3 Essential Lifecycle Email Marketing Strategies

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Key takeaways

• Lifecycle email marketing = automated, targeted emails that engage customers at different stages of their online journey (welcome, win‑back, cart recovery).
• Three high‑impact times to send lifecycle emails: welcome (new customers), win‑back (inactive customers) and abandoned‑basket recovery.
• Welcome emails should make new prospects feel valued but avoid heavy incentives early on, use personal preferences to encourage site exploration.
• Win‑back (‘We Miss You’) emails can reactivate customers, even a small recovery rate (e.g. 0.5%) can yield substantial revenue because the segment is large.
• Abandoned cart/browse recovery is common and effective: ~98% of visitors as window‑shoppers, over half of shoppers abandon baskets and recovery programmes can deliver up to 5% of online revenue.
• Measure lifecycle email success as a nurture process, don’t expect immediate purchases, maintain contact and deliver value‑driven content to stay top of mind.

Introduction

Lifecycle email marketing is a technique that many email marketers forget to include in their over-all strategy. However, it is one of the most effective ways of maximizing a marketing plan because it targets prospects at different stages in their purchasing journey. It is also great for recapturing leads that may have forgotten about your product or service.

So What Is Lifecycle Email Marketing?

“Lifecycle email marketing programmes are automated and targeted emails designed to reach your customer at different stages of their online journey, whether that be welcome emails for new customers or discount emails for customers who have been inactive for a while,” explains Emma Weir on Business2Community. “Lifecycle emails are one of the best ways to keep in regular contact with your customers.”Lifecycle email marketing provides a lot of benefits for marketers, however this is not always easy to measure depending on the type of lifecycle email that you are sending. If you want to nurture prospects, you need to realize that it is a process. Just because you email someone, does not meant that they will purchase immediately. However, maintaining open contact with your audience and providing them with value-driven content will keep your business in their mind whenever they are ready to purchase.In order to get the most out of your lifecycle email marketing, here are 3 essential strategies for some of the best times to engage your prospects.

Get On The Welcome Wagon

This is a critical point in a prospect’s lifecycle journey. They always say that first impressions are the most important, so this is your chance to use your email marketing to make a potential customer feel special and valued. However, you also don’t want to overstep your bounds. This is just the beginning of the nurturing process.“As this is quite an early stage within the lifecycle it’s important to be careful with incentives. Your customers may not be ready to make another big commitment or purchase with you just yet so your incentive might fall flat,” recommends Weir. “It’s better to encourage your customers using their personal preferences to visit your website again, maybe even different areas, so their whole experience with you becomes more familiar.”

Bring Them Back

For most online businesses, the majority of their business is a one-time purchase. This means that repeat business is almost unheard of for companies without strong strategies for customer retention. However, there is one advantage to marketing to previous customers. You probably already have their contact information on your mailing list.“This is where win back emails can help. A simple ‘We Miss You’ can have a significant impact and give them a prod to revisit your website and potentially make another purchase,” says Weir. “Even if you get an incremental 0.5% of these customers back, the size of the segment is so large that this is likely to be the biggest revenue generator of all email programmes apart from abandonment.”

Abandoned Baskets

For some reason, people love to fill a basket with potential purchases and then leave them behind. Most of them do it as a method of comparison-shopping, but others are just looking for items that interest them.“Around 98% of site visitors will be ‘online window shoppers’ and leave without making a purchase AND over half of customers who add items to their basket will end up abandoning it,” says Weir. “Having a good Cart and Browse Recovery programme in place can provide up to 5% of all online revenue. So just getting a small amount of this revenue back will make a huge impact on the bottom line.”

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