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The key to a successful marketing strategy is not just to attract new leads and customers. In fact, existing customers tend to be more profitable as they are more likely to make a repeat purchase. Also, marketing to these customers is a lot more cost-effective than acquiring new leads. On average, 40% of ecommerce revenue comes from repeat customers.
To make the most out our your existing customers, it’s vital to keep communicating with them and nurturing your relationship. Marketing automation enables effective communication with your customers at all stages of their lifecycle.
Automated marketing techniques such as email autoresponders enable you to build and maintain relationships with all current and prospective contacts. It also helps you to manage the entire customer lifecycle. More effective management helps you to achieve an optimal return on every contact and maximise your profits.
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What is a Customer Lifecycle?
The customer lifecycle begins when a contact is sourced from your wider and less-targeted marketing activities such as television and print marketing, SEO, and content marketing. The customer will then continue through an education phase where they learn more about your business and your products and services.
Hopefully, this stage will lead to a purchase, after which you should focus on customer retention and loyalty building.
Marketing automation helps to bridge the gap between your marketing and sales teams and close the loop of the customer lifecycle, ensuring leads are not lost due to lack of education or lack of nurturing.
Your marketing automation platform measures customer engagement at every stage of the process so you can immediately see how well your campaigns are working. It ensures targeted and effective communication with each of your customers.
The Stages of the Customer Lifecycle
Marketing automation not only speeds up tasks and helps you create an effective marketing strategy with fewer resources, it’s also integral in allowing you to design a marketing plan to attract customers, grow sales and deliver great experiences.
Marketing is no longer about generating leads of various quality and passing them over to the sales team (whether they’re ready to buy or not). Instead, marketing automation allows you to think about the value of your customers over longer periods and how you can move them through the lifecycle.
There are four main stages of the customer lifecycle:
- Reach– the first stage of marketing in which you’re trying to grab as much attention and as many different leads as possible from several different channels. These may include television advertising, print advertising, events, PPC, SEO, and content marketing.
- Act– once you’ve hooked some interested leads, they’ll move onto the next stage of the customer lifecycle where you can teach them more about your products and services via social media, content marketing, and retargeting. Marketing automation is used here for managing email and social campaigns. In this stage the customer may make a first purchase.
- Convert– a one-off customer can be converted into a repeat customer by continuing engagement on social channels, providing value through personalised emails, and building a community around your business.
- Engage– the final stage of the lifecycle is where customers become loyal with the help of personalised loyalty programs, excellent customer service, and re-engagement emails in the case of lapsed customers.
Marketing Automation & Integrations
Your marketing automation platform and CRM can together form a complete marketing ecosystem in which both marketing and sales teams can access important prospect and campaign information, with updates of data syncing both ways.
For example, if an update is made to a CRM record, it will automatically be updated on the marketing automation platform and vice versa. As well as tracking customers through the sales funnel, you can measure ROI and streamline your campaigns for better success.
You can shorten your sales cycle by automating marketing and sales task so that the marketing team can focus on nurturing leads, and the sales team can concentrate on closing deals.
Why Is a Well-Designed Marketing Ecosystem so Important?
Marketing has always been a rapidly changing industry. This has become even truer since the dawn of digital marketing. You need to stay on top of the new innovative solutions that can drive business success. Otherwise, you risk being left behind.
An integrated marketing ecosystem gives buyers control over the channels they choose to communicate with you on and to learn more about your products and services through. The best part is, marketing automation means you can still capture valuable information for your CRM, simply from your customers’ actions and behaviours. This data can then be used to create even more personalised and effective campaigns.
The marketing team is no longer responsible for only initial conversion at the top of the sales funnel. They must also deal with acquisition, nurturing, up sells, and managing revenue and budgets. A full marketing ecosystem with an automated marketing platform can help to remove some of the load and aid in more efficient processes.
Do you need help with the creation, automation, or increasing engagement? Here at Swift Digital, we can help you with your email and social media strategy and can provide tips on email best practices to make your email campaign a success!
The Preferred Email, Events and SMS Automation Software For All Australian Government Departments
Swift Digital’s templates help you effortlessly create stunning emails and events communications using our drag-and-drop email and event builder.
You can raise engagement with embedded images, videos, polls, article feedback, and emojis and schedule messages to send at the right time.
Government departments’ unique marketing requirements are covered with Swift Digital, and full compliance with all anti-spam and privacy laws is guaranteed. Swift Digital is also ISO 27001 certified.
Swift Digital is Australia’s leader in marketing automation software and event management working with organisations like the NSW Government, ATO, and companies like Westpac Bank and Qantas.
Find out why we’re the Australian government department’s number one choice for their professional communications and events.
To find out how your business can get the best out of Swift Digital’s platform, contact our team today.
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