Hey there, fellow marketers!

You know how we've all been chasing this dream of "right message, right person, right time" forever? It's like the holy grail of personalization, and honestly, it's felt a bit like chasing a unicorn for decades. (The original mythical unicorns from fantasy, not the startup valuation ones.) Every new martech platform promises to deliver it, but somehow, it always seems just out of reach.

Think about it: we've been talking about this since the dawn of digital marketing. The various flavors of Lifecycle Marketing including CRM Marketing and Marketing Automation have all promised to deliver this nirvana of getting the right message to the right person at the right time. And sure, martech has been making this promise all the way back since the days of the first digitized customer databases that came out in the 80s or the first clunky ESPs in the 90s. That's a long time to be chasing a promise! So, why haven't we cracked the code yet? And can AI finally be the game changer we've been waiting for?

In our goal of “right person, right message, right time” we’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out the “right person” part, thanks to all the data we collect. And A/B testing has made finding the “right message” a whole lot easier. But nailing the “right time” in the customer's journey? That’s been the real challenge.

The problem is context and intent. We can track clicks, opens, and website visits until we’re blue in the face, but truly understanding what’s going on in a user’s head at any given moment? That’s a tough nut to crack.

Understanding Lifecycle Marketing

Lifecycle marketing is more than just a buzzword; it’s a strategic approach that focuses on building lasting relationships with customers by delivering relevant, targeted experiences at each stage of their journey. By understanding customer behaviors, preferences, and needs, businesses can drive engagement, retention, and revenue growth. This approach isn’t just about acquiring new customers; it’s about managing the entire customer lifecycle, ensuring that the people you bring in stay engaged and keep coming back for more.

What is lifecycle marketing?

At its core, lifecycle marketing is about creating a unique strategy for each customer based on their specific journey with your brand. It involves understanding where your customers are in their lifecycle—whether they’re new prospects, first-time buyers, or loyal advocates—and tailoring your marketing efforts to meet their needs at each stage. By doing so, you can ensure that your messaging is always relevant and timely, which is crucial for keeping customers engaged and satisfied.

Benefits of customer lifecycle marketing

Implementing a customer lifecycle marketing strategy offers a multitude of benefits that can significantly impact your business’s bottom line. Here are some of the key advantages:

• Increased customer retention and loyalty: By delivering personalized experiences, you can keep customers engaged and loyal to your brand.

• Improved customer satisfaction and engagement: Tailored messaging ensures that customers feel understood and valued, leading to higher satisfaction levels.

• Enhanced customer lifetime value: Engaged customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, increasing their overall lifetime value.

• Increased revenue and growth: Satisfied and loyal customers contribute to steady revenue streams and business growth.

• Better understanding of customer behavior and preferences: By analyzing customer data, you can gain insights into their behaviors and preferences, allowing for more effective marketing efforts.

• More effective marketing efforts and resource allocation: A targeted approach ensures that your marketing resources are used efficiently, maximizing ROI.

• Improved customer relationship management and exceptional customer service: Understanding your customers’ needs allows you to provide exceptional service, further enhancing their experience with your brand.

The Data Deluge

We’re drowning in data about our customers. We know what they click, where they browse, and what they buy. But knowing their context and intent in a given moment? That’s hard to intuit from these data signals.

Think about it:

• Context: Are they on their phone or laptop? At home or on the go? Is it morning or midnight? Should they be asleep even though they are awake?  Are they happy? Are they stressed?

• Intent: What are they trying to do? If they are buying something, what is compelling them to purchase?  What were their last interactions with our brand and how are they feeling about our brand?

These are only a few of the questions that need to be answered to truly gauge context and intent. Indeed, just creating an exhaustive list of every question that needs to be answered to truly and fully understand someone’s context and intent would be a massive challenge in itself.

