A lot has been said about the perfect customer lifecycle. Many marketers push their blueprints as a plan that apparently any business on Earth can implement, and lo behold! They’re suddenly turning over millions a month.
This blueprint is not prescriptive. It’s not even something I created. All I did here was pattern recognition and reading insightful articles by successful business owners (not marketers) who were kind enough to document what worked for them. This was inspired by people & companies like Dane Maxwell, Ryan Deiss and Keap (formerly known as Infusionsoft).
A word of warning. It can be easy to skim an article like this, roll your eyes, and say “Yeah, I’ve read this before.” Well, yeah. There’s no rocket science here. Small business ownership doesn’t require a degree. The psychology of humans hasn’t changed in thousands of years.
So why do most businesses still get marketing wrong?
The answer is simple most of the times. They’re too busy being stuck in their business to zoom out and realize that the answers are staring them in the face. Or they fall into the trap of thinking their business is a special unique snowflake and none of these rules apply to them because “Our business model is so different!”
That’s why hiring business consultants is so important. They help you see the forest for the trees, point out your blind spots, call you on your BS and remind you that 99% of success is just deciding a plan and sticking with it.
Onwards.
Essentially, if you’re a business that sells something online, and want to be tremendously successful, all you have to handle are the following 3 parts of your business strategy:
In the acquire phase, you need to magnetically attract the right people into your sphere of influence. You do this by driving traffic to a resource that calls out their specific problem or their required desire and offer to give it away for free or a very low cost, in exchange for their contact details.
You need to capture their contact details, document where they came from & then segment them based on their interests.
The outcome of this process is a database full of leads who are very interested in who you are and what you offer. You’ve demonstrated your authority by showing that you understand their problems and you’re now in the perfect position to continue to deliver value and add trust.
In the conversion phase, you continue to add value to your subscribers and leads. If people only buy from people that they know, like and trust, then this is where you demonstrate that your product or service is trustworthy, relatable, and more importantly gets them to the result they are looking for. When they are ready to make a purchase decision with the information that they have, you enable them to let them pay you online.
Perhaps the most understated phase of the perfect customer lifecycle, and the phase where most businesses go wrong. In the leverage phase, you first wow your customers to create a legion of raving fans by overdelivering on customer delight. You can then use your existing positive relationship with your happy customers to upsell more products and offerings, ask for referrals. This is where the most amount of profits are made (or lost).
Ready to dive deep down? Let’s go!