The customer lifecycle refers to the process of prospects becoming aware of a product, making a purchase from a brand, and ideally becoming a company's longtime customer. The process is made up of five stages: reach, acquisition, conversion, retention, and loyalty.
More simply, it outlines the steps taken by a customer as they progress through the flywheel and sales funnel. It gives marketing, sales, and customer service teams a complete picture of the customer's journey and highlights areas for improvement.
Your team can leverage the lifecycle to create lead acquisition content and deliver customer experiences that delight customers at every stage.
Before we go over the customer lifecycle stages, grab your free customer journey map templates so that you can map your customer's journey as we go along.
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With your templates in hand, let's dive into customer lifecycle management.
Customer lifecycle management is the process of tracking the stages of the customer lifecycle, assigning metrics to each one, and measuring success based on those metrics. The goal is to track the business' performance over time as it relates to the customer lifecycle.
Every company has the opportunity to control and guide the customer journey.
Most customers follow a similar set of steps when it comes to choosing a brand's product or service and, eventually, becoming loyal to that brand. Rather than leaving that to chance and hoping that customers will choose you, you can guide them in your direction.
You're not manipulating prospects. Rather, you're intentionally giving them the kind of content they're looking for and thus providing value. In doing so, you prove that you're a reputable, transparent brand that has its visitors' and customers' best intentions at heart.
The customer lifecycle is handy to see how your customers behave, so let’s jump into detail on what that looks like at each stage of the process below.
As mentioned, the customer lifecycle has five stages: reach, acquisition, conversion, retention, and loyalty. While it's similar to the buyer's journey, the customer lifecycle takes into account the customer’s experience, or what happens long after a prospect makes a purchase.
We'll walk through these stages one by one.
In this stage, a customer searches for a product after becoming aware of an issue or problem they need to solve. This stage is called “reach” because it's your chance to reach the customer while they're deliberating.
In this stage, your customer is comparing products across competing brands (including yours), carrying out research, and reading customer reviews. Social media marketing, SEO, search engine marketing, and other inbound and outbound methods should place your brand on this customer's radar.
This stage is successful when the customer reaches out to you for more information, looking to either educate themselves further or get a definitive price.
When the customer gets to your website or calls you on the phone, they've officially entered the acquisition stage.
This stage will look different depending on the acquisition channel the customer has used. If they called over the phone, for example, you'll need to respond to the customer's questions and concerns, as well as to inquire for more information on the customer's needs. Following that, you'll offer the best products or services to satisfy their needs, as well as educate them on the uses of those products or services.
If they've found you via your website, they should come across helpful, educational content that can help them make a purchasing decision. Every content offer, pricing page, or blog post should give the customer what they need to decide on making the purchase.
Some of this content should be gated so that you can get the customer's information. Don't forget: your service team should be available via live chat to answer urgent inquiries. In many ways, all interactions are customer service experiences — even something as simple as someone accessing and using your site is a customer service touchpoint.
Having gained all the necessary information and being delighted with your brand's customer experience, the prospect makes a purchase. They've officially converted and turned into your customer.
In this stage, you want to make it clear that you're providing value. They've entered a relationship with you, not just made a purchase.
But the work doesn't end here. It's time to retain the customer so that they continuously come back to your brand.
Customer retention starts by finding out how the customer feels. Check in with them to ask how they've enjoyed their new product or service. Carry out customer service surveys, measure your Customer Satisfaction Score, and establish a Voice of the Customer program to find out what you can do better.
Using information directly from them, you can continuously make improvements to your products and services, as well as the customer service experience.
In this retention stage, you'll want to offer exclusive perks that only your customers have access to. 24/7 support, product discounts, and referral bonuses are all perks that can take your customer from a plain purchaser to a brand promoter.
In this stage, the customer becomes an important asset to the brand by making additional purchases. They might post on social media about their experience with your company and write product reviews that inform a future customer during the reach stage.
Brand loyalty is of the utmost importance. Here's a common example.
In the automobile industry, there are dozens of brands selling similar vehicles for similar purposes. So, what helps a customer choose an SUV between, say, Toyota and Chevrolet?
The answer is brand loyalty. For instance, the customer's first car could have been a Toyota Camry back in the 90s. The car was reliable throughout and beyond their college years. Now, as an experienced car-buyer looking to invest in a new SUV, which company are they going to go with? The brand that has been there for them for the past three decades, or the one that's completely new to them? Probably the former, unless a bad customer service experience drives them away.
Your customer reaches this stage after being influenced by the previous four stages. In other words, you can't create brand loyalty out of nowhere. It must be nurtured and instilled in the customer through service experiences that solve for them and proves the value of your product (and of your brand).
Although these are the typical stages that a customer follows in their journey with a brand, this process can be fluid. Customers can come to learn about a brand in several ways: family or friend recommendations, social media, advertisements, research, and more.
