Embrace the Customer Life Cycle
If you’re paying attention, you’ll see that your customers leave clear signs about where they are in their cycle. One way to find out where they are in the cycle is to use a customer life-cycle approach. First, lay out the stages of the life cycle for your business. An example: suspect, to prospect, to lead, to customer, to, finally, churned customer.
Next you need to define exactly what it means to be in each state. For example, the early customer stage may be defined as a paying consumer who is within the first 15 days of his or her first purchase. Whereas an engaged customer may be a paying consumer who has made at least three purchases or visited the app or site a minimum of 10 times over more than 30 days. The most important thing to understand is that if you’re doing it right, a customer can only be in one life-cycle stage at any given time. This is critical to making the life cycle actionable.