By understanding the different customer lifecycle stages, you're building a solid platform for a long-term relationship with your customers. Visualize the touch points from their perspective to ensure you are addressing them with an interesting and personal dialogue.
The toolbox
Engage provides the necessary tools, such as customer data, channels, and triggers to enable a personal and real-time dialogue. With all prerequisites in place, you can focus on the fun part—talking to your customers in a personal and surprisingly relevant way.
Talk to the customers on their terms, and always meet them at the right time with a proper message.
The design
In the world of Engage, a customer lifecycle starts at recruitment and ends after several months (approx. 24-36) of inactivity. In between there are lots of reward-and-retain activities you should perform so the customers don't become inactive.
Before you head into Engage to start building complex workflows, we recommend you begin with the design phase. Define touchpoints, objectives, segments, triggers, channels, content and offers for prioritized journeys to ensure you have everything covered. Don't think too big but start small and smart, to continuously learn what's working. Use these insights as input for the next workflow, to ensure opening rates and conversion.
Always monitor, test, follow up and adapt your activities to improve conversions and customer satisfaction.
The construction
When the initial mapping is done, it's time to start building. In our construction there are six main phases that can be divided into numerous subcategories depending on your defined objectives and design ideas. As mentioned earlier: don't start too big but with the most important touchpoints and journeys.
Recruitment
Why should customers join your program? How will it benefit them? Be clear about what they can expect, what type of communication and benefits they'll receive. Nominate store ambassadors to be responsible for spreading the words in store. Online, great information and UX are your best friends. The process to sign up must be both simple and smooth.
Welcome
Once a customer has signed up, send them an email to confirm they've made a good decision and remind them of their member benefits.
Activation
After onboarding, you really must put an effort into activating the customer. The sooner the better, since there's a correlation between time to first re-purchase and profitability. Adapt communication and offers to customer profiles, to improve your chances of being the customer's first choice.
Retain and Develop
This is one of the most important phases in the customer lifecycle. They should stay and grow here. Show appreciation by sprinkling surprises, offers, services, and tips around you. It will boost your relationship. But remember—we all have different preferences, so make an effort to personalize the gifts.
In this phase you work with both ad-hoc campaigns and smart automations. For example, you can follow up on a purchase with tips on how to use something or accessories that go well with it, congratulate customers on birthdays with a promotion or send a reminder if they've left something in their cart.
Win-back
Have you noticed a customer isn't purchasing like they used to? Time to figure out why they've become inactive and see if you can make any changes or improvements to reactivate them. Perhaps they'd appreciate more information on your products, or maybe an offer will do the trick.
Close
How long can you save customer data? Make one last attempt to activate the customer, but if you still don't see them acting on it, it's time to close their account.
Want to learn more?
As a customer or partner of Voyado, you can request free access to Voyado Academy, our digital training center. In the course catalog there is, among other things, a course on how to work with the customer lifecycle. Sign up and get to learning via the form here.
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