An email lifecycle campaign acknowledges the growth stages of your customers and offers personalized content that matters to them at the right time. Email lifecycle campaigns are built based on customer behavior and events throughout the customer journey– from a lead to a free trial user, paid user, retention, and reactivation.
In this article, I’ll focus on how to use email lifecycle campaigns for customer retention. I’ll also share insights from Ugo Iwuchukwu, Head of Marketing and Partnerships at Bamboo, a Nigerian investment platform on how they’ve retained customers and increased business revenue through email lifecycle campaigns.
Let’s get to it.
Why an Email Lifecycle Campaign is Important
Email lifecycle campaigns allow the business to cater to customers’ needs based on their journey, offering contextual recommendations that strengthen customer relationships, boost loyalty, and curb churn. Instead of sending generic messages, a lifecycle marketer carefully factors in the customer’s interaction with the brand, segments customers based on this data and builds a lifecycle campaign with messages and offers relevant to each customer’s journey.
When the customer experience is bettered, customer lifetime value and business revenue increases.
For fintech platforms, some important lifecycle campaigns are welcome emails, onboarding, activation, educational, upsell, and reactivation campaigns.
Steps to Consider While Building an Email Lifecycle Campaign
The goal of an email lifecycle campaign could be to acquire customers, retain or increase conversion. Whatever your goal is, these steps will help you tailor messages to the right customers at the right time.
1. Use A CDP to Gather Real-time Customer Insights
Data is the backbone of your campaign, without it, your messages will be generic. A customer data platform (CDP) like Bunce helps you connect your data sources on one platform and gives you real-time insight into your customer behavior. You could monitor customers who haven’t engaged with your product in months, segment and create a campaign to reactivate them or track high-value customers for an upsell.
2. Personalize Campaign to Suit Customer Journey
Each messaging campaign should speak to your customer’s needs and journey. This is where you turn insights from your customer data into helpful messages that can cause them to take action. According to Ugo Iwuchukwu,
A lot goes into an email lifecycle campaign. We try to pay attention to a couple of principles–it has to be relevant to the person. Relevant in the context of where they are within the funnel, and also what type of behavior they have exhibited or did not exhibit. This requires proper targeting. It may not always be time-sensitive, but some need to be time-sensitive and has to be, as much as possible, tailored to the general attributes of the customer.
3. Build an Automation
Automation is the engine that runs email lifecycle campaigns. It helps to clean up segments ensuring customers enter and exit segments only when they’ve fulfilled set conditions. Ugo Iwuchukwu shared,
I think automation is at the backbone of everything because even the events and attributes are all automated. Let me give an example, creating a segment of users who trade $200 or more at least once a quarter, because you’re feeding the events and attributes from your database into your messaging system, that segment automatically kicks people out and adds people in from time to time, on a rolling basis, every three months.
By moving customers to appropriate segments and automating messaging, you can target the right message to the right person at the right, using the right channel. And this is important in managing your email lifecycle campaign.
4. A/B Test your Emails
A/B test allows you to test and discover which emails work best. You can decide how long you want to A/B test. In Ugo’s opinion, an onboarding A/B test email could go for as long as 6 months because with onboarding comes a constant tweak and you need enough data to implement customer feedback. But a newsletter email A/B could be as short as a day to know which works and target the same for the rest of the audience.
5. Use a Multichannel Approach
Having an email lifecycle campaign is great, however, you don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to reach your audience where they are most likely to respond, this could be via a pop-up notification or an SMS. You should understand the best channels and include them in your automation flow. In the case of Bamboo, Email has proven to be more effective for customer retention, engagement and re-engagement, rather than for acquisition as stated by Ugo, and this is because they invest in educating users about their investments.
How Bamboo Uses Email Lifecycle Campaigns to Retain Users
As earlier said, an email lifecycle campaign depends on real-time data like customer events and actions to determine the kind of campaign to target specific customers. Bamboo understands this and wields the power of data to create lifecycle campaigns that convert. I’ll share some usecases.
Bamboo launched a point-of-action campaign with one seeing a 15% increase in conversion and the other a 10% conversion rate outperforming their initial target conversion rate set at 5%. Ugo shared,
The most successful campaign…this would be affected by recency bias. We launched a point-of-action campaign last year to avoid abandoned deposits and deviant drop-offs. And I think our goal at the time for that campaign was to improve it by like 5% and I think we got 10% for one and 15% for the other. That was a really good campaign. The moment the user drops off or doesn’t complete the action, they get notified, similar to what e-commerce sites do. So that was very successful.
Another successful campaign was the Formula One campaign which Bamboo used to capture the interest and reengage high-value users.
Another campaign we did last year. Again, recessive bias. Not completely a lifecycle campaign, but for a specific type of user, for our high network users. We realized some sports attract a certain type of people who have money, that are expensive to watch. So Formula One, tennis ball. Right. Generally, the people that are interested in those sports are either rich or aspiring. So we ran a campaign to bring back and improve transactions on some of the high-value users. And that was very successful in terms of revenue. This is recency biased, because both these campaigns happened in the last twelve months.
Using Bunce to Set Up an Email Lifecycle Campaign
Equip your marketing team with the right customer data platform like Bunce to create email lifecycle campaigns that helps your team achieve your conversion goals.
Here are some benefits of using Bunce to set up your email lifecycle campaign:
- Assemble all your data sources on one platform and get real-time data to make smart marketing decisions
- Segment customers automatically with insights from real-time data
- Set up and automate customer messaging based on events and attributes, allowing you to target customers with personalized messages fit for every customer journey and lifecycle.
- Monitor campaign performance and attribute revenue.
With Bunce, you can seamlessly set up email campaigns that help onboarding, customer retention, activation, and re-engagement. Suppose you want to factor in other messaging channels into your customer lifecycle marketing. In that case, Bunce allows you to explore different channels like WhatsApp, SMS, Push notification, and In-app messaging while maintaining a consistent experience across all channels.
Quit juggling multiple data tools. Use Bunce to collect, analyze and engage customers all through the customer journey. Create email lifecycle campaigns and seamlessly track and attribute revenue to all your campaigns. Sign up now.