Look at the sales funnel. This key business concept has been around since 1898 when E. St. Elmo Lewis first introduced the AIDA (Awareness/Interest/Desire/Action) model, providing brands with a way of conceptualizing their customer’s progression towards a purchase or other conversion. But with the rise of mobile and other emerging technologies, today’s customer journey isn’t as simple—or as linear—as the sales funnel depicts it, leading many brands to replace it with a lifecycle marketing model built around a more nuanced view of how customers engage with brands.

Let’s take a look at the benefits of a lifecycle marketing approach to customer engagement, and how the Braze platform can help make that vision a reality for your brand.

The Sales Funnel vs. The Lifecycle Marketing Model

Research shows that being consumer-centric is essential to customer engagement, retention, and, ultimately, company profitability. Thanks to modern technology, brands have access to an abundance of user attribute data, such as age, location, and interests. Combine user attribute data with customer journey mapping, and you have a recipe for creating meaningful and successful campaigns.

Sales funnels focus on squeezing potential customers into narrower and narrower buying stages, which ignores the user’s freedom of choice. These days, it’s not unusual to see a consumer’s engagement with a given brand shift almost in real-time, influenced by social media, the messages they receive, and their overall experience of the brand.

Lifecycle marketing, on the other hand, allows potential customers to be human. Brands can use modern customer engagement strategies—think triggered outreach, in-the-moment personalization, and responsive, cross-channel campaigns—to build trust and loyalty among current and potential customers. These efforts are scalable and sustainable over the long haul, making it possible for brands to improve their bottom line by retaining and monetizing their audiences in a thoughtful way.

Final Thoughts

Lifecycle marketing is the new sales funnel for savvy consumer-centric brands looking to increase customer engagement, retention, and profitability—and the Braze customer engagement platform is built to make all that possible.

For more innovative ways to drive customer engagement, download our Lifecycle Marketing Best Practices guide. And to learn more about Braze and how it’s architected to support today’s lifecycle marketing strategies, check out our look at the Braze Vertical Engagement Stack.