You’ve hit a snag in your efforts to attract more customers to your business. Increased marketing expenditures are necessary to acquire more customers, which feeds the cycle backwards: you can’t spend more on advertising until you have more customers. Lifecycle automation can be useful in this situation.

To begin with, let us clarify what this means. Lifecycle automation refers to automating and optimizing customer interactions at every stage of their journey throughout a product or service’s entire lifecycle (e.g., from acquisition and onboarding to engagement and retention). Automation is the use of technology to perform tasks or processes without the need for human intervention. Compared to general automation, lifecycle automation covers a wider range of tasks and phases and aims to improve customer satisfaction and increase business results.

It sounds pretty strong, doesn’t it? It is, but it’s also one of the resources that small businesses consistently underutilize. Here’s why it matters and when it will be most beneficial.

Why is automation of the customer lifecycle important?

Perhaps this will persuade you if you’re still not convinced that customer experience has a noticeable impact on business. According to research, businesses that make investments in enhancing the customer experience have seen an average increase in cross-selling and up-selling of 32%, a 42% improvement in customer retention, and a 33% improvement in customer satisfaction.

These are some strong numbers that provide you with every justification for making customer experience a top priority. This is where lifecycle automation comes in, providing every customer with a superior, personalized experience in a dependable, trackable manner.

For instance, if you automate sending notes to prospects reminding them to schedule an appointment, your team won’t forget to follow up. Alternatively, you can programmatically send your customer an invoice following a purchase and set up alerts to remind them to pay it. You have the option to automatically review requests or suggestions for additional purchases once you’ve completed a project or provided a service.

When properly implemented, lifecycle automation can boost revenue without raising advertising expenses and free up your staff to work on more crucial projects.

The three stages of lifecycle automation are Lead Collection, Client Conversion, and Fan Creation.

1. Gathering leads

In order to obtain permission to follow up with your ideal audience, you will want to draw their attention and obtain their contact information during the “collect leads” phase. This entails attracting people with excellent content (such as videos, ebooks, infographics, or blog posts), targeting them (based on criteria like interests, behaviors, demographics, or location), and collecting their information (via a web form, frequently in exchange for a free consultation or premium content).

For instance, by using automation to engage patients, one independent pharmacy we’ve worked with increased revenue by 20% in spite of facing formidable competitors. As part of their Collect Leads stage strategy, they placed an iPad in the lobby to collect walk-in data, which was then sent to their CRM through a form-filled landing page. This allowed for the follow-up with those who did not convert to customers right away.

2. Getting customers to convert

When the leads you’ve drawn are prepared to make a purchase, you’ll position your good or service as the clear choice during the convert clients phase. Starting with an automated campaign, you can entice them with an offer they can’t refuse, close the deal, and use automation to let them know what comes next.

By putting in place an automated welcome campaign, the pharmacy previously mentioned was successful in this stage. In order to maintain relationships with their customers, they also segmented their list based on medical conditions like diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular problems.

3. Gaining admirers

And lastly, the stage that small businesses tend to ignore: building fans. By fulfilling your promises to customers, adding value that wows them, and offering incentives to partners and customers, you can make this stage of the process profitable.

Before lifecycle automation was put in place, the independent pharmacy mentioned earlier had between 15 and 20 Google reviews. Because they follow up consistently and use highly personalized service automation, they have nearly 500 reviews now and are able to serve their community.

You won’t ever lose a lead when you set up lifecycle automation, and every customer, regardless of stage, will receive the appropriate messaging to advance in their customer journey.

Most important times to use lifecycle automation

Setting up lifecycle automation is never too early, but it functions best when your company is beginning to see a rise in revenue. The greatest impact will be felt by those who already have a large contact list and a dependable method (like a sound lead generation strategy) to make sure it continues to grow.

Lifecycle automation becomes essential, as you can imagine, when you have more customers than you believe you can personally serve and address. Lifecycle automation is a must, not a maybe, when your company begins to lose potential customers because you aren’t responding to them quickly enough or you unintentionally create a bottleneck that prevents your team from advancing sales.

By automating your lifecycle, you can free up time that would have been used for one-time customer communications to focus on the things you enjoy doing most, like helping customers, creating new services, or spending time with friends and family. Customer lifecycle automation is the answer for business owners who want to maximize their time and grow their companies.