And let’s be honest, most Lifecycle marketing systems struggle to turn the data signals we have into understanding of context and insight. This is the fundamental reason that historical Lifecycle Marketing, Growth Marketing, and Marketing Automation systems can’t really deliver the “actionable insights” they all promise. To effectively engage customers, we need to understand their context and intent.

We want to know when our users are in those crucial “I want-to-buy” moments, not just that they clicked on a product page three days ago. And for truly hitting marketing nirvana, we need to not just understand moments but micro-moments also:  the “I-want-to-watch,” “I-need-to-buy immediately,” “I’m-ready-to-upgrade” moments. These moments are where lifecycle marketing has always gotten fuzzy.

The B2B vs. B2C Divide

Interestingly, B2B marketers have had some success with lead scoring to identify those key moments. In B2B, lead scoring has been a decent proxy for, if not context, at least intent (at the company level). But even that’s getting shaky as buying decisions become more team collaborative and less linear overall.

And in B2C? Well, let’s just say it’s been a wild ride trying to pinpoint those crucial moments. Lifecycle marketing campaigns, which are targeted strategies designed to engage customers at every stage of their journey, from initial awareness to long-term loyalty, can help address these challenges by integrating cross-channel approaches and personalizing messaging to effectively boost retention and drive revenue.

Enter AI: The Game Changer?

This is where things get really interesting. AI, with its ability to crunch massive datasets and recognize patterns we might miss, might be the key to finally cracking the code of “right time.”

Imagine AI that can find “hidden” patterns in the data signals enabling a marketer to know the current context and intent of any member of their audience at any time in real time. We’re now getting so much closer than we have ever been historically.

Additionally, AI can significantly enhance lifecycle marketing strategies by tailoring them to fit the unique characteristics and regulatory environments of different industries.

How can AI that can find “hidden” patterns in the data signals enabling marketers to know the current context and intent of their audience members?

AI is revolutionizing the way marketers understand and predict customer behavior by exposing “invisible” patterns in data signals. This capability enables real-time insights into the context and intent of audience members. Engaging customers effectively at various stages of their journey is crucial for building lasting relationships and increasing customer lifetime value. Here’s how AI accomplishes this:

Uncovering Hidden Patterns

AI excels at processing vast amounts of data and identifying subtle patterns that might be invisible to human analysts.

By leveraging these capabilities, businesses can gain insights into different lifecycle stages, such as awareness, consideration, conversion, and retention, and tailor their marketing strategies accordingly.

Concurrent Customer Data Analysis of Diverse Sources = Unexpected Correlations

AI algorithms can analyze diverse data sources simultaneously including all the usual stuff like website interactions, purchase history, and more. While humans can do this also, AI excels at finding unexpected correlations between metrics.

By understanding these correlations, AI can help tailor content and marketing strategies to align with each specific lifecycle stage, enhancing customer interaction and improving overall campaign effectiveness.

Machine Learning Algorithms Feedback

Machine learning models continuously improve their ability to recognize patterns as they process more data. This iterative learning process allows AI to find more hidden patterns in the data and translate them into actionable insights about intent and context of audience members. A lifecycle marketing manager can leverage these insights to guide customers through their journey with a brand, from awareness to loyalty.

AI Understands Language

Well, we’ll leave it to the philosophers to figure out if AI “understands” and what “understands” even means. What we do know is that AI can do NLP - Natural Language Processing. AI-powered NLP can analyze text based data from customer interactions, social media posts, and reviews to ~understand~ classify sentiment and context in a way machines could never do before while at a scale that humans could never do before. This capability is particularly useful for engaging and retaining existing customers through personalized communication and marketing efforts.

How AI is Revolutionizing "Right Time" Marketing

AI-powered martech is already making waves, bringing us closer to true personalization in several exciting ways. Solutions like Rengage are leading the way with new capabilities that dramatically reduce a marketer’s workload while improving marketing function. Let’s take a quick look at what AI powered Rengage brings to the table. Additionally, AI can significantly enhance lifecycle marketing campaigns by enabling targeted strategies that engage customers at every stage of their journey, from initial awareness to long-term loyalty.

