Lifecycle Marketing: How to Keep Subscribers Engaged at Every Relationship Stage

Marketers, now more than ever, you need to step up your game when it comes to email relevancy.

In addition to the status quo of overcrowded inboxes and only seconds to grab attention, you've now got intelligent inboxes to maneuver.

Engagement and how subscribers interact (or don't!) with your messages matters more than before.

Email clients, like Gmail with its Priority Inbox, want to make it easier for users to digest their email more effectively. So the messages that are opened and clicked and responded to are seen as important and prioritized while others either end up in the spam folder or get lost and perpetually ignored in new categorizations of “less important." Now, more than ever, you have to get relevant and get noticed.

The path to driving relevancy is lifecycle marketing – emailing people in very targeted ways depending on where they are in their lifecycle with you

Are they new, have they taken a specific action, are they older subscribers and not interacting anymore? Because most lifecycle messages are automated and based on some kind of data (often a date field), they are extremely timely, targeted and relevant, resulting in better engagement (think 40-80% open rates), more money (often NEW revenue streams) and improved ROI. Additionally, these message ideas will help you save time, simply running in the background, building relationships and boosting revenue, while you focus on other things. Consider incorporating the following triggers into your email marketing program if you haven't already. While we're including some great links to best practices, we'll also dive deeper into some of the suggested triggers below in future posts.

Post-Sign-Up:

• Welcome Message
• Welcome Series, including messages such as:
  • Social Media introductions
  • Company background/values & principles
  • Educational content
  • Special offers

Post-Purchase:

• Thank you coupon
• Product care, how-to information
• Accessory cross-sells
• Product review requests
• Refer-A-Friend messaging
• Re-order/refill requests

Other Behavior/Events:

• Birthday, anniversary offers
• Recommendations based on recent browsing behavior
• Abandoned shopping cart reminder/remarketing

Pushing Subscriber Engagement:

• Loyalty points balances & triggers when a customer is only X points away from reaching a reward
• Lapsed or non-purchaser series

Certainly, the list above is just a starting point as there are plenty of other trigger possibilities. Hopefully these ideas will inspire you to start down a path of timeliness and relevancy guaranteed to have higher engagement rates and ROI than on your regular broadcast messages.

Stay tuned for detailed best practices in these areas soon!

Kristen Gregory
Manager of Strategic Services Bronto Software
@kristengreg