Mapping your customers lifecycle is key to your marketing efforts, after all, your ultimate goal is to move them through each stage of your journey. Ultimately, that is the definition of Customer Cultivation, which is what we are all about! 

Are they leads? Let's get to become buyers.

Are they first time buyers? Le's get them to become Champions. 

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But to move them from one stage to the next, first we need to know where they are.

To know where they are, we need to know what is the definition of each stage. What properties make it up and what is the criteria for moving them towards the next one. 

Inside HubSpot there are only a handful of lifecycle stages you can chose from and while they are helpful we encourage you to make your own lifecycle stages based on what is important to your business. 

We will go through some of the best practices to create your stages and using segments within each of them to analyze your customer behavior.

First things first, acquisition:

Attracting the right customers is key, you may have a lot of traffic but is it qualified? A lead should be someone that fits your ideal persona(s) not someone who is unlikely to buy again. So the first step, setting your persona criteria so your outbound marketing efforts as well as acquisition strategy are in line is key, this way your TOF strategies will attract people with the most potential of converting into loyal customers and that, is when your acquisition efforts become investments.

  • How to analyze this?
  • There are some easy reporting dashboards you can build to check your acquisition channels and analyze their performance 
  • There are some Unific Sync creates in HubSpot that will let you measure this with some ease. 
  • Total Number of orders
  • Total Value of orders

Find easy to follow steps to get your reporting to show exactly what you need with the first blog in our series.

HubSpot E-commerce Reporting Part 1


Once they are inside, its about time between orders:
 
It is time to get to know them deeper...how often are they buying from you? You may have a clear goal regarding this depending on your product. 
A product with 3 month's worth of material should be repurchased after 3 months, but then again, you may not really know how your customer is using it. 
 
Finding this data is key to understanding your customers behavior against what your brand may have expected and then taking action on it. 
 
Are people not repurchasing when they should? Survey time, let's figure out why. 
Are they buying more often? Curiosity time, are they using it wrong and should we worry or are they using it in a different way than anticipated?
Are they not repurchasing? Action time, they are either not getting the actual value or don't love the product. 
 
In any case this allows you to know this customer are at a key stage, they have already bough once and getting them to fall in love with your brand and buying again is the goal.
 
Could you create more content around how to use your product?
Could you sell a subscription so they don't forget to re-stock?
Could you send them email reminders?
 
This are just a few questions you can ask yourself before making action and moving this customer who are full of potential into your Big Spenders, Loyalists and Champions. 
 
Our Buyer Behavior Analysis paired with our Dynamic Segments product will analyze your data for you and create a HubSpot property with the segment name for each customers, doesn't get easier than that. 
 
 
You can also read more about creating calculated properties in HubSpot in the second blog in our series:
 
 

Segmenting them is your third step

Now you know where they are coming from, what are they buying and how often. 
This becomes unbelievably useful data but it can be very hard to read if you don't categorize or segment it according to your business. 
 
This is when we define what a New Customer needs (data wise) to be moved into a Promising Customer for instance. Or what a Champion is defined by as opposed to a Big Spender.
 
Why? Simply put, they have different needs that you will want to cater to. 
 
We split our segments into 6 categories:
 
 
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Let's go through them with an example, Lucy has just made her first purchase in an e-commerce store and is excited to get her first product. Right now she is a New Customer. I want her to come back so I'll send her follow up emails to know about her experience, offer her a discount coupon if she repurchases within the next 3 months. 

New Customer Criteria: 

  1. Number of Purchases: 1 - 2
  2. Number of Categories Bought: 1

3 months later she repurchases the product and gets another type of product as well. She can now be classified as a Promising Customer. I will send her emails about the different products I have in the category of her interest, let her know a little bit about my company and our story and offer her a free sample of a new product in her next purchase. 

Promising Customer Criteria: 

  1. Number of Purchases: 3-5 or 
  2. Number of Categories Bought: 2 - 4

She continues to repurchase every 3 months for a year, she can now be classified as a Champion or Loyalist, maybe even a Big Spender if she is getting all my premium products. Now I want her to be part of my loyalty program, I'll ask her what she loves about my brand maybe even a referral discount and she will be the first to know about my offers and new products. I'll ask for a testimonial and reward her on her birthday with her most purchased item. Maybe once a year, I'll even give her a free product since she is so loyal to my brand.

Champion Criteria: 

  1. Number of Purchases: 5 or more 
  2. Average time between purchases: 3 months or less
  3. Average products bought: 3 or more
  4. Average order value: $50 to $70

This is a customer journey mapped, at each stage Lucy needed something different to move to the next stage and I needed a different criteria to know when she had moved on and needed something different. 

Once you define this setting your system up in HubSpot is key. There are 2 was to do it:

 

Our Buyer Behavior Analysis paired with our Dynamic Segments product will analyze your data for you and create a HubSpot property with the segment name for each customers, doesn't get easier than that. 
 
 
You can also read more about tracking your repeat purchase rate in the  third blog in our series: