Lifecycle Email Marketing: From First Click to Lifelong Loyalty

You must have heard it before: the best type of marketing is the one where the recipients have no idea you are selling something to them. It might sound strange, but a majority of us who have gotten Spotify Wrapped hardly think of them as a lifecycle email marketing strategy.

Every year, users get highly personalized emails showing them their listening habits, top artists, playlists, and more. Over the years, many people have said their take about Spotify Wrapped; however, only a few see it for what it is—a clever marketing plan—a great example of what lifecycle email marketing should look like.

If you like what Spotify is doing with Wrapped, we have good news—you can make yours. We have prepared this guide to help you make great lifecycle emails, taking cues from some of the biggest brands on the Internet. First, let’s tell you about Airbnb.

Airbnb 

When you talk about companies that have learned and understood the good use of lifecycle marketing, it would be an erroneous mistake to leave out Airbnb.

Airbnb has one of the most sophisticated lifecycle email systems specifically designed to engage users at different stages of their customer journey, from initial sign-up to post-stay feedback. 

With emails like the one you are seeing above, Airbnb makes billions of dollars annually. While we cannot say for sure how much of that money comes directly as a result of lifecycle emails, we know how they get the results—and it’s not magic!

The company starts by sending welcome emails to new users, encouraging them to complete their profiles. As users browse listings, they get targeted emails showcasing properties based on their preferences. If a booking is abandoned, reminder emails with offers or suggestions aim to re-engage them. 

With such a seamless flow of targeted communication, Airbnb keeps users engaged and drives conversions. 

With this clear example, you can see how powerful lifecycle email marketing can be when executed thoughtfully. 

So now, let’s break down the concept of lifecycle emails and show you its importance in the next sections.

What Is Lifecycle Email Marketing?

For any product, there are steps that the customer has to go through before they can make a purchase. For instance, if you are selling shoes, your customers first need to find your brand. The next step might be to find the shoe they want, add it to the cart, and then make payment. So, the entire process, from finding your brand to making payment, is called a customer journey.

In simple English, lifecycle email is a concept in email marketing where you send emails to different customers focusing on their particular stage in that customer’s journey. 

This approach to marketing considers the customers’ interests, preferences, and behavior along with their stage in the customer journey. As a result, it’s typically more personalized and more user-focused than regular marketing.  

Why Is Lifecycle Email Marketing Important?

First off, email marketing has one of the highest ROIs of any marketing channel, with an average return of $36 for every $1 spent. 

The second and most important reason (one that most people overlook) is to help you avoid information overload. If you were to tell people about your brand and all of the products you have, there is a huge chance that you will exhaust the pages of a dictionary. But that’s not a bad thing—it shows you are passionate about your great products. 

The problem, though, is that your customers do not have that patience to go through your catalog—one item at a time or even one page at a time. This is where lifecycle emails come in. You are offering to guide them through how to do business with you—in the best way they want. Email marketing allows you to send just what the user wants to see at that particular time. On your end, it means less stress, and for the customer, it means better customer experience. 

Thirdly, your email campaign is only as valuable as the customer thinks it is—not you. So, a lifecycle email bridges this gap of value for you. By grouping your customers and sending them targeted emails, you can be sure they get only messages that meet their needs and tell them what to do next. 

This helps you build relationships with your customers over time. Precisely, it is how you make first-time customers become loyal customers. Interestingly, research shows these customers are likely to spend 67% more on your products than the new ones.

Key Stages of Lifecycle Email Marketing

When you plant a seed, it doesn’t just start fruiting immediately. Similarly, your lifecycle email marketing is like planting seeds in the hearts of your customers, usually in three stages. As you go through each stage, you see different significant changes until you reach the point where your prospects start fruiting—buying from you and even bringing others to the same!

Attraction and conversion

This is the first stage where you put the seed in the soil of their hearts. Your job here is to introduce your products to prospects and gain their attention. Essentially, you are showing them reasons why they should become customers. Depending on your business, this might involve signing up for a newsletter, requesting more information, a welcome email, or initiating a trial of your product or service.

Onboarding and value realization

Even if you have sold the most effective product on the planet, it can only be as useful as the client uses it. So, after purchase, your emphases should be about teaching your users how they make the best use of their new purchase. 

