Josh is the CEO of Chronos Agency and host of the eCommerce Profits Podcast. He’s all about scaling DTC brands with lifecycle marketing – across the email, SMS, and push marketing channels. Using lifecycle marketing Josh and his team drive an average revenue lift for their clients of 23%, and are generating 8-figures in monthly trackable revenue across email, SMS, and push marketing. With performance like that – who better to talk about exactly how to make your lifecycle marketing work for you.
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What Is Lifecycle Marketing?
Josh describes lifecycle marketing as effectively optimizing customer relationships to achieve higher customer lifetime value.
It means having a more effective customer acquisition strategy as a result of a robust backend, improving the relationship further during the purchase journey, and elevating the experience in the long term.
For Josh, it’s so much more than just email marketing.
The Three Core Channels
The three main channels for lifecycle marketing are:
- SMS
- Push marketing, which refers to mobile push, or the app push notifications on your home screen that cost nothing to create and send out. With push marketing, you can send out notifications away from email and SMS, stand out from the crowd, and connect with your audience in a direct and intimate manner when done correctly.
How To Make The Channels Work Together
Josh describes three levels where the three channels come into play:
- Basic level, where you clone your strategy across the different channels.
- Level 2, where you stagger your messages, understand each channel’s power and use them accordingly.
- Level 3, where you incorporate the data you’ve collected over a period of time, store them on a customer data platform, and use the information you have to create unique journeys for different types of customers that can be manipulated across the three different channels.
Two Major Tips
Josh shares 2 key tips:
- Create a mobile app for your store. He recommends using Tapcart, which allows you to create an app in less than two weeks.
- On the topic of zero party data, Josh says email is an effective platform for collecting data. He gives an example of how using 4 different CTAs leading to four separate pages can give you data on four segments, and use the data to personalize content based on the responses, and effectively build relationships.
Insider Tips
If we’ve inspired someone to take their first step with lifecycle marketing – what do they need to know to give themselves the best chance of success?
Pick one channel and master it before moving on to the next.
Find out what level one looks like and master that level. Do not get overwhelmed on day one or on the first level.
Once you’ve started of course you’ve got to ‘keep optimising’! So what’s your favourite way to improve lifecycle marketing performance?
Look at your data and let it tell you what you need to do.
Your data and metrics will give you insights to perform more tests, and continue testing to find out what works and what doesn’t.
If someone listening wants to learn more about lifecycle marketing is there one cheap/free resource you’d recommend?
Go to Chronos Agency’s YouTube channel for free and useful content on lifecycle marketing.
Crystal ball time – what’s coming up in the next 6-12 months that we should be getting ready for in lifecycle marketing?
Josh mentions two things to watch out for:
- Conversational SMS: It’s a tool to build relationships because it’s no longer just a one-way conversation on SMS marketing.
- App clips: App clips allow apps to load and function without having the user download the app. It works like an app preview but it’s fully functional, and already provides value to the user.
Interview Links
Josh on Social media:
Sponsored by…
Klaviyo is a leading customer data and marketing automation platform dedicated to accelerating revenue and customer connection for online businesses. Klaviyo makes it easy to store, access, analyze and use transactional and behavioral data to power highly-targeted customer and prospect communications. The company’s hybrid customer-data and marketing-platform model allows companies to grow by fostering direct relationships with customers, without giving up their valuable data to popular big-tech ad platforms. Over 80,000 innovative companies like Unilever, Custom Ink, Living Proof and Huckberry sell more with Klaviyo. Learn more at www.klaviyo.com.