Customers are already 57% into their buying process before contacting businesses.

That’s why it’s essential to understand and optimize each stage of the customer experience lifecycle – it can help improve satisfaction, enhance retention, and increase brand advocacy.

In this blog, we will explore the essential stages of the lifecycle and provide actionable insights on creating a customer-centric experience that sets your business apart from the competition.

Pro tip: Your messaging is the vehicle that delivers your brand value to your customers and plays an integral role in creating a positive CX lifecycle. Make it count.

Let’s work together to convey a compelling brand value at each stage of the customer lifecycle. Book a discovery call with me, Nora Sudduth, today!

What is a Customer Lifecycle?

The customer lifecycle refers to the entire relationship a customer has with your business, beginning with the moment they become aware of your brand and continuing until they make a purchase.

Understanding it is crucial to gaining insight into your customers’ behavior, identifying trends, and spotting opportunities to optimize customer touchpoints.

Mapping your customer lifecycle can also reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your product messaging.

What is a Customer Experience Lifecycle?

This term is often used interchangeably with “customer journey.” Although both map out the stages that customers go through when engaging with your brand, the customer experience lifecycle outlines the journey and also records customer sentiment at each stage.

Knowing how your customers feel, what drives them forward, stalls them, or turns them away will help you understand the intent behind their behavior. 

This, in turn, will help you fine-tune your CX and messaging strategy to meet their expectations.

Stages of Customer Lifecycle

There are usually five stages in a customer lifecycle, namely:

1. Reach

At this stage, your target audience discovers they have a problem and are now looking for ways to solve it. 

Make sure they know you are the solution through:

• Content marketing
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Advertising
• Social media 

2. Acquisition

If your strategies to reach your target audience have been successful, potential customers will contact you to learn more about your products or services.

What this means is you have turned traffic into leads. You’ve captured their attention; now, you want to ensure they stay long enough to move to the next stage.

To do so, make sure your customer service is top-notch. Provide as many resources as possible to let your leads know they are making the right choice by turning to you.

3. Conversion

Once you gain a paying customer, it’s the perfect time to ensure they’re having a great experience. 

Your during-sales strategies will come into play at this stage, which can mean:

• Ensuring a smooth onboarding process
• Providing proactive and personalized support
• Opening clear lines of communication
• Informing customers on policies and other important information

If you think your funnels could generate more leads and sales than they do at the moment, you can review your funnels with ConversionRX–a comprehensive marketing diagnostic program that uncovers the full potential of your marketing strategy. 

4. Retention

During the retention stage, your goal is to keep existing customers satisfied with their experience so that they continue subscribing to or using your products and services.

The key is nurturing customer relationships that demonstrate you care about them. Practically speaking, that means:

• Meeting – and even exceeding – their expectations
• Understanding their preferences
• Continuously refining your CX so it matches their needs

Specific tools that will help you at this stage include:

• Customer surveys: Such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES)
• Feedback forms: Can be hosted on your website, via email, or social media
• Customer data analytics: Provide real-time data and insights into customer sentiment so you can spot issues before they can negatively impact your business

5. Loyalty

Happy customers are the best and most natural brand advocates. However, the reverse is true as well: unhappy customers can damage your reputation and prevent potential clients from doing business with you.

According to the recent National Customer Rage Survey, 79% of customers now take the time to “settle the score” by complaining about their problems with a company, and 50% of them do so using digital channels like social media.

You also need strategies to ensure your happy customers are incentivized when they spread positive word of mouth about you.

These strategies can include:

• Referral programs
• Brand advocacy programs

Steps to Conduct a Customer Lifecycle Analysis

Taking the time to examine your customer lifecycle can produce helpful insights about not just your CX, but also your business operations, manpower, and products and services.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Evaluate Resources of Customer Targeting

First, focus on how well you’re reaching potential customers. To do so:

• Examine where your leads are coming from: Do prospects find you through social media? Paid ads? What is your ROI on these platforms?
• Find out what people say about you: Use social listening tools to find brand mentions and the context around which those mentions occur. 

2. Assess Strategies for Generating Leads

Analyze how effective your tools are for generating leads. 

You should also ask whether you have enough in place or if there are other tools you can use to amplify your brand value.

• Assess the quality of your content: Publish helpful, quality content that answers your customers’ pain points to ensure you’re providing real value.
• Examine self-service CX tools: These include a website chatbot that can answer common customer questions or perform simple, repetitive tasks (like providing product features).

3. Check if Leads Are Converting

If your sales and marketing funnels are effective, your leads should convert into paying customers.

To assess whether your strategies are working, use customer data to:

• Find CX lifecycle bottlenecks and stumbling blocks: Do leads suddenly get disinterested and stop engaging? Where in the customer journey does this happen?
• Examine the sale process: How easy is it for a customer to finalize a transaction? Do customers think the sales process is too long, repetitive, or complicated?
• Perfect your product messaging: Do your customers understand the value of your offerings? Do you provide enough proof of their quality or usefulness?

4. Find Out the Depth of Customer Relationships

Sometimes, the difference between having one-time customers and loyal customers is in the quality of your relationships.

Do your customers feel like your relationships are transactional, or do you take the time to personalize their experience?

