Customer lifecycle communication—the strategic art of engaging customers at every stage of their journey, from awareness to loyalty—is no longer optional if you want to build long-term relationships and drive customer retention. It’s a key component of your customer growth and retention strategy.
Effective customer communication is the foundation of long-lasting customer relationships and loyalty.To communicate effectively with customers, you can utilize two key approaches: event-based messaging and email-based messaging. Each approach yields different outcomes.
This blog will explore the distinctions between event-based and email-based messaging, their use cases, and how they can be effectively leveraged in customer lifecycle communication.
What is customer lifecycle communication?
Customer lifecycle communication refers to the strategic approach of engaging with customers at every stage of their journey with a brand. These stages typically include:
Awareness: The customer learns about the brand.
Consideration: The customer evaluates the brand and its offerings.
Conversion: The customer makes a purchase or takes a desired action.
Retention: The customer continues to engage and make repeat purchases.
Advocacy: The customer becomes a brand advocate, sharing positive feedback and recommending the brand to others.
Communication at each stage aims to guide, inform, or delight customers. When executed correctly, it builds trust, drives sales, and transforms new customers into lifelong fans. If handled poorly, it becomes mere noise—or worse, a reason for customers to unsubscribe or uninstall your app.
There are two effective methods of customer lifecycle communication: Event-based messaging and Email-based messaging.
An effective strategy must understand how to apply both. While both methods aim to engage customers, they differ significantly in their approach and effectiveness. This article explores the nuances of each method, highlighting their strengths, weaknesses, and ideal use cases.
Event-Based Messaging
Event-based messaging refers to communication triggered by specific actions or events in the customer journey. These events can include anything from a customer signing up for your app, completing their KYC, making a purchase, abandoning a cart, or reaching a milestone. Event-based messages are typically sent in real-time and are highly personalized to the customer’s recent behavior.
Key Benefits of Event-Based Messaging
Real-Time Relevance: Since event-based messages are triggered by specific actions, they are timely and contextually relevant to the customer. A message that reflects a customer’s recent purchase or activity is more likely to grab their attention than a generic email.
Personalization: Event-based messaging allows for a high level of personalization. Because the messages are tailored to specific actions or milestones, they resonate more deeply with customers. For instance, a customer who abandons their cart can receive a reminder featuring the exact items they left behind.
Increased Engagement: Event-based messaging typically has higher open and click-through rates because it addresses the customer’s needs and actions directly. For example, a welcome message following sign-up for a service feels more relevant than a generic promotional email.
Automated Customer Journey: Once established, event-based messaging can operate automatically, making it an efficient way to nurture customers at every stage of their journey without requiring constant manual input.
Use Cases for Event-Based Messaging
Welcome Emails: These are sent immediately after a customer signs up, introducing them to your brand or product.
Onboarding Completion: Guide users based on key actions taken or not taken to help them finish their onboarding process.
Dormant or Churned User Reactivation: Triggered when customers haven’t engaged with your platform, app, or services for a specified period.
Activation Flows: Triggered when customers sign up but have not taken any action.
Post-Purchase Follow-Ups: Sent after a customer completes a transaction, thanking them for their purchase and providing related product recommendations.
Email-Based Messaging
Email-based messaging, on the other hand, involves sending regular, often scheduled emails to customers, regardless of their immediate actions. These messages are usually less tied to real-time events and are often used to maintain ongoing communication with customers or promote content and products.
Key Benefits of Email-Based Messaging
Wider Reach: Email-based messaging can reach a larger audience, regardless of the customer’s specific behavior. This makes it ideal for communicating with customers at different stages of the lifecycle and promoting new offers, products, or content.
Nurturing Relationships: Regular email communication is excellent for building long-term relationships with customers. It helps keep your brand top of mind and ensures that customers receive updates and promotions.
Promotional Campaigns: Email is the go-to channel for promotional campaigns. Whether it’s a seasonal sale, product launch, or limited-time offer. Email allows businesses to communicate these events to a broad audience.
Segmentation: Email-based messaging allows businesses to segment their audience based on demographics, purchase history, or engagement levels. This ensures that the right messages are delivered to the right people, although they might not always be triggered by specific events.
Use Cases for Email-Based Messaging:
Newsletters: Regular updates about the company, industry news, or educational content to keep customers informed.
Promotions and Offers: Periodic emails with discounts, sales, or new product announcements aimed at driving conversions.
Product Recommendations: Based on past purchases, email-based messaging can suggest relevant products to customers.
Seasonal Campaigns: Email is great for sending themed messages during specific holidays or events.
Content Delivery: Newsletters or emails that offer blog articles, how-to guides, and other content that nurtures customers through the consideration stage.
Event-Based Messaging vs. Email-Based Messaging: A Comparison
1. Timeliness and Relevance
- Event-Based Messaging: Highly timely and relevant, as it’s triggered by specific customer actions. A purchase confirmation email is more meaningful immediately after a purchase than it would be weeks later.
- Email-Based Messaging: While emails can be scheduled for optimal times, they are often less immediate and can lack the level of context that event-based messages provide.
2. Personalization
- Event-Based Messaging: Since it’s triggered by specific actions, event-based messaging is inherently more personalized. For example, sending a personalized offer based on a recent purchase feels more tailored than a generic email campaign.
- Email-Based Messaging: Email campaigns can be personalized to a degree, but they are generally based on broader segmentation, not immediate actions. While you can personalize the content, the timing and relevance are less specific.
3. Engagement
- Event-Based Messaging: Typically achieves higher engagement rates because the messages are more relevant and timely, speaking directly to the customer’s recent activity.
- Email-Based Messaging: Engagement rates for email can be lower, especially if the messages are not well-targeted or are too generic.
4. Automation
- Event-Based Messaging: Highly automated. Once set up, these messages run on their own, triggered by customer actions. This makes it a scalable and efficient way to communicate with customers.
- Email-Based Messaging: While email can be automated through campaigns, it is generally more manual than event-based messaging and often requires periodic updates to remain relevant.
5. Use in Different Stages of the Customer Lifecycle
- Event-Based Messaging: Works well for nurturing customers through specific stages, especially for conversion, retention, and re-engagement. For example, sending an abandoned cart reminder can help drive customers to complete their purchases.
- Email-Based Messaging: Best suited for maintaining ongoing communication and building long-term relationships. Newsletters and promotions can keep customers engaged across all lifecycle stages, but they are not as effective for responding to specific customer actions.
When to Use Event-Based Messaging
Event-based messaging is ideal when you want to:
- Trigger immediate actions based on customer behavior.
- Increase engagement through timely, personalized communication.
- Optimize your customer journey with minimal manual effort. Common examples include cart abandonment, post-purchase follow-ups, welcome emails, and re-engagement messages.
When to Use Email-Based Messaging
Email-based messaging is best for:
- Regular communication and updates to a broad audience.
- Nurturing customers at various stages of the lifecycle.
- Promoting products, content, or events to a larger segment of your customer base.
Common examples include newsletters, promotional campaigns, and seasonal offers.
If you want to adopt both approaches in your communication strategy, Bunce is the ideal platform that offers the best of both worlds in a single solution, allowing you to seamlessly implement both methods. If you haven’t signed up for Bunce yet, you can start a 7-day trial here