If you use Grammarly, you will understand this part better. Every now and then, the company provides their customers with the needed training and resources to help them understand how they can do more with the tool. 

Happy birthday emails can also fall in this category. Tell them how much you appreciate their existence and that they do business with you. Might sound like nothing, but a recent poll claims 68% said they will stop doing business with a company if the company is indifferent about them. 

Your goal at this point is to help your customers see how they can make the most value from what they just bought from you.  

Nurturing and advocacy

Even though it’s the last stage, this one hardly ever ends—at least if you do things correctly. At this point, you have gained the trust of your customers to a reasonable extent, but you now want to build an ongoing relationship with them. 

For a minute, which would you prefer, a friend recommending a restaurant to you or the chef of a restaurant telling you their food is the best in town? Of course, everyone would prefer their friend’s recommendation even though the chef has 10 years’ experience. The reason is simple: while one sounds like someone trying to help you, the other sounds like what every chef would say about their food. 

The gist is, at this point, you want to make your customers think only about you (in a good way, though). Such that, when their friends ask them, where is the best place to get products that you have, they instantly recommend you. The moment you can achieve this, you have reached the highest possible achievement in marketing. 

Best Practices for Lifecycle Email Marketing

To implement an effective lifecycle email marketing strategy:

Segment your audience

The summary of this article to this point is that lifecycle emails work well because of personalization. What we didn’t tell you, though, is that personalization can only work if you implement segmentation.

Segmentation means you are grouping your customers using important data like:

• How do they interact with your website or app? What are their most visited pages?
• What are they like? Their age, gender, race, and so on.
• When did they sign up? Have they made a purchase? Are they planning to renew their subscription?

Collecting this information is only the first step—now you need to create personalized emails based on what you know. And no, personalization is not just saying “Hello, Sarah.” No, make suggestions to Sarah based on what you have learned about her. You know, the way Netflix sends you emails about movies that might be related to the one you have just seen—yes, something like that!

Automate your communications 

If you have bought something from AliExpress or Amazon, you would probably notice how you get messages when some things happen. For instance, you will get an email reminder from AliExpress when you don’t clear your cart after a number of days. Have you for once imagined how stressful it would be if there was someone sitting behind a desk sending these emails?

Yes, you need to speak with your clients at their different stages of the user journey but who said you have to do it yourself? Like AliExpress and Amazon, you can implement an email automation system that sends out emails based on specific user activity, like when they make purchases, abandon their cart, etc. 

This automated communication keeps customers informed throughout the purchasing process without requiring manual updates from you. Even though you are sending these emails automatically, they should sound as natural as possible. You want every customer to feel like you took time to write an email just for them. That means you create emails that reflect your brand’s personality and values.

Test and optimize

If you have been in marketing for a while, you know by now that no one can tell precisely how your customers will react to a particular strategy. So, you need to regularly review key performance indicators like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns. 

Don’t just stop there—see how you can improve these things by doing A/B testing on the different elements like the subject lines, content, and send times to improve performance.

Case Studies: Brands Successfully Using Lifecycle Email Marketing

Finally, let’s quickly give you some real examples of more companies doing well with their lifecycle email marketing:

Apple

We already described how lifecycle emails can help you turn average customers into loyal ones. Now look at how Apple Music exemplifies this strategy with this visually appealing campaign. You will see it features a CTA button for automatic renewals that everyone can see. Apple is essentially telling them: We can make things easy for you—it’s like selling, but not selling at the same time.

Booking.com 

The following email from Booking.com is another example to follow for lifecycle emails. After making a booking for Siena, the company quickly suggests similar locations based on their research. This means customers can explore more suggestions that are close to their interests that they did not think about before.  

To Sum Up

A lifecycle email marketing strategy, no matter how good, will not guarantee success. Yes—read that again! It is just a step in the right marketing direction. To get the right results, you must work on implementing lifecycle emails into your new strategy in the best way that suits your business and your customers. 

There is a thin line between selling your products and being a digital nuisance. Sadly, many marketers cross this line every day without even knowing. If you don’t want to be that guy, ensure your strategy is built rock solid on data and do well to follow the tips above.