Use feedback-gathering tools to analyze customer sentiment in real-time and adjust your strategy accordingly.

5. Check Mechanisms for Inspiring Loyalty

Inspire happy customers to become ambassadors by ensuring you have a mechanism in place to reward them for referring your brand to others or simply staying with you.

This can include offering attractive perks like freebies on their birthday or special occasions like holidays.

Best Way to Create a Customer Experience Lifecycle Map

Building a CX lifecycle map can help you understand customer sentiment at various stages of their relationship with your brand.

Follow these steps to do so:

1. Gather CX Data

Using surveys, feedback-gathering tools, and data analytics, mine the channels you’re on–from social media to your website to community forums where discussions about you take place.

The goal is to understand:

• Various types of customers you appeal to
• Their pain points and motivations
• Patterns of customer behavior
• Where customers choose to interact
• The content messaging that attracts them

2. Set Your Objectives

Based on the data, what do you want to achieve by mapping out the CX lifecycle? Chances are, you’re already building a CX experience map with an objective in mind.

Remember: Your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, and realistic.

3. Build Customer Personas

Define customer segments using market research and analysis of your existing customer base to develop customer personas.

These fictional characters represent customer segments and help direct your strategies. They also ensure you’re using the right methods to target a specific group of people during the ‘Reach’ stage of the customer lifecycle.

4. Outline the Customer Journey

Now, draw the stages of the customer journey. Start with the moment customers first encounter your brand up to the moment they become advocates. 

Note that the lifecycle is an ongoing process since the loyalty stage involves continuously proving your value and maintaining your relationship with your customers. However, journeys look different for various customer segments. 

5. Draw a Visual Map

Once the customer journey is complete, you can now create a visual representation of the customer lifecycle. 

When doing so, highlight stages of the customer journey, note opportunities for optimization, record customer sentiment and motivations, and identify key touchpoints.

How to Manage the CX Lifecycle for the Best User Experience

Building a CX lifecycle doesn’t end the work. You need to be constantly reviewing and fine-tuning it for an evolving audience.

These tips should help:

Target Your Audience With Useful Content

Make it easy for your target customers to find you and spend time with your content by providing relevant, useful resources like blog articles, tutorials, and even online courses.

Your customer personas will help ensure you’re speaking to their motivations, challenges, and needs.

Provide Excellent Customer Service 

This should happen way before your audience decides to be paying customers. 

At the acquisition stage, when people contact you for more information, make it easy for them to find or do what they need. 

That could be full customer support in the form of a live service agent or a self-service option where customers can accomplish common (yet important) tasks like learning more about your pricing models on their own.

Implement an Easy Sales System

According to research by Baymard Institute, 70% of consumers abandon their carts. These are consumers who show great interest in buying but are suddenly turned off at the last minute.

What could be the problem? The possibilities are endless, but one of the most common reasons is a complicated sales process.

So, ensure you have a straightforward sales system that doesn’t cause your customers to change their minds.

Take Care of Your Customers Post-Sales

Personalize your customers’ experience even after they’ve bought from you to let them know you care. 

Use customer data to understand what support they need or what perks they are most likely to appreciate. 

For instance, if you have a SaaS product, make sure to provide ample resources for a smooth onboarding process.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Learn more about this topic with these FAQs:

What is Customer Lifecycle Marketing? 

Customer lifecycle marketing means delivering key messaging tailored for various lifecycle stages. 

For instance, during the Reach stage, marketing messages should aim to provide helpful, relevant content that solves the customer’s pain points and introduces your brand as the solution.

At the acquisition stage, those messages must be targeted toward reinforcing your positioning or explaining why your brand is better than the competition.

What is Customer Lifecycle Management? 

Customer lifecycle management is the process of tracing the stages of the customer lifecycle, assigning metrics and tracking their performance, and refining touchpoints to meet customer expectations.

What is the First Step of the Perfect Customer Lifecycle?

The first stage in the customer lifecycle is “Reach,” where you strategically position yourself to be on your target audience’s radar. This involves tactics like paid advertising, content marketing, and SEO.

What Role Does Customer Feedback Play in the Customer Experience Lifecycle? 

Customer feedback is essential in refining your CX lifecycle because it provides insights into what customers need and want straight from your customers themselves.

It is also key to ensuring you’re meeting your customers’ expectations.

What Tools Are Available for Managing the Customer Experience Lifecycle?

To manage your CX lifecycle, you will need tools such as:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software: Tools like Hubspot are essentially data hubs that enable you to track and monitor customer information more efficiently.
• Social listening tools: Use automated social listening tools like Hootsuite. These enable you to track and analyze customer sentiment on all the channels where you exist.
• Feedback gathering tools: Use survey platforms like Zonka Feedback to build survey and feedback forms that you can use to measure customer satisfaction. 

Conclusion

Enhance customer loyalty by managing your customer experience lifecycle.

To do so, analyze each stage of the customer lifecycle and make sure your messaging nudges your customers further from Reach down to Loyalty.

Not sure your messaging does that? Let’s connect to shape your messaging so it can flex through various lifecycle stages in a way that connects with your customers. Join me for a discovery call today.