Lifecycle Marketing

Lifecycle Management
Attract, engage, convert, retain and expand - 5 simple words that cover lifecycle management. While it is easy to understand what each of them mean, it is equally hard to execute on each one of them. Lifecycle management in its purest sense means to guide customers and ensure that they have the most optimal experience at each leg of their customer journey. It encompasses a series of strategies and actions which enables your end customer to derive the requisite value and experience from your product.

While lifecycle management has been covered from a marketing lens, enabling brands to run campaigns, tailor their messaging and personalize each step of the journey for their potential customers. We at Toplyne would like to cover it from a product lens and what each of the aforementioned terms (attract, engage, convert, retain and expand) mean from a product standpoint.

Attract/Aware
This is the first step of your process. It involves customers learning about your product and use case. This will involve running ads online, running email marketing campaigns, blogs, building communities, influencers etc. While this is useful to draw the customers to your product, in today’s self-serve world it is critical to allow your customers to come in, use your product and derive value. A self-serve flow with a free trial of your produce, adds to the awareness of your product and its use cases. It brings to life what they have seen so far in your campaigns and adds a real ‘wow’ factor to your experience.

Activate and Engage
Once the customer has signed up, it is important to keep them within your product and help them draw maximum value out of it. Users should be able to navigate the onboarding flow, integrate it with the relevant products in their tech stack and start using it and get activated. It is critical to ensure that the points of friction are reduced and the users are able to add other members of their firm and drive value out of it. Points of activation are different for different types of companies and the modes taken to reach these steps are different as well. A few examples of this include:

1. Offering customer support (Sales-assist FTW): Maintaining human touchpoints with your end users either through calls, guided onboarding or live chats. Companies like Loom have made multiple 2-4 minute short videos to enable this while teams like Superhuman have hired onboarding specialists for the same.
2. Creating a functional checklist: Companies like Notion, have created a checklist for their users to complete to unlock the value of their product.
3. Creating interactive product flows: Adding an in-app user guide which highlights the key features of their products and guides the user through each of the functions helps the person to understand the product in greater depth. Companies like Typeform have created a demo-like environment, highlighting key product features to explain complex workflows of their product.

Convert
While the first two steps are good, a company will only make revenue once you convert the free and engaged users to paying ones. Identifying the right set of users, running the right GTM playbook, negotiating and closing the deal are the steps which form this process. This process becomes incrementally critical when the user might be a decision maker or an influencer within their organization.
Achieving this conversion is critical, since this user will continue to be your champion and advocate the usage of this product across their respective organizations.

Retain and expand
Retention rather than acquisition is the key revenue driver for your company. Net revenue retention (NRR) is one of the most critical metrics for SaaS companies. The best-in class SaaS companies with the highest revenue multiples have the highest NRRs (Datadog’s NRR is >140% and Snowflake’s >160%). Maintaining a strong customer support team is critical for this step. They work with the users very closely, identify ones in danger of churn and the ones who are most likely to expand. It is important to ensure that the users see continued value out of the product while simultaneously you add features and integrations which further augment their experience.

Across all these processes it is always critical to identify the right users who need to be nurtured through the process. Sales teams need to judiciously use their time and effort and achieve the targets which have been set out to them.

This is where Toplyne comes into play! Toplyne is a SaaS company that helps businesses and companies monetise their product led growth strategy. With Toplyne, your business can automate the process of identifying promising leads and determine what GTM strategies will work best for each.

Here’s how Toplyne can help you:
Here are a few ways Toplyne can help product led growth companies monetize their freemium user base:

1. Integration: Toplyne integrates with your CRMs (Salesforce, Hubspot), customer engagement platforms (Braze), and product analytics infrastructures (Amplitude, Segment).
2. Assessment: The software can then aid product marketing by:
   1. Assessing complex patterns in large volumes of product usage data
   2. Identifying existing customers and accounts with the highest intent to convert to paid subscriptions
3. Experimentation: Toplyne lets growth marketing teams at product led companies rapidly experiment and deploy various GTM motions at scale. This includes driving self-serve conversions through in-product nudges (chatbots, paywalls, promos) and sales-assisted conversions through a high-velocity internal sales team.

Your empowered revenue team can now focus on users who show real intent rather than chasing leads that will never convert

Oh, and the proof of the pudding?
Teams at top SaaS companies like Canva, Invideo, and Gather have already monetized their product led growth using Toplyne.