What is customer lifecycle management?
Customer lifecycle management is how you track, analyze, and optimize every interaction a customer has with your brand. You can think of customer lifecycle management as your game plan for making every touchpoint, from the moment someone discovers your brand until they become a loyal customer.
It’s easy to confuse customer lifecycle management with customer lifecycle marketing. While similar, customer lifecycle marketing focuses on campaign strategy throughout each stage of the customer journey, whereas customer lifecycle management is about tracking the journey and optimizing it at every stage.
Customer lifecycle management is more important than it’s ever been: according to Klaviyo’s future of consumer marketing report, 1 in 5 buyers stop purchasing after a single negative experience—and 74% of consumers expect brands to provide personalized experiences. Customer lifecycle management is one way brands can exceed consumer expectations and stand out in competitive markets.
Core components of customer lifecycle management
- Unified customer data across all marketing and service interactions
- Automation tools that trigger the right message at the right moment
- Personalized experiences tailored to customer behavior—from acquisition to post-purchase and loyalty
- Performance analytics that measure how well you’re doing at each stage of the customer journey
With the right approach, customer lifecycle management can actually speed up time to first purchase and repeat purchase. This is because unified customer data across marketing, sales, and service teams is the catalyst for personalized brand experiences that nurture long-term customer relationships.
Why customer lifecycle management matters for B2C businesses
Successful B2C brands aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest ad budgets. But they are the ones that know how to take care of their existing customers so they keep coming back.
Customer lifecycle management, quite simply, helps you understand your customers so much better than you thought possible. This understanding translates to:
- Higher retention rates and customer lifetime value (CLV)—which, in turn, create more opportunities to invest in customer acquisition
- Higher conversion rates as a result of more personalized brand interactions
- Higher marketing return on investment through smarter resource allocation
- A cohesive customer experience, with consistent messaging that builds on previous interactions
For example, when fragrance brand Happy Wax consolidated their email, reviews, and SMS into one platform, they could finally see how each channel performed relative to one another—and how each customer preferred to interact with and purchase from their brand.
This simple consolidation made it easier for Happy Wax to personalize their brand experience with more granular segmentation, sophisticated review follow-up flows, and abandoned cart flows that use AI to pull in reviews for the item that was abandoned. As a result, the brand saw 18% YoY growth in SMS revenue and 27% YoY growth in submitted reviews.
The 5 stages of the customer lifecycle
This is when people realize they have a problem or a desire that your brand can step in to address. At this stage, potential customers may discover your brand through online search, advertising, social media, or word of mouth.
This is when people know about your brand and start to compare your products to competitors’. At this stage, potential customers might sign up for your newsletter or start following your brand on social media.
This is when shoppers turn into customers. For customer lifecycle marketers, it’s important to understand why people might hesitate to buy so any objections can be addressed through product page FAQs, reviews and testimonials, etc.
This is everything that happens after an order—order confirmation messages, shipping notifications, and product education. At this stage, it’s important to take care of your customers and exceed their expectations—so they buy again.
This is when satisfied customers promote your brand through reviews and referrals. They may also join loyalty programs that reward repeat purchases. At this stage, it’s important to focus on retention strategies.
Key metrics for customer lifecycle management at each stage
With these stages in mind, let’s take a closer look at how to spot success or areas for improvement at each stage.
It’s vital that your brand has access to unified performance metrics that reflect every customer interaction on every channel. This is how you’ll get an accurate view across your entire customer journey, so you’re allocating resources to fixing real problems.
Awareness metrics
Learn how people discover your brand and become potential customers. These metrics can tell you how your brand awareness campaigns are performing:
- New visitor traffic: first-time visitors to your website
- Branded search volume: how many times people search for your brand online
- Influencer video views: the number of times your product was viewed in an influencer video
Consideration metrics
Get a deeper understanding of how people shop for your products. These metrics show engagement level before a purchase:
- Product page views: which items generate the most interest
- List growth rates: how quickly your email or SMS subscriber base is growing
- Time on site: how long visitors browse your website
- Email and SMS engagement: click rates for campaign and automation messages
- Return visitor rate: how many people come back to browse your website
- Cart abandonment rate: how many people add items to their cart but don’t complete checkout
Conversion metrics
Learn more about how shoppers become customers. These metrics highlight what drives purchasing decisions and the efficiency of your acquisition efforts:
- Cost per acquisition: what you’re paying to acquire each new customer
- Conversion rate: the percentage of shoppers who complete a purchase
- Revenue per recipient: the average revenue amount per email or SMS message you sent.
- Average order value: how much customers spend per purchase
- Attribution channel: which marketing efforts drive sales
Post-purchase metrics
Understand how well you’re serving customers. These metrics track the critical post-purchase experience, which sets the stage for loyalty:
- On-time shipping rate: how reliably you deliver packages
- Cost per order: the cost efficiency of your fulfillment process
- Return rate: how well your products fulfill customer expectations
- Post-purchase automated flow engagement: how engaged customers are with your post-purchase flow after they’ve bought an item
- Customer Hub engagement: how engaged customers are with your Customer Hub after they’ve bought an item
Loyalty metrics
Measure long-term customer relationships and advocacy. These metrics can tell you how well you’re retaining customers:
- Customer lifetime value: the total revenue a customer has generated
- Churn rate: how many customers stop buying from you within a specific time frame
- Net promoter score: how likely customers are to recommend your brand to someone they know
- Review submission rate: how many customers submit reviews
- Review sentiment: the average sentiment of your reviews about specific products
When you monitor these metrics consistently, you’ll know exactly where people are dropping off and how you can improve your brand experience.
4 steps for managing the customer lifecycle
Effective customer lifecycle management requires a systematic approach. And while every brand will manage their customer lifecycle slightly differently, these 4 steps are a great place to start:
1. Audit your current customer journey
Start by mapping every customer touchpoint across all your channels—website, email, SMS, social media, customer service, etc. Here is a sample visual of a mapped customer journey.
Look for where customers drop off—these are opportunities to improve your brand experience. For instance, high cart abandonment rates might signal checkout experience issues, while low email click rates could indicate a need for more personalized segmentation.
2. Consolidate your customer data
Unify all your customer data across marketing, sales, and customer service into one customer relationship management platform (CRM). Use integrations to connect your commerce platform, marketing tools, and service systems to create a single view of all your customers. This will give everyone on your team the same access to each customer’s history and preferences.
3. Set up lifecycle stage-specific automations
Automations are messages that trigger after people interact a certain way with your brand online. Create targeted flows for each lifecycle stage: welcome sequences for new subscribers, cart abandonment messages for shoppers who don’t convert, post-purchase notifications for recent buyers, and loyalty program invites for repeat customers.
4. Measure and optimize
Establish baseline metrics for each stage, then test different strategies where you’ve identified a need for improvement. You’ll want to monitor all metrics at least monthly or quarterly, but you may zero in on certain stages that are seeing higher dropoff.
How a B2C CRM supports effective customer lifecycle management
Traditional CRMs often fail B2C companies because they’re designed for complex B2B sales cycles. A dedicated B2C CRM like Klaviyo—the only CRM built for B2C—can better serve brands that need to personalize the customer journey for thousands or even millions of people.
Klaviyo B2C CRM makes it easy for brands to manage their customer lifecycle with:
- A unified data platform that connects marketing, service, and commerce in one place
- AI-powered insights that help predict customer behavior
- Personalization capabilities that scale across millions of customers
- Omnichannel tools for consistent experiences across touchpoints
Sign up for Klaviyo today or schedule a demo to see how we can help your business grow.