What are the main stages of customer lifecycle?

Here’s a grim fact: First-time visitors to a site only stay an average of 10 to 20 seconds before clicking away, never to return. Even if a visitor stays longer, that’s just scratching the surface. The journey to get a visitor to eventually convert and remain loyal long-term is an arduous path for marketers. That’s why it’s so crucial to understand how the stages of the customer life cycle work.

What is a customer life cycle?

It’s very rare that a visitor visits an e-commerce or service site the first time and makes a purchase minutes later. In competitive industries, customers have a galore of options. This is why marketers have to take careful measures to nurture their leads and guide the visitor through a series of steps, with the end stage being a purchase or sign-up. This is known as the customer life cycle, and the steps can vary, with multiple steps and sub-steps depending on the industry.

The 6 main stages of the customer life cycle

While the approach varies by niche, the customer lifecycle stages—or some variation of them—can be broken down into these six steps.

1. Awareness stage

Your demographic has to know your company exists before they can consider you. This step is about getting them to click the link to your site, whether that be through an organic search or social media. Ways you can establish awareness include:

• SEO
• Social media networking
• Paid ads
• Affiliate marketing outreach
• Offline methods, such as business cards and word-of-mouth

2. Interest stage

Once visitors have gone to your site and are pleased with what they see, they’ll engage with your content in other ways. For example, they may follow you on social media, subscribe to your email list, or look up reviews from past customers. 

3. Consideration stage

This is the stage where customers are seriously contemplating purchasing your product or service. They may have other competitors in mind and may still be doing additional research. You can stand out from the competitors through the following:

• Responding to inquiries within 24 hours
• Providing a customer ticket with an invitation to a live one-on-one consultation
• Providing links to case studies and white papers

4. Purchase stage

This is the stage where customers enter their credit cards and finalize the transaction. However, customers do get cold feet. This accounts for the alarmingly high 69.8% cart abandonment rate in 2022. Proactively reach out to customers by sending reminder emails, employing retargeting ads, or providing small incentives (i.e. free shipping).

5. Customer support stage

Providing continued customer support is a cornerstone of retention. This is essential from a money-saving perspective. When a customer churns, you have to replace that person. Acquiring new customers is up to seven times more expensive than retaining an existing customer. 

Be responsive to customers. Reply to their inquiries in a timely manner. Responding implies the following mediums:

• Responding to questions through the contact page
• Responding to blog and social media comments
• Responding to reviews (especially negative feedback) posted on third-party sites

6. Bonding and advocacy stage

This is the final stage where you continue to foster an ongoing relationship long after the initial conversion to garner customer loyalty. Ways to establish the loyalty stage include:

• Providing freebies, especially on special occasions personal to the customer, such as birthdays
• Invitations to affiliate and referral opportunities
• Exclusive sneak peeks at beta-phase products

Customer lifecycle best practices 

An effective customer lifecycle marketing strategy needs to implement the above while tailoring the stages as needed to suit your niche-specific demographic. Here are some tips to help you kickstart your campaign.

Identify customer segments

For best customer lifecycle optimization, divide your audience into segments based on a number of behavioral metrics. For example, you can group customer segments based on churn probability, lifetime value, purchase frequency, etc. Each segment should have its respective customer lifecycle tailored to the group’s behaviors, trends, and patterns.

Provide a consistent flow of high-quality content

Continued content is important, especially in the interest and consideration stages. Aside from consistency, aim for variety based on content medium and type. Mediums can include blog posts, YouTube videos, and social media posts. Content type includes industry news, tutorials, reviews, etc. 

Collect customer feedback at every stage 

Send out surveys to gauge customer sentiments. Keep questionnaires short; customers should be able to complete them in under five minutes. You can send surveys under the following scenarios:

• Several days after a purchase
• Within 24 hours after the customer speaks to a customer support representative 
• After a customer churns (e.g., closing their account, unsubscribing, canceling membership)

Surveys provide valuable information on how to refine and tweak future customer lifecycle campaigns.