Overall, it's essential to be aware of the customer lifecycle so you can manage it effectively, and mapping it out can aid in the process.
A customer lifecycle map is a high-level, visual tool that marketers use to track where customers are in their buyer journey. It’s important for understanding the behavior of customers as they go through different stages.
Differentiating — or mapping out — what actions in the lifecycle correlate to each stage can help you build a buyer journey that takes prospects from being familiar with your business, to raving advocates.
Now that we understand the customer lifecycle and the use in mapping it out, let’s talk about analysis.
Managing the customer lifecycle won’t be possible unless you carry out a customer lifecycle analysis, which will show you how your customers are currently moving through the pipeline.
Knowing how you're faring at every stage of the customer lifecycle is essential to leveraging it for your brand's benefit.
Below, you'll find a list of questions for each stage that can help you analyze your current customers' journey. These questions should help you identify problems in the customer lifecycle — and come up with solutions that can lead to a better experience overall.
When analyzing the reach phase of your customer lifecycle, you'll seek to figure out whether prospects can find your company.
You'll want to answer these questions:
The acquisition phase is all about the information and tools you offer. This information then allows prospects to become leads and get close to making a purchasing decision.
You'll want to answer these questions:
In your analysis of the conversion phase, your goal is to understand where there might be barriers to making a purchase.
You'll want to answer these questions:
When analyzing the retention phase, you'll want to surface where you can make your customer's experience better, so that they stay with you for longer.
You'll want to answer these questions:
Inspiring customer loyalty is difficult. To improve this phase of the lifecycle, you'll want to analyze how likely it is that the customer will return for another purchase (and bring others along, too).
You'll want to answer these questions:
Now that you know how to analyze each stage of the customer lifecycle process, let’s talk through how you can manage your own.
Before your customers discover your company, you need to determine who you're trying to reach. Rather than marketing to everyone, identifying a specific target audience, which will help you create content that's relevant to your customers.
The easiest way to define your target audience is to create buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional people that represent the demographic and behavioral characteristics of your customer base. They have names, backstories, and even hobbies. Everything you need to know about your customers is found in these personas. Remember, however, that they're fictional, and that the needs of your customers may evolve.
Give your customers a reason to trust you before they invest in you. By putting out lots of useful, engaging, search-engine-optimized content, your company will pop up more frequently when customers are searching for related topics.
Content can include original blog posts offering industry information; templates for email, infographics, and other marketing tools; and online courses, such as those offered by HubSpot Academy.
Later, when customers are looking for certain products or services, your company will be the first that comes to mind. This is the basis of the inbound marketing methodology.
Once a customer has gotten acquainted with your brand and its content, it's time to take it a step further by providing self-service resources that go over every detail of your product. You'll make potential customers' lives easier by offering as much information as possible. It limits their need to reach out to your customer service team and will facilitate a well-informed purchasing decision.
For example, you can create a knowledge base — a centralized, online database offered by your company containing extensive information on the uses of your products and services and answers to FAQs. Customers like to handle as much of the purchasing process on their own, so providing them with a means to educate themselves will further attract them to your brand.
Even if people haven't bought your product, they may still have questions about it or your company. They may not know how it works, or even what it does, and this can lead to potential customers walking away from a purchase.
Rather than relying solely on self-service tools, your sales team should be working proactively as well. They should be reaching out to leads and offering them trials or demos that help familiarize customers with your products. This not only promotes your product line but also establishes a personal relationship with the customer.
Build a simple, online ordering system. That way, the most difficult part of the purchasing process is the customer writing out their credit card number. While it may seem obvious; the easier it is to add items to a cart, add shipping and card information, and press "submit," the more likely it is that a customer will make a purchase.
Depending on what you're selling, the purchase stage can be a high-stress moment for the customer. No one wants to have buyer's remorse, and this fear of regret can act as a major point of friction during the customer experience.
One way to counteract this is to provide support options during the purchase stage. For example, you can add a live chat widget to your website that links to a support rep. That way, customers can easily contact your team when they have questions while they're shopping. Instead of navigating away from the page they're on, they can just click on the chat widget, ask a question, and return to their purchase.
Don't forget about your customers after they've made a purchase. If you do, that usually ensures they'll be a one-time customer.
Make the customer feel just as cared for post-purchase as they are pre-purchase. Set up an automated email system that immediately thanks customers for their orders post-purchase. Or you can personally reach out after their product has been shipped to ensure they got exactly what they wanted and are happy with their purchase.
Personalizing your post-purchase engagement is easy when your team only works with a handful of customers each day. But as your customer base grows, you'll need to scale your efforts accordingly to keep pace with customer demand.
This is where marketing automation comes into play. Pairing it with your contact base and CRM allows you to quickly access user information and turn it into personalized content.
