Customer Lifecycle Management: Strategies for Engaging at Every Touchpoint

Getting new customers is only half the battle – you also need to continue engaging them so they remain loyal. The customer lifecycle outlines the journey leads and customers take from beginning to end. It looks at each touchpoint where customers interact with your company, from becoming aware of your brand to turning into a loyal customer and brand advocate.

While the journey itself may look different for every business, the path is often similar, encompassing core stages of the lifecycle. Businesses need to implement intentional strategies to maximize impact at each touchpoint so that customers move seamlessly through the path.

This post will look at customer lifecycle management (CLM) and some strategies businesses can use to optimize touchpoints, including how using the right tools like EverAfter’s customer interface can support development in various lifecycle management stages.

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The Key Stages of Lifecycle Management

Before we jump into looking at which strategies work best for optimizing each touchpoint, we must have a clear idea of each customer lifecycle journey stage and what it entails. Below, we’ll break down the five core stages of lifecycle management.

1. Awareness: In the first stage, brands need to reach and prospect leads to grabbing their attention. This can be done through various marketing campaigns, SEO, or social media. The goal is to get a lead interested enough in your product or service to continue learning more.
2. Engagement: Once a lead is aware of your offering, it’s essential to consistently engage them to continue keeping them informed. In this stage, targeted and automated campaigns such as email newsletters and personalized offers work best through highlighting tailored solutions.
3. Conversion: It’s at this stage that leads turn into customers. The process of converting customers itself can be fragile, making smooth onboarding essential. In the stage where customers adopt new services, it doesn’t matter whether your brand offers high-touch or low-touch onboarding, the key is providing a seamless experience.
4. Retention: Once a customer is converted, the next challenge is retaining them. This can be done using different strategies like loyalty programs, personalized offers, regular check-ins, and proactive customer support. Another way to retain existing customers is to expand their exposure to your brand by cross-selling additional services that address other pain points they may have, including them in your broader ecosystem.
5. Advocacy: When a client is satisfied with a product or service, it’s time to turn them into a brand advocate. Referral and loyalty programs can incentivize them to promote your solution to others, helping drive new leads.

Optimizing Customer Touchpoints Using Lifecycle Management Strategies

Building a strong customer lifecycle management strategy involves maximizing each touchpoint and interaction to identify more opportunities for connection. In the B2B space, understanding customer journey touchpoints is crucial, as customers interact with your company differently at each stage of their lifecycle. Implementing specific strategies will help you make the most of each of these B2B customer journey touchpoints, ensuring a seamless experience that supports customer satisfaction and retention.

1. Map the customer journey

When you map out your customer’s journey visually, your team can more clearly identify each touchpoint and understand what customers need at each one. A customer journey map helps you predict your customers’ needs and pinpoint decision-making elements that can influence them. With a customer journey map, businesses can better:

• Enhance the customer experience
• Understand buyer behavior
• Optimize touchpoints for smoother conversions
• Identify areas for refinement

You can create multiple customer journey maps that correspond to different segments or customer personas to offer more tailored solutions.

2. Create multi-channel touchpoints

Customers interact with your business in more ways than one, so it’s important to make sure your company is ready with omnichannel support. Creating touchpoints on multiple channels helps you engage customers where they are and retain them even after they’ve converted. According to a survey, 80% of respondents wanted multiple personalized touchpoints across different channels. Here are some ways to connect with customers through multiple channels:

• Live chat and chatbots for 24/7 support
• Email marketing for personalized offers
• Social media to build more awareness
• Surveys for ongoing feedback
• Knowledge bases and forums for self-service

3. Leverage the right CLM tools

You can employ many tools to optimize customer journey touchpoints across all lifecycle stages more easily. Using customer lifecycle management software enables businesses to streamline and personalize customer interactions. With platforms that highlight AI and automation, you can enhance customer lifecycle management by tailoring experiences more effectively. For example, AI-powered algorithms can inform marketing campaigns and automate the delivery of personal content, improving engagement at every stage.

Recommended reading: Automating Customer Engagement in SaaS: A Comprehensive Guide

4. Implement self-service resources

A whopping 88% of customers expect your brand to have an online self-service support portal. Customers don’t always want to reach out to customer service to get help, so setting up self-service resources like chatbots, FAQs, or customer interface allows them to connect with your business without overloading service agents. 

Yet, according to Gartner, the average self-service success rate is only 14%, making improving this metric a core focus for businesses and customer service teams. With a customer interface like EverAfter, a commerce business, Spryker, was able to add five new key touchpoints within the customer journey, improving the customer experience and onboarding processes with a reliable self-service portal.