Automatic Customer Journey Workflow Building (with Best Practices Built In) 

With a simple prompt to Rengage’s high tuned AI, it can auto-create customer journeys or workflows with best practices around relevant touchpoints, actions, and triggers built in.

These workflows can be tailored as part of comprehensive lifecycle marketing strategies to fit the unique characteristics and regulatory environments of different industries.

Automatic Campaign Creation and Automated Optimization

Rengage’s AI-powered platform, including their email template builder, is streamlining the campaign creation process. Marketers can now generate personalized email templates automatically that are based on content, audience, and past performance data. This automation allows for the near instantaneous creation of highly customized content for marketing campaigns that would typically take months to create manually.

Additionally, this approach is crucial for engaging customers by providing timely and relevant communication throughout their journey.

Intelligent Channel Selection

Rengage utilizes AI to analyze customer data and behavior across multiple touchpoints. This allows the platform to intelligently determine the most effective channel for each individual customer at any given time. The AI considers factors and finds hidden patterns in signals including:

• Past engagement history

• Customer preferences

• Real-time behavior

• Channel performance metrics

By leveraging these signals, Rengage can automatically select the optimal channel for each interaction, whether it’s email, SMS, push notifications, or other channels. This strategy helps to engage customers throughout their journey, ensuring meaningful connections and re-engaging those who may have become inactive.

Hyper-Efficient A/B Testing and Optimization (Dare We Say Multivariate)

Rengage’s AI conducts multiple tests simultaneously, providing real-time results and recommending the most effective variations. This is a great example of something that was nearly impossible (to scale at least) in the past. Us marketers have long heard of multivariate testing but we were held-back by the real-world challenge of the advanced math required to calculate the probability that it was a particular component of any variation that was causing the observed effect. Well, in a manner of speaking, AI excels at multivariate testing.

Additionally, AI can significantly enhance lifecycle marketing campaigns by personalizing messaging and integrating cross-channel approaches to engage customers at every stage of their journey.

Creating an Effective Lifecycle Marketing Strategy

Developing a successful lifecycle marketing strategy requires a comprehensive understanding of your customers and the ability to deliver personalized experiences at each stage of their journey. Here’s how you can create an effective strategy:

Bring Your Data Together

One of the most critical steps in creating an effective lifecycle marketing strategy is bringing your data together. This means integrating customer data from various sources, such as CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, and customer feedback tools. By combining this data, you can gain a holistic view of your customers’ journeys, identifying key touchpoints and triggers that inform personalized marketing efforts.

• Use data integration tools: Connect disparate systems and teams to ensure that all customer data is accessible and unified.

• Leverage customer data platforms (CDPs): Utilize CDPs to create a single customer view, enabling more accurate and personalized marketing.

• Utilize data analytics and machine learning: Gain insights into customer behavior and preferences by analyzing data and using machine learning algorithms.

• Develop a data-driven approach: Use data to inform your marketing strategy, optimizing efforts based on real-time insights.

By bringing your data together, you can create a robust foundation for your lifecycle marketing strategy. This enables you to deliver targeted, personalized experiences that drive engagement, retention, and revenue growth, ultimately leading to a more successful and sustainable business.

The Promise of Personalization is Now for Customer Retention

It’s an exciting time to be in marketing, folks. After decades of waiting, the “right message, right person, right time” dream is finally within reach. AI is the key that unlocks true personalization, and the possibilities are endless. Tailoring lifecycle marketing strategies to fit the unique characteristics and regulatory environments of different industries is essential for maximizing the impact of these personalized messages.

In the next post in this series, we’ll take a closer look at the evolution of martech and how it has paved the way for this AI revolution. Then, we’ll dive deep into the specific ways AI is transforming lifecycle marketing and helping us deliver those perfectly timed messages. Stay tuned!