5 Steps to Boost your Automated Customer Lifecycle Engagement

Customer engagement forms the backbone to any business success, and thus, maintaining a healthy customer relationship throughout the customer lifecycle is crucial. But as your business grows and it gains more leads and customers, it might get a little difficult for your marketing team to keep up manually. Thus, just like most other marketing technology advancement areas, the customer engagement procedure also witnessed a rapid technological innovation to cater to the increasing need for personalization in marketing.

To keep the rising number of customers happy with their services and products, organizations these days are integrating new MarTech in their system, which automates the work needed to build good customer relations. By automating the repetitive marketing tasks to nurture leads, such as sending and following up emails, social media communication, and website and text messages, marketers get more time to focus on other important areas needed to grow their business.

Automating your customer lifecycle not only decreases the workload of your company’s marketing professionals but also reduces customer engagement costs while increasing upsell and cross-sell opportunities. A prospective lead goes through a set of stages in their journey with the interested product, even after converting into a buyer. For smoother and better progress of a customer journey in this era driven by technology, marketers are willing to integrate automation in the process. It helps attract, engage, satisfy, and retain potential customers with its well-connected and personalized customer journey.

But before you invest in a marketing automation platform to automate the customer lifecycle, understand the different stages in the process of automating the customer lifecycle. A customer goes through several stages in its entire journey of developing interest as a buyer, buying it, and retaining your brand. As communication’s objective varies at every stage, you need to govern your reach, nurturing, acquisition, retention, and referral based on your marketing objective to increase the efficiency of your automating engagement process. An automated customer lifecycle, built using the right strategies, will help you increase marketing efficiency and overall business ROI. Moreover, understanding the automated customer life cycle stages gives your marketing campaign a more focused roadmap of the customer journey.

To help you guide through the different stages of an automated customer lifecycle, we have prepared a list of 5 different steps to build a flawless automated customer lifecycle:

1. Analyze and integrate customer data: As marketing automation gives you the opportunity to collect all the metrics related to a customer journey, you need to make sure that you integrate those data wisely. Ensure that all the important data that will boost the experience of your automated customer lifecycle are in place. To target the right customers with the right messages, you need to know how interested they are in your company and product, how satisfied they are with your service if they are a good fit for further engagement, the current customer lifecycle stage, how often they bought the product, and more. Also, ensure that the data in your CRM is integrated with your marketing automation platform. Analyzing and integrating the right customer data at the right place helps you bridge the gap between CRM and marketing automation systems.

“Pairing them with your contact base and CRM allows you to quickly access user information and turn it into personalized content,” states HubSpot. 

1. Lead scoring: In order to determine the sales-readiness of your potential customers, you need to rank your leads to configure your automated sales and marketing process accordingly. By analyzing the customer interest in your service or product, the automated tool will understand the lead’s current position. This method of behavior and demographic scoring further segments the customers and determines the efficiency needed behind each conversion. Eventually, this step helps identify unhappy customers and focus on improving their experience.
2. Lifecycle-based triggers: As the automated customer lifecycle engagement platform analyzes the customer lifecycle, you can further command your system to send messages that will trigger the reader to proceed to the next step. Based on personal information and customer behavior, you can draft email content such as subscription confirmations, welcome and thank you notes, products related to interests, order details, feedback requests, reward campaigns, and special day wishes. Regular automated emails for inactive subscribers and reactivation campaigns can also boost customer engagement. Lifecycle-based trigger messages ensure you create a personal connection with your customers and their pain points are addressed.
3. Digital advertising: Well, this digitally connected world has given marketers the chance to advertise their products on the right digital platform to the target customer, and at the right stage of their lifecycle. This is a great way to enhance your lead generation automation system. By analyzing the most used social media platforms or search tools, you can place your ads through your social media account or Google Ads. Digital advertising further streamlines your lead scoring and customer lifecycle management by increasing visibility and conversions.
4. Monitor your customer support services: Automated marketing solutions will easily help you build customer relationships. But to strengthen the relationship, you need to upgrade your customer support services. This helps you retain qualified customers who have had a good past experience with your brand, but are not satisfied with the post-buying service. Constantly monitoring the automated customer service support will help you analyze the system’s existing gap and fix it. Also, by understanding the pain-points in a customer journey due to automation, such as the complexity of the user interface or a late or no reply to a query, your marketing team gets a chance to fix it.

A successful automated customer lifecycle engagement program involves high monitoring of the technology and ensuring that it aligns with your business objective. The best-automated customer lifecycle module covers every area related to building a better customer relationship from the first day of interacting with a potential lead to post-selling customer support service. If implemented properly and throughout the customer lifecycle, marketing automation tools can bring huge benefits to your business.