Using Lifecycle Personalization to Improve Lifetime Value and Cost of Acquisition

As a marketer, you directly influence two major measures of your brand’s success—LTV and CAC. You might even have the words customer acquisition costs and lifetime value ringing in your ears daily as you search for more efficient ways to convert customers and drive repeat purchasing.

While there are many ways to approach increasing LTV and decreasing CAC, personalization should be in every marketer’s toolbox; specifically, personalizing marketing content and cadence to the customer’s order history and where they are in the purchase funnel.

Let’s walk through the three steps every marketer can take to achieve lifecycle-based personalization.

Assess the Customer Journey

When thinking about the customer journey, you, the marketer, are the expert in your business. First, consider the purchasing inflection points that matter to your brand. For example, you might start with:

• No Purchase
• 1 Purchase
• Repeat
• Loyal

You’ll have to decide what these terms mean for your business. Is a loyal buyer one with 4 purchases? Or 10? Look at the distribution of your customers by order count, evaluate metrics like order frequency, and consider your brand’s costs, revenue, and goals as you make this decision.

Then, determine the different touchpoints and events (KPIs) that provide value to your business and that are hallmarks of each stage of consideration. Let’s start with:

• At Risk: Has not been seen across any channel in over 30 days
• Recent Buyer: Has purchased within the last 30 days, but has not been seen on any other channel since
• Awareness: Has been seen in the last 30 days
• Interest: Has shown a basic level of interest in a product, such as viewed a product
• Consideration: Has shown further interest in a product, such as viewing a single product twice
• Intent: Has shown real purchase intent by adding a product to cart

Again, this is where your brand expertise shines. What are these major milestones for your brand and what are the events that comprise them?

From the mash-up that results when you segment purchase stages with KPIs, you’ve now defined the customer lifecycle for your brand:

Segment Customers to Exact Specifications

The hard part of segmenting your customers should be giving your business model the proper consideration, not getting the data you need. Integrating a customer data platform (CDP) into your marketing processes allows you to centralize your data from all sources, including website, ecommerce, marketing, loyalty, service, and the custom elements that make your business unique. 

Use this “central command” to gain full visibility into the customer journey, regardless of where it’s happening or whether the customer is still anonymous or already known. The visibility and dynamic, up-to-date segmentation gives you the power to execute on all types of experiences from one launch point, ensuring consistency, completeness, and accuracy of customer segments across all marketing channels, or even in loyalty and service platforms.

Deliver Marketing Experiences that Matter

As customers work their way into and down the funnel, hitting your brand’s KPIs, the message and the assistance you provide changes, as well. 

• At the Intent stage, follow up with reminders about products in cart, but amp up these reminders with recommendations for similar products, in case the customer just hasn’t found the right one
• When customer engagement is at-risk, focus not just on offers to win them back, but on building relationships and delivering branding content

Just as important as the message, consider the channel. Your repeat customers know the value you provide and might respond well to seeing you in their email inbox. You may have to get more creative with your non-purchasers, though, reaching them on social and display channels with precise and up-to-date segment sync. Finding the right channel for the right customer stage and KPI both keeps costs in check and increases marketing efficiency.

Using your CDP to power the precise segmentation, you’ll deploy these campaigns into the marketing system of your choice, measure the exact outcomes, and iterate and improve as you learn what works.

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By putting the customer at the center of your marketing endeavors, your brand can deliver an experience that is both highly effective and highly personalized to the customer. Need help? Learn more about partnering with Zaius to deliver the ultimate customer experience.