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Lifecycle Marketing

Lifecycle marketing is the messaging layer of retention: what you send, to whom, and — most often overlooked — what you deliberately do not send. A program that gets the economics right can still be undone by a win-back email that arrives the day after a service failure. Suppression is the part nobody writes case studies about and the part that protects everything else.

This is where we cover the sequences and the rules around them. Getting to a second purchase, which is the hardest transition in the whole lifecycle and the one most programs skip. Win-back flows that recover margin rather than train customers to wait for a discount. Suppression rules, and why they matter more than the campaigns they suppress. Segmentation that fits in a spreadsheet and still beats sending everyone the same thing. Where referral belongs, and why it is a separate job with separate math. How to set send frequency from margin and repeat cycle rather than from a calendar someone inherited.

For people who own the sends and get asked why the numbers moved. The emphasis throughout is on timing and restraint, because most lifecycle problems are a volume problem wearing a copy problem's clothes. These pieces assume you have a limited number of sends and have to choose between them, because in practice everyone does.

Articles in Lifecycle Marketing