Those who work in marketing, or are marketing/loyalty program-adjacent, will find their stress easing once they understand the four core pillars of life cycle marketing.
Effective lifecycle marketing in loyalty programs isn’t just about rewards and discounts—it’s about creating a personalised customer journey that boosts satisfaction and drives long-term engagement. By anticipating customers’ needs and preferences at every stage, businesses can deliver impactful, meaningful interactions that truly resonate.
Now a good argument can be made that there are more than four pillars, but that’s a conversation for another time. Those currently struggling with lifecycle marketing are likely to benefit from the following, easy-to-remember, four-step guide.
Step one: Find an Effective Data-Storage Solution
I remember the data warehouse craze—it was a wild time.
Every business unit (BU) was putting all their data into data warehouses, but then they turned into data swamps.
Architects were struggling to keep up with demand from BUs requesting data. Then data marts were born and we were sectioning off little pockets of BU-related data. Then, all of a sudden, the CDP craze happened.
And, now here we are.
I’m not shilling for any particular data-storage solution. What I am arguing is that, for this layer in the MarTech stack, businesses need to focus on the data required for their customers’ journeys.
If business leaders start with the customer journeys and then work their way back from there, it’s easier to ask the right questions of the data then use that information to improve those journeys. Your business’s data instantly becomes more valuable as it’s use case specific.
Step two: Leverage AI Analytics to Maximise Customer Journeys
Rather than bore you with a deep dive into the long history of AI and ML, I’ll simply note that these technologies aren’t new. The reason they haven’t been widely used until recently is that MarTech hasn’t matured enough to enable their effective deployment—let alone at scale, at precisely the right times, for customer experiences.
This layer needs attention in today’s market more than ever.
If your business isn’t providing a nearly seamless customer journey—one that allows customers to effortlessly switch between brick-and-mortar and digital—it risks being left behind by competitors who focus on this.
This ‘AI/ML/Analytics’ layer of the tech stack is what businesses need to leverage to provide industry leading CX and customer journeys.
Perhaps the simplest example of how your business could be better leveraging this layer is Send Time Optimization. This will allow your business to send emails to customers when they are most receptive to receiving them.
Step three: Deliver Value Exchanges at Scale
“Value exchange” is the buzz term marketers use to describe giving something to get something—usually first-party data. Despite Google’s latest flip-flop, there is no doubt about the direction of travel concerning consumer privacy.
The lazy solution—pulling browsing data and spamming existing or potential customers with what you think they care about—is now off the table, or it will be soon.
If you want data from existing or potential customers to improve their CX and, ideally, your business’s revenues, you’ll increasingly need to offer them something of genuine value in exchange.
Here are two observations that may help you identify the next right move:
- If your business hasn’t implemented a loyalty program or retention strategy, it’s likely falling behind industry leaders.
- Understanding what is considered valuable to tens or hundreds of thousands of customers in real time is no easy task, especially since their preferences may differ between, say, 10 am on a Thursday and 8 pm on a Friday.
The encouraging news is that the technology now exists to facilitate value exchanges at scale—meaning literally billions of offers, promotions, and rewards that can reassure customers that you understand and appreciate them.
If done exceptionally well, growing numbers of your customers may even become passionate brand advocates and lifelong clients.
Step four: Get the Message into the World
Send a pretty dynamic email at the right time of day.
Send a push notification to those loyalty-program customers who trust you enough to have in-app notifications on.
Have staff members provide personalised experiences in-store, based on what your business has learnt about their preferences.
There are plenty of options but always remember to ensure ease of integration in this ‘activation’ layer. Best-of-breed solutions in this layer will provide the capability to ingest data in real-time and action it immediately.
One last technical tip: event streaming architecture is a key capability to look for.
(Event-driven marketing is the future, but that’s a whole other article.)
Got the Right Tech Stack? Adopt the Lifecycle Marketing Method
Let’s assume your business has put in place a tech stack that allows for decisions at scale.
This is a solid foundation. Your business now needs to apply a method to ensure the CX it provides is consistent with your business’s brand values. Only after this is done should you use your tech stack to create value exchanges at scale for customers.
Last Words of Wisdom
People sometimes underestimate what “scale” means in the context of a digital economy. It refers to the ability to process billions of offers, rewards, and promotions, applying them to a basket at POS, mobile, e-commerce, and across the entire omnichannel—in about a quarter of a second, completely supported by headless technology.
These are the platforms to seek out. They might even be described as the unsung heroes of the MarTech world, allowing ever more businesses to offer personalised value exchanges to vast numbers of consumers.
Here’s the “Too Long; Didn’t Read” Wrap-Up:
- Apply the four pillars to value-exchange decision criteria
- Ensure your vendors conduct performance testing at scale
- Ask your vendors to show you how they solve the use cases you’ve built out. (Be warned, vendors will say they can do this, but may fail to deliver the goods. POC will help weed out the pretenders.)
