Zoho Marketing - Customer Lifecycle Strategy

A Zoho MarTech Agency

How The Zoho Customer Lifecycle Stages Can Help You Create A High-Performing Inbound Marketing Strategy

There’s one message that’s as clear as daylight to every successful inbound marketer: successful and sustainable inbound marketing strategies are customer-centric. When you put this to heart, you’ll keep to the best practices for inbound marketing and generate the results you deserve.

Although you need an understanding of the buyer’s journey to create a solid inbound marketing strategy, but that’s only the foundation. A high-performing inbound marketing strategy needs a more streamlined relationship with your prospective clients; something more streamlined than the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. This more streamlined relationship can be achieved through an understanding of the customer lifecycle stages.

What Do We Mean By The Zoho Customer Lifecycle Stages?

Customer lifecycle stages are a means of organizing your marketing efforts by segmenting your contacts based on the stage they’re in your marketing and sales funnels. Customer lifecycle stages can help you envision what’s next for each contact and how to get them to the next stage.

Also, with customer lifecycle stages, you’re less likely to jump the gun and skip processes which might make you lose your prospects before you’re able to acquire them as customers. Thus, the customer lifecycle stages help you remain cautious and guided in your marketing and sales efforts. This ensures that you’re hyper-focused on the leads that can be truly converted and are thus maximizing the use of your resources.

You can automate the customer lifecycle stages in the marketing tool you use. This gives room for the opportunity to monitor your contacts and lifecycle stages and set criteria that will qualify your contacts for each stage.

The Zoho Customer Lifecycle Stages

Web visitor

Subscriber

Lead

Marketing Qualified Lead

Sales Qualified Lead

Customer

Evangelist

Web Visitor

Every customer acquisition starts from a visit to your website. Although you cannot classify a web visitor in your marketing tools like Zoho, you can always get to know about your web visitors and their attributes via web analytics tools like Google Analytics.
You need to work on the UI/UX of your website to ensure that they’re designed to give a memorable experience to each web visitor.

Also, you need to strengthen your content marketing game to ensure that your content pieces are well-ranked for the keywords that matter. Beyond that, they must be informative and convincing. This is especially needed if you desire a considerable conversion rate of your web visitors. What do web visitors become?

Subscriber

This is the first category you can classify in your marketing tool. The reason for that is that your subscribers will supply you with classifiable information. Subscribers are web visitors that the value of what they found on your website captivated and are thus willing to receive more from you.

They may sign up for your newsletter, sign up for an upcoming event, or whatever promotion you have available in your content marketing game. The people in this category willingly chose to give you their personal information, and they know you’ll be reaching out to them beyond that first contact.

That’s a win, right? However, you need to tread carefully so you don’t scare them away.

Lead

Leads are contacts that have interacted with and were converted via any of your marketing efforts – Facebook ads, LinkedIn lead generation, downloading your lead magnet, among other things. This category of contacts is further divided into two – marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads.

Marketing Qualified Lead

Your marketing qualified leads are leads you’ve nurtured up to the point of getting the sales call. You can determine the qualification of a lead based on the criteria you’ve set. It could be their engagement with your email newsletters; it could be following through with two of the 3 CTAs in your email sequence. In the end, you determine your criteria based on your inbound marketing goals.

Sales Qualified Lead

Your sales qualified leads are leads that have received the sales call from your sales team and show the potential of becoming your customer. They might have asked for the procedure of getting the product; the offers available; details on delivery, among other things.

Customer

This is the final stage of your customer acquisition process. The lead has eventually decided to take the buying decision and make a deal with your company. This could be based on special offers such as a discount.

However, high-performing inbound marketing strategies do not stop at the end of the customer acquisition process. For all you know, the customer might have bought your cheapest product or service.

The goal of a successful inbound marketer is not to seal customers for one-off deals, but to retain customers and have a sustained customer base.

Evangelist

This is when your customer retention strategies come to play. You must learn how to continue to delight your customers so that they would keep buying from you and remain loyal to the brand.

It’s just like a married man. You don’t stop courting your wife, buying her flowers, and making her happy once you’ve married her. You have to continue these things so you can boast of a happy and successful marriage.

You must be ready to bring your customers news of the latest features, products, and updates. Offer loyalty-based discounts; thank them for their loyalty. Spotlight them. Give them social-media shoutouts. Appreciate them. Let them see that you care.

This way, your customers feel endeared to your brand. And once people love your brand, they won’t hesitate to tell other about it. It’s human nature. When we love and enjoy something, we want our loved ones and friends to enjoy it too.

Thus, your company will have attained the coveted level of word-of-mouth-marketing; the most profitable form of marketing. This is a stage where your customers actively advertise for and talk about your brand to other people – without you paying them a dime.

Customers who have been classified into this category need to be continually rewarded and appreciated.

An understanding of the customer lifecycle stages and what you need to do to ease each contact through each stage will help you create and maintain a high-performing inbound marketing strategy.

Inbound Marketing Powered by Zoho MarTech

If you have experience with Zoho’s marketing software stack ( MarTech ) and understand this inbound marketing strategy foundations, you have a very powerful marketing starter pack ready to be configured and unleashed!

QuakeCinch can always help with your Zoho Marketing initiatives, just reach out to us!!

How The Zoho Customer Lifecycle Stages Can Help You Create A High-Performing Inbound Marketing Strategy

What Do We Mean By The Zoho Customer Lifecycle Stages?

The Zoho Customer Lifecycle Stages

Web visitor

Subscriber

Lead

Marketing Qualified Lead

Sales Qualified Lead

Customer

Evangelist

Web Visitor

Subscriber

Lead

Marketing Qualified Lead

Sales Qualified Lead

Customer

Evangelist

Inbound Marketing Powered by Zoho MarTech

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