By: Christian Fea
Recognizing a customer life cycle and aiming for these distinct steps in your customer retention strategy is an important building block to your company's relationship marketing scheme. A relationship marketing platform puts the customer at the central focal point of your business, and thinking in terms of a customer life cycle and how to move your customers through these distinct stages will help you select, target, and retain a strong customer base.

A customer life cycle may vary depending on your company and what types of products and services it sells. Your customers will have a different buying cycle depending on what you sell. For example, if your company sells coffee, the life cycle and re-order time will be different for your customers than it would be if you were selling contact lenses or shoes. If your business gets customers on a monthly renewable buying scheme, your customer life cycle will be slightly different from a company who has customers purchasing roughly quarterly or every six months.

Given these parameters, there are five stages in a customer life cycle that are readily accepted and agreed upon. These are the natural procedures that a customer goes through when considering a purchase, making a purchase, using a new product and staying loyal to a product and company. You may need to alter your customer lifecycle scheme, but these five steps are a good way to get started.

Step 1: Reach

The first step in a customer life cycle is to reach out to prospective clients. You need to think in terms of how to gain a new clients attention.

Step 2: Acquisition

Acquisition is the step where you show a potential customer what your company has to offer. Once you have the attention of a potential new client, you must engage them to keep their interest.

Step 3: Conversion

Conversion is the act of turning a prospect into a paying customer. It sounds a bit underhanded, as though you are trying to "convert" a client from a competing company to yours, but this is just a technical term. The goal here is to convert someone who is merely considering a purchase to actually making a purchase.

Step 4: Retention

Retention in the customer life cycle is exactly what it sounds like: you want to figure out how to retain and keep this new customer as a repeat client. You'll need to focus on things like personalized attention, offers and customer service to make an impression with your new client, and inspire them to keep purchasing from you.

Step 5: Loyalty

Loyalty is distinct from retention - at first glance they may seem like the same thing, but they are not. Retention is about turning a new customer into a repeat customer, creating a personal loyalty. But loyalty in the