more about the details of your product to see if it could be, in fact, what they have been looking for.

In this stage, the most important automation you can send is the Abandoned Cart/checkout flow

Here are 3 key things you need to do in this flow:

-Tackle down your prospect objections
-Show how your solution works for other people
-Make your offer irresistible using guarantees and incentives

If you do those 3 things right, there is no way you’re not winning that sale.

3. ACTION

Here, we arrive at the point where a prospect becomes a customer. They’ve evaluated your offerings and decided to buy from you.

But once your hard work in the prior stages results in a sale, it’s not time to rest on your laurels.

Every purchase should be followed with a post-purchase sequence that:

- Thank the buyer for the purchase
- Offers content specific to the items purchased or adds value to the customer in any other way
- Ask customers to leave a review

4. RETENTION

It’s far easier and roughly five times cheaper to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one.

It’s hard to build enough trust with a prospect to turn them into a first-time buyer, so once you’ve gained their trust and their business, you should be working hard to maintain it.

The retention phase is all about deepening the relationship with the customer after the purchase so that they are more likely to buy from you again.

I love this stat that says there is a 20% chance that a 1x buyer converts into 2x buyer.

But once they are 2x buyers, it’s 60% more likely they become a 3x,4x,5x buyer.

So definitely, you want to work hard to make your buyers make that 2nd purchase!

Here are 3 flows that will help you with that:

Up-sell/cross-sell flow.
Winback flow.
Sunset flow.

WARNING: As you're optimizing your strategy to make people buy from you multiple times...

Your browse abandonment, cart abandonment, & post-purchase flows should be segmented for first-time vs. repeat customers.

5. ADVOCACY

This is the last stage of the customer journey and the hardest to achieve. This is the stage of the customer journey when the customer becomes an active advocate for your brand.

They say great things about you and your company, they refer their friends and family to you, they generate the most powerful kind of marketing your company can ever have, which is word-of-mouth.

Take advantage of this stage using VIP/loyalty flow to offer your customers loyalty/referral programs or take other actions as brand ambassadors.

FINAL ADVICE

Once you understand your customer’s life cycle and set up your automation to nurture each stage, keep optimizing!!!

Through continual improvement of your customer journey, you can build a base of loyal clients and grow your business.

Simple right?

ANYWHO:

If you’re an e-commerce brand owner and you need help with email marketing book a call with me

I'll review your account and see if my service would be a good fit for you

calendly.com/fourthplanetme…