glossary
Lifecycle Marketing
The discipline that runs the funnel after the sale: onboarding customers to first value, growing retention and expansion, and turning satisfaction into advocacy.
Lifecycle marketing picks up where demand generation signs off. The pre-sale funnel finds buyers and closes them; the post-sale half decides what those customers are ultimately worth. Its three stages are onboarding (the race to first value, where churn is silently decided), retention (expansion at real usage milestones, win-backs for the quietly lapsed), and advocacy (reviews, referrals, and the case studies that feed the top of the funnel again).
The channels are owned and consent-based: email is the spine, with push, SMS, in-product nudges, owned communities, and review platforms around it. What separates the discipline from a send calendar is the trigger. Lifecycle messages earn their place by reacting to where the customer actually is: a milestone hit, a setup stalled, a renewal approaching.
It is measured on its own scorecard: NRR summarizes the whole half, with time to first value, churn by cohort, expansion share, and review velocity underneath. The lifecycle marketing guide walks all three stages, and the CAC & LTV calculator turns the retention numbers into LTV.