Mastering strategic customer lifecycle app marketing

Customer lifecycle app marketing (also known as lifecycle app marketing) involves implementing various strategies to guide customer behavior at each stage of the marketing cycle, from initial attraction to brand advocacy, with the aim of creating positive interactions.

It’s the process of taking a holistic view of your customers’ changing interactions with your app, focusing on every stage of the cycle—from bringing new users to your app to maintaining their relationship with your brand in such a way that they eventually become loyal brand advocates. The purpose of lifecycle app marketing shares the aims of app marketing in general: to engage customers, boost revenue, and grow a brand.

The mobile app user lifecycle (above) starts with user acquisition and works towards the ultimate goal of converted users and monetization. At each stage of the lifecycle, specific marketing opportunities are presented, each with different strategic goals. Let’s dive into each stage to discover the marketing strategies that will make an impact.

• Acquisition: To bring new users to your app, your strategy revolves around generating installs. This is usually achieved by advertising campaigns and promotional offers. Within the marketing funnel (pictured below), the user acquisition phase sits between download and install. Data analysis plays a huge role in user acquisition, helping marketers hone in on trends and patterns that work.

• Engagement: Engaged users (users who interact with your app in some way, e.g. “liking” content or completing a game level) are incredibly important to marketers. Your data has given you tangible proof that a user has some level of interest in your app, and by nurturing this relationship, you could be heading towards a retained and monetized user. By measuring users’ engagement through in-app events, marketers get a clear picture of exactly where in the app experience engagement rates are negatively impacted, allowing them to make data-driven improvements.
• Retention: Perhaps the most coveted and sometimes elusive stage in the lifecycle is retention. With countless apps battling for users’ time, keeping users engaged is no easy feat. Again, by closely monitoring the data gathered by a mobile marketing partner (MMP), marketers can make data-driven decisions around improving UX, messaging, etc. If a previously engaged user stops using your app, re-engagement and retargeting strategies can persuade them to return.
• Monetization: You’ve struck gold! The final stage of the app user lifecycle is monetization. If you’ve engaged a user to the extent that they’re willing to pay for an aspect of your app (see various monetization models below), it’s a cause for celebration—but also a reason to continue to engage and incentivize to avoid the churn of your most valuable users.

As we’ve seen, the key driver of successful strategic marketing at each stage of the customer lifecycle is robust, comprehensive, and up-to-date data that gives marketers instant insights into campaign performance. This enables campaign improvements in real time, reacting to either positive or negative trends and patterns.

Adjust’s Datascape solution allows you to optimize your marketing strategies at each stage of the customer lifecycle. From implementing your campaigns to users engaging and purchasing, our measures stay true to the users they’re attributed to, giving you an insight into the lifetime behavior of a user on your app. Displayed clearly in the Datascape dashboard is all of the data you need to discover what keeps your users’ attention and what increases churn.