Customer Lifecycle Marketing & Personalisation
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Greeting someone by their first name in an email is not ‘personalisation’
Customers expect much more. They are time-poor, and they are looking for easy ways to connect with brands. This means seamless, customised experiences that feel like a part of their everyday life, instead of heavy promotions & aggressive marketing. To achieve this, you need the ability to send entirely unique communications (from marketing to onboarding) to every customer, no matter the channel they are interacting with. You especially want to be able to do this for your most loyal customers.
- 72% only engage with messages customized to their interests
- 80% only frequently shop with brands who personalise the experience
- 63% stop purchasing from companies who provide poor personalisation.
Despite this, the opportunity is largely untapped. Although 89% of companies are investing, only 36% have even basic website personalisation. Even if companies have the right data and the right tools to get personalisation right, because of wrong measures or processes, they are often creating more detractors than advocates. Getting this right drives significant improvements, not only for start-ups and scale-ups, but established corporates too: considerably reduced acquisition costs, revenue lifts of typically 5-15%, and conversion rates, lead gen, visitor engagement, customer experience and brand loyalty all improving. If there was ever a ‘silver bullet,’ or ‘golden ticket’ to growth—it’s this.
The ‘status-quo’ is holding companies back from nailing personalisation
Getting lifecycle marketing right requires a robust data architecture. To create behavioural and personalised campaigns across every channel, you need to understand what your customer journey and touch-points look like, how you can leverage different tools, and most importantly—ensure your customer data and events are consolidated, flowing in an automated solution.
This is not easy. Many companies are struggling because the advances in the space are new, and are hard to implement correctly. As a result, they instead circle back to traditional ‘spikey’ communications like newsletters, discount promotions, and paid channels, which are necessary to meet KPIs and see a spike in revenue. These strategies have their place, but over-reliance on them takes the focus away from more-effective layered strategies like customer lifecycle marketing—which are more subtle, personalised and engaging. Spikey strategies are expensive without creating lasting performance improvements, whereas layered strategies are engaging, build trust and increase lifetime value.
Getting personalisation right requires business acumen and funnel understanding, and cross disciplinary expertise in growth, monetisation, marketing, analytics, product development & engineering. There’s no out-of-the-box solution, especially if you are migrating an existing set-up and cleaning big customer data sets. There are a lot of things that can go wrong (e.g. data interruption) so it becomes a bit like changing the wheel on a moving car. Most companies do not have someone with this skill-set, or are unable to bridge the gap between their teams to make this happen. That’s where we come in.
Build customers for life with personalised lifecycle marketing, at scale.
The team at ikaros are experts and pioneers in the field of customer lifecycle marketing, having built and scaled hyper-personalisation engines for companies of all sizes and industries. We’ll help you navigate the new space, and tailor an analytics infrastructure and marketing stack to your business needs, including:
- Customer data clean-up and customer data platform set-up
- Cross-channel communication set-up (retargeting ads, email, sms, web, in-app), ensuring personalisation is channel agnostic
- Drawing behaviour derived preferences
- Tailored onboarding & marketing flows that convert
FAQs
Can I do this myself?
It depends. To some extent the answer is yes. If you have a simple product and clean data in the necessary systems, you should be able to implement some personalisation across your comms. In most cases, however, that’s not the case and you need a better underlying data architecture to nail this topic. You need the experience of which events work well to track, what customer journey and touch-points should look like, and how you can leverage different tools across your data & marketing infrastructure to suit your needs.
Why does it matter?
Lifecycle marketing and personalisation aren’t particularly new concepts; they’ve been buzzwords for a while now. Despite this, the opportunity is largely untapped. Although 89% of companies are investing, only 36% have even basic website personalisation. There’s a disconnect between what’s trending, and what people are actually doing, which means there’s a great opportunity to pull ahead of competitors. Companies that have cracked the code are doubling down on their analytics stack and personalisation efforts, and reaping the rewards. They are seeing significant improvements: up to 50% reduced acquisition costs and revenue lifts of 5-15%.
What does it look like?
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to personalisation. The correct customer lifecycle marketing infrastructure depends on your industry, size, existing set-up and goals. Our approach begins with your infrastructure—we establish a customer data platform, consolidating all your sources of customer data into one clean source of truth. From here, we’ll help you choose and set-up the platforms you need to send comms, orchestrating the data flows to enable personalisation. Finally, we’ll help you run experiments, creating tailored onboarding and marketing flows that create customers for life.
Can I build my own tool / do I need to use third party tools?
The choice is yours, but we like to think of this from a total cost of ownership perspective. Building your own solution is complex—and takes time. In our experience, we advise companies to focus on the core business and get the best tools available to accomplish their objectives, even if that means paying for it.
What do I need to have in place?
You need the right data infrastructure, the right data flows, and the right customer attributes/events pulled together into an automated solution. If you’re using multiple platforms to collect data, you need to make them to talk to each other. Ideally you have a customer data platform in place, otherwise we can help set this up.
We don't do marketing.
We deliver growth.
During our FullStory platform implementation the ikaros team was invaluable. They took the initiative to address tracking issues through GTM, set up crucial Amart Website dashboards, and collaborated seamlessly with our team, including developers and IT. Everything was extremely well documented and communicated. I highly recommend their services with the implementation of the FullStory platform.
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ikaros has been a great help in driving growth for one of our portfolio businesses, thanks to their deep understanding of growth strategy, analytics & experimentation.
They have the ability to reliably deliver across all stages of projects, whether validating product-market-fit from the ground-up, or scaling growth and unlock new levers.
The the ikaros team assumed a crucial role in driving Pearler’s growth strategy as a Fractional CGO. They played a pivotal part in shaping and implementing our product-led growth approach and worked seamlessly with our CMO and internal team. Their contributions across marketing automation, analytics, and product development have consistently made a significant impact on the business.
The ikaros team have been instrumental in supporting Prezzee on our data and insights journey.
From strategic advice through to best-in-class implementation support of our analytics tools, ikaros has been a true extension of our team. Their strategic, data-driven marketing lens and a real focus on business growth truly sets them apart.
From day 1 ikaros have filled us with confidence that we made the right choice with them. They couple deep growth expertise and strategic advice with the ability to get things off the ground and running super quickly.
Their collaborative attitude has also made them a pleasure to work with. Big thanks to Ikaros for helping us setup the experimentation culture that every start-up needs.
ikaros has been the true description of a partner. Providing valuable advice at all times, educating our team where necessary and providing the level of engagement that truly feels like they are one of the family.
Joining us at the outset of a large acquisition, the ikaros team worked on setting up the infrastructure, monitoring and reporting and providing the recommendations that will keep giving us the digital competitive edge.
The team at ikaros have supported us in transforming a 20 year-old family business into a growth-machine, helping deliver close to 100% new customer growth.
They helped establish a data-driven growth culture, pulling together teams across functions and bridging the gaps between our technical and business challenges.
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Daniel and his team at ikaros are world-class digital and growth professionals.
They are experts in the space of SEO, PPC, analytics and customer lifecycle marketing and were able to align our marketing and engineering team’s direction with their deep understanding of both business and technical requirements.
The ikaros team have been instrumental to CareerTeam's growth, defining and implementing a successful growth strategy for our business.
ikaros quickly delivered results across each stage of our customer journey and continues to do so as part of our ongoing collaboration. We couldn't be happier with them!
Why ikaros
Broad Expertise
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Candid Comms
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