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5. Prime the customer for repeat purchases with a tailored experience

The customer experience should be personalized at every stage of the lifecycle, but when it’s especially important after adoption. Personalizing the customer experience once customers have already signed on to your brand can not only improve relationships, but also helps build trust, which encourages repeat buyers. Surveys show that up to 60% of customers would become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience. Create a positive post-adoption experience by combining the tools we mentioned above, such as:

• Using AI to create tailored communications
• Automating emails to thank customers and follow up for feedback
• Turning to a customer interface to facilitate onboarding
• Providing personalized additional product suggestions based on a customer’s profile, pain points, and usage history

6. Productizing customer programs for long-term success

Productizing customer programs can transform how businesses engage with and support their customers, especially within the SaaS customer lifecycle. This lifecycle requires scalable, repeatable processes that can evolve alongside your business. By aligning customer programs with the SaaS customer lifecycle, both you and your customers can benefit from the following advantages:

• Scalability: Customer programs can grow with your business without overwhelming your resources
• Consistency and personalization: Each customer receives a tailored experience with consistent service across the board
• Efficiency: Reduced manual effort allows teams to focus on more strategic and higher-value activities
• Clarity: With clearly structured customer journeys, you can guide customers through transparent, predetermined, and, action-driven paths
• Improved measurability: Data-driven insights allow for the constant refinement of customer programs
• Retention opportunities: Productized programs help you build lasting relationships that can lead to upselling possibilities as well as greater loyalty

With platforms like EverAfter, businesses can seamlessly productize their customer programs,  enabling scalable, efficient, and personalized customer journeys that lead to long-term success.

Best Practices for Customer Lifecycle Management Touchpoints

While strategies for customer lifecycle management can differ from one company to another, there are certain best practices to implement that will enhance results across the board.

• Optimize onboarding

It’s critical that your onboarding experience is seamless since it sets the stage for long-term customer success. Make sure you provide clear instructions, step-by-step tutorials, and dedicated support so that you can reduce time-to-value for customers and help them feel more confident from the start while reducing early churn.

• Leverage automation: Automation ensures customers receive timely and relevant communications based on their actions. Event-triggered messages such as follow-up emails, reminders, or feedback requests keep customers engaged without exerting too much manual effort. This boosts engagement and reduces drop-offs by maintaining consistent interaction.
• Encourage advocacy: Well-structured and incentivized referral programs can turn customers into brand advocates. By offering incentives for new referrals, you can attract new customers through trusted recommendations, driving more growth and loyalty.‍
• Focus on communication: Whether through email, SMS, social media, or elsewhere, consistent communication is key to keeping customers informed and engaged. Regularly check in with your customers and offer personalized content to ensure they feel valued at any stage of the customer lifecycle. ‍
• Build content for each stage: Creating content according to each customer lifecycle stage allows you to address unique customer needs and concerns at the right time. For example, you can use onboarding guides for new users, blog posts to continuously educate more experienced users, and self-help pages for ongoing support. This can also help you maintain customer interest and add more value.‍
• Monitor and adjust: Regularly monitor customer interactions from all your touchpoints to identify areas for improvement. Analyzing customer behavior and feedback can help you make data-informed adjustments to improve your customer journey, increase satisfaction, and reduce churn. 

The Role of Automation and AI in Customer Lifecycle Management

We covered it briefly above, but automation and AI play a core role in optimizing key touchpoints across the customer lifecycle by putting repetitive tasks on auto-pilot to provide timely interactions.  Using AI, businesses can create even more personalized experiences by leveraging customer data to better predict behavior, recommend content, and send the right message at the right time. When paired with a strong customer lifecycle automation platform, the opportunities are endless. For example, AI can automatically trigger personalized emails after actions like an abandoned cart or purchase to help teams stay proactive about nurturing customer relationships. 

With a customer interface like EverAfter, businesses can harness the power of AI to automate routine tasks related to customer engagement strategies. EverAfter is a customer onboarding software that helps businesses onboard their customers while offering tailored content like customer retention strategies, customer success plans, targeted marketing, and more. With EverAfter, companies can personalize the journey for each of their customer segments, creating a dynamic interface that empowers customers to move through a high or low-touch onboarding experience intuitively and at their own pace.

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Put Your Customer Lifecycle Optimization Strategies on Auto-Pilot

Automating key parts of your business’s customer lifecycle can go a long way in ensuring your selected strategies are consistently being implemented. With automation tools, AI-powered algorithms, and a customer interface like EverAfter, you don’t need to second guess whether or not your customer is moving forward through the path you set out for them. The success of your CLM strategies may depend highly on the tools you use to implement them, so consider solutions that will bring you closer to your goals without adding any strain on your resources.