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Customer Lifecycle Management

What is customer lifecycle management?

Customer lifecycle management (CLM) is a strategy for managing customer relationships, focusing on a customer’s entire journey with a business from initial contact to retention and beyond.

It helps businesses build stronger relationships with their customers which can lead to repeat sales and increased loyalty. Customer lifecycle management involves activities like gathering feedback, targeting campaigns, increasing brand visibility, and delivering personalized experiences.

What is the difference between CLM and Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?

The difference between CRM (customer relationship management) and CLM (customer lifecycle management) is that CRM looks at individual customer interactions while CLM takes into account the customer’s entire journey.

With CRM, companies focus on things like sales, support, and marketing activities for individual customers.
However, CLM is more holistic. It’s focused on building long-term relationships with customers, and does this by using data to gain a comprehensive understanding of all the interactions a customer has with the company over time.

The five main lifecycle stages targeted by CLM

The five stages that customer lifecycle management focuses on include:

  1. Awareness

    : When a potential customer first encounters a product or service.
  2. Consideration

    : When a customer investigates and researches that product or service.
  3. Conversion

    : When shoppers commit to a purchase by completing a transaction.
  4. Retention

    : When customers reflect on their purchase, returning again in the future.
  5. Advocacy

    : When customers share their experiences, helping to promote the product or service to friends and family.

Analyzing the customer lifecycle

Analyzing the customer lifecycle involves understanding each stage of a customer’s journey with your product or service.

Awareness

Take a look at how potential customers become aware of your product or service. How are you reaching out to target audiences? Which marketing campaigns are driving the most results? Are there any other marketing channels you could be using?

Consideration

Evaluate how customers interact with your brand and explore your products or services. Are there any barriers that may prevent customers from considering you as an option? What content could you provide to help them make an informed decision about their purchase?

Conversion

Take a look at your checkout process and work to optimize it. Ensure navigation is simple, offer multiple payment options, use auto-fill tools that pre-populate checkout fields, add trust symbols throughout the checkout to build customer confidence, and consider using exit intent pop-ups to entice bouncing shoppers back.

Retention

To increase customer retention, show appreciation with rewards and loyalty programs, follow up with customers after purchase, create personalized, value-packed content tailored to their interests and needs, and establish customer service standards that set you above competitors.

Advocacy

Use social listening tools and hashtags to investigate whether current customers spread the word about your product or service. Push current customers to follow you on social media, implement loyalty strategies to reward repeat customers, and use referral programs to make it easy for customers to recommend your brand to others in their network.

Leading brands choose Emarsys to power their customer lifecycle

Emarsys helps leading brands like PUMA, Pizza Hut, and Nike to connect their sales, product, and customer data to better manage the customer lifecycle and deliver personalized cross-channel experiences that satisfy customers and drive business results.

Deliver the predictable, profitable outcomes that your business demands.

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