Whenever you present your brand in front of the people, does it occur to you that, will he be coming again for the purchase? Will he be my loyal customer? When a person becomes your potential customer and do the purchasing and then repeats the process of buying, this process is called Customer Lifecycle and in this process a customer is basically building his/her trust into your brand or you can say building a relationship with the company.
This process is the most crucial one for any brand or company because once you maintain or understand a customer's Lifecycle, it maintains your presence in this competitive marketplace. Understanding each potential customer's Lifecycle will boost the revenue of the company and make it a trustworthy one. It's not easy to understand one's customer Lifecycle but to make it easy there are 5 steps of customer Lifecycle which you must know if you want your brand to be a success.
It is important to build loyal or quality customers for your brand because people who buys the service one time will never going to benefit a lot. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the Lifecycle of the customer and lookout for your loyal/long term customers. The five steps to understand a customer's Lifecycle are:
Reach - This is the earliest stage where you try to grab the attention of the customer and make it a potential customer. However not all the people will become your potential customer and to make this happens, you must have your marketing placed in the right place for the right people. This stage can also be called a communication stage where you try to convey the person about your product, its features and reasons to buy it. For you to understand which marketing effort is being most beneficial, you must have your metrics ready.
Acquisition- This is the stage where you have finally managed to grab the attention of the person and kind of made him one of the potential customers. The goal of this stage should be making a potential customer out of that person who is visiting your website in the hope of finding something he/she needs.
Now you must know what that person would be expecting from your service and place them in such a way that he finds solution to his problem. The website should be a guide to the person who fulfills all his needs and give him the direction of becoming a customer of the service or product.
Conversion - Conversion is the stage where the lead you generated from the first two steps becomes a paying customer. A simple way of turning your lead to the customer is to build a relationship with the customer and provide him the value he needs. The motto should not be just selling the product, the motto should be turning him into a long-term customer.
Retention - Retention as the name suggests is the process where you try to make the customer as a recurring one. A loyal customer is the best profit one organization can make therefore it has become necessary to have long term customers who trusts your brand and values your products. The way by which you can make this happen is maintaining the relationship with the customer by communicating through different mediums. For example, trying to cross sell something or bring out the offers or best services to the customers by which he feels the need of the service.
Loyalty- The last and the final process is Loyalty. This is process where you feel in immense need of understanding a customer's Lifecycle. It is really important for a business to understand the Lifecycle of the customer and know whether the customer is long term or just a one-time buyer. Obviously, it's not an easy task to understand who can be your loyal customer but it is something you have to know even after a long time. A loyal customer will be like a word-of-mouth advertiser for your service and one can only make that if you have made him feel like a friend of yours, to whom he can trust.
It's hard to convert someone into your long-term customer but one should acquire it with each cycle. And if something is stopping it to happen then you might have to look back to see if you failing somewhere in the Lifecycle stages of a customer.
Conclusion
Customer Lifecycle is the process from where every pass be it considering the product, buying it or becoming a loyal customer of it. This Lifecycle has been broken into 5 stages to make the process simple.
The final goal of any organization should be providing value to the customer and build a strong relationship. Once you become successful in this, then your customer will work like your advocate or advertiser who will be referring your service to his friends and family because trust your brand enough to recommend it to someone. The only thing which should be priority in making a loyal customer should be offering value to the customer and be relevant throughout the process.
