Automate the use of lifecycle approach in your firm

What is the lifecycle approach in marketing ?

Lifecycle approach can be conducted towards clients or products but here, we will be focusing on clients. It is a tool used in marketing to improve sells and the branding image.
The concept is quite simple : to analyse the different steps the clients is going through while being regarded as a client. The latter notion is broad because while talking about "client" we consider consumers, but also consumers-to-be, meaning leads, and former consumers.
The aim of this approach is to improve clients' experience of a brand and therefore attract more consumers and avoid losing them. To do so, a marketer should take into account two criteria : the client's behaviour towards the brand and what should be done commercially speaking.
At the end of the day, each client's action should bring about a commercial reaction specially designed to improve the client experience.

3 Goals

• Measure the rate of erosion to set the right objectives and budgets for client renewal ;
• Measure the profitability of actions designed to increase customer loyalty ;
• Calculate the budget for the conquest, according to the average cycle of a customer.

3 Steps

• Determine the stages of a customer's life cycle or the length of its relationship with the company, for example: first purchase, renewal, additional purchases, cessation of activity, etc.
• Establish customer segments according to the stages of the life cycle: profiles, characteristics, attitude towards the product.
• Analyze the customer portfolio from a lifecycle perspective and answer the eight questions: What is the rate of erosion of our customer base? Is our offer evolving enough to successfully re-launch former customers? Do we have offers to increase their average basket? To develop their business, do we have cross offers to offer them? Do we have customized offers to retain our best customers? To avoid the risk of erosion, do we have a monitoring system by tracking key indicators? What actions have we put in place to retain the highest value customers? Have we calculated the cost of losing a customer in relation to the budget devoted to retaining them?

How to automate the lifecycle approach in your firm ?

This approach can be automated by coding an app using artificial intelligence. We would need to use Machine Learning and more specifically in this filed, supervised learning.
It would only required to define measurable criteria corresponding to client's behaviour and to match commercial reactions. For instance, when the customer buys his third product online, he receives a promotion by e-mail on the next product. It would also required to connect the code to a database with information about clients and their actions towards the brand.