Business comes through customers from their entire lifetime engagement with the brand. That is why you need to understand and acknowledge the contribution in the totality of the customer’s lifetime.
In this blog, we are going to discuss the ways through which a brand can ensure maximum business value or Customer Lifecycle value from every customer that they have engaged with.
Before we proceed, let’s understand the concept of customer lifecycle and its importance first.
Technically the customer lifecycle is the timeline from the first engagement of the customer to the point where he turns into an advocate of the brand. Every interaction or touch point falls within the range of this lifecycle timeline. The total business impact or value generated within the customer lifecycle is defined as the Customer Lifecycle Value for that individual unit.
6 Steps for Better Customer Lifecycle Management
1- Laser Point Towards your Customer Persona: Understanding what kind of customer audience you are trying to reach makes your goals clearer and more aligned to company’s business goals.
2- Create a Relevant Content Marketing Strategy for the Customer: A research on what could be the pain point or a requirement of utmost importance for a customer, can help the content marketing team to develop the email/awareness advert more effectively.
3- An Open and Simple Window of Approach for the Customer: Once the customer pinpoints his interest on the concept of your product, then he starts to explore it with more and more queries. Here an open window for a free demo or a consultation via live call/chat can make the deal for you a lot smoother.
4- Personalised post-sell Experience: A proper customised onboarding can be really soothing for a customer, who has invested in your product & its services. A right and strong base can help build a longer relationship for the future.
5- Automated Engagements & Retention Activities: You can’t leave the customer post onboarding on his own to battle the challenges of continuously changing marketing demands.
You must engage with them to know their feedback, further requirements, and challenges to make the relationship between you and your customers stronger. A marketing automation workflow can ensure punctual, personalised, and relevant communication with your customers via the right channels.
6- Strong Emphasis on Advocacy or Referral Programs: The customers once established with a comfortable connection with your brand, are the best advocates for your products and services.
You can pitch them for referral programs and incentivise the same to get the much-needed expansion for your business. The more positive the advocacy the higher the customer lifecycle value potential for your company.
Customer Lifecycle: The approach towards making the best out of this valuable relationship includes quantifying the business value. Thus, the Customer Life Cycle becomes measurable and also makes the possibility for further improvement. This also creates an environment for better prediction of the total business scenario in terms of profit, revenue, inventory etc.
You can project your MRR/ARR much more accurately and plan resource hiring, acquisitions more intelligently. In short it can be your business health indicator to keep a track on.
So how do we calculate this magic score?
There is a simple formula to get this calculated, illustrated below:
Let us see the ways through which you can improve this score to maintain a healthy business inflow.
Way to Maintain a Healthy Business Inflow or Customer Lifecycle
A Good Customer Experience
Well, this should never be a flexible option, rather I would say this to be the golden mandatory thing to work on. A better customer service, onboarding, and consulting can deliver the best Customer Lifetime Value, as it will pave the way for a higher frequency of sales events from the same customer, directly or indirectly.
Invest More Time With High-value Score Customers
A known fact is hard coded in business books, that states the majority business comes through your happy and retained customers, rather than the new acquisitions. Once you come to know about the CLV source accounts, you can start meeting them to probe more about their likes and dislikes about the product & customer experience. This helps in the improvisation of all sorts in the product as well as service.
Increase the Revenue Scope with Upsell and cross-sell:
The business thrives on products being sold more and more, this could be with either single customers or multiple. In case your revenue expansion is not going the right way with new acquisition numbers, then your approach should be to increase them through existing customer accounts.
Customer Lifecycle: Upselling the current product with its full-stack capability to your happy customers can be one of the crucial steps to increase the CLV. Cross-selling comes into picture, when you have a host of products, which can be complemented with the existing ones to give the complete all-round package to the customer.
Price Management:
This could be a possibility in lots of cases, where the cost of input exceeds the cost of revenue output. When the brand launches a new product, it tends to keep it at a lower price to attract buyers, which in the long run can imbalance the revenue sheet. This would demand you to correct the pricing structure to enhance your CLV decently.
Never Put the Customer In a Sticky Situation
Many times, a brand might give a bundled service, without actually quantifying its impact on customer purchase capacity in the long run. If the product is not able to cater to the expectations as per customer demands, then he may be put in a spot to decide on the future feasibility of the product with their brand.
Customer Lifecycle: If this process makes it tough for customers to exit via legal contract, technical difficulty, dependencies, etc then that can backfire on you in the future a big time. Make the customer as free as possible to decide what is best for them. This makes the customer advocate the ease of integration and disintegration among peers or other brands.
Loyalty or Rewards Programs:
These programs can help you retain your customers and further inspire them to increase their spendings with you in the long run. You can apply automated journey campaigns to manage the reward allocation via mailers, SMS, WhatsApp etc. Sharing continuity bonus, or timely loyalty points to reclaim as cash can be good initiatives.
Conclusion:
So here we have understood the impact and Importance of investing in Customer Lifecycle Management, which results in a higher CLV score. This would need a well-managed and automated setup of activities to be carried out for engagement and retention. You might still need some changes and improvements as per your business vertical.
We have tried to explain the concept as per our study on standard verticals. For any questions, kindly contact us at hello@enrcloud.com or Visit to www.enrcloud.com
Also Read- 6 Obstructions that Can Derail a Customer Buying Journey
Amit Bhateja is the co-founder of enrcloud and helping brands and Unicorns from the last 15+ years and overachieve their Engagement and Retention goals. He is passionate about solving customer problems with modern technology, new age solutions, and consultancy approach. Besides Building ENR, He enjoys reading books, spending time with his family and Teammates, traveling, meeting new people, learning new things, and love to close the business deals.