For example, you can set up a workflow that automatically sends customers an email whenever a new product or service is released. This keeps you in steady communication with your customers and helps you maintain an active relationship with them.
A customer will need that final push to encourage them to go above and beyond for your brand. Encourage happy customers to share their experiences by making it simple to do so. Email them brief surveys, link them to your Yelp or Google Reviews sites, and offer them discounts or compensation for referring friends.
Managing the customer lifecycle is critical to guide customers to your brand. You can follow these steps to ensure you're always maximizing the effects of customer lifecycle management.
At every stage, you should follow best practices to ensure you’re getting the most of your efforts.
A key part of managing the customer lifecycle is ensuring that every interaction—including calls, emails, and chats — are personalized to each lifecycle stage. For instance, you wouldn’t send an early-lifecycle customer a discount offer to purchase your product when they may still be doing research and considering a competitor. Instead, you’d send helpful resources that will inform your prospect about the problem they’re having and about how they can go about solving it.
You can personalize interactions by using a CRM like HubSpot that can help you look at your customer’s browsing history on your website. If they look at a certain blog post, then you know the type of research they’re doing and whether they’re close to making a purchase.
Great lifecycle management begins with being where your customers are. Unless you offer an omnichannel experience to your customers, you won’t be able to manage the lifecycle efficiently and effectively. Acting inconsistently or being only on certain platforms will create gaps in your understanding of the customer lifecycle.
The customers who’ve purchased from you are your best source of truth for analyzing and improving your customer lifecycle. Send out surveys to find out where they found out about you, how they feel about your brand, and where they felt like there were gaps in the acquisition process.
For instance, customers might say you need an up-to-date website, which means you should make it a priority for your next quarter.
Your next best source of truth? Prospects who never made a purchase. Knowing what keeps your audience from converting is integral to removing roadblocks and points of friction. For instance, they might prefer a competitors’ product because of its ease of use, or maybe they felt that they couldn’t find enough information about your product online to make a purchase decision. Whatever it is, it’ll allow you to address these concerns and feed more customers into your flywheel.
As mentioned, the customer lifecycle continues even after customers make a purchase. In fact, retaining customers is often more important and impactful than acquiring new ones.
Whether you send a new perk every quarter or send a check-in email every month, you want your customers to feel valued and appreciated for giving you their business. After all, they don’t owe their business to you — yet they chose you in a sea of competitors. Keeping up with customers after a purchase is an effective way of continuing to manage the lifecycle and not letting the lifecycle automatically run its course (and potentially end prematurely).
The key to managing the customer lifecycle effectively is listening to your customers at every turn. That’s going to help you refine your strategy at the reach, acquisition, conversion, retention, and loyalty lifecycle stages.
Next, let's go over some of the tools you can use to manage the customer lifecycle and encourage customer engagement.
Using customer lifecycle software can help you automate the customer lifecycle management process. There's no need to remember each customer by name — so long as your software does it for you.
Here's some software you may need:
Most customers find companies online — meaning you'll need a website and, more specifically, a content management system. With a CMS, you'll be able to reach customers via search engines, acquire them with tailored content offers, and convert them with an easy-to-navigate site that facilitates the purchasing process.
It should also give prospects immediate access to your service team. You should have the option to add live chat, lead capture forms, and click-to-call buttons.
Here are some CMS resources to get you started:
After acquiring or converting a prospect into a customer, it's time to nurture and retain them. You'll need a marketing automation tool that allows you to send emails, gate content, provide personalized experiences, and segment your customer list based on behaviors and attributes.
Here are some marketing automation resources:
A CRM keeps track of prospect information and activity in a unified database. In their contact card, you'll have access to their name, email, and phone number, as well as their activity on your website.
You'll use a CRM after the customer submits a form or signs up on your website. In other words, you'll use it after the reach stage. It should allow you to collect leads, assign contacts to team members, and create automation workflows.
HubSpot allows you to keep all of your prospects' information in one simple-to-use platform, keep all conversations in one inbox, and automate follow-up emails. You can start with our all-in-one CRM for free, then scale up as your business grows.
Here are some CRM resources:
Last but certainly not least, you'll want a customer service tool. While it only applies to the last three stages of the customer lifecycle, a help desk software is arguably the most important tool for customer lifecycle management. Customer service experiences can deter a customer from returning to you — worse, they might tell others to avoid doing business with you.
A customer service software tool should allow you to create tickets, communicate with customers across platforms, carry out customer experience surveys, and create a knowledge base.
Here are some customer service tool resources for customer lifecycle management:
Every customer progresses through the five stages of the customer lifecycle. While it seems like that process is a result of chance, you can take control of your customers' lifecycles by analyzing your current performance, initiating lifecycle marketing campaigns, and using the right tools to manage each stage. Use customer lifecycle management to create a loyal customer base and grow your business exponentially.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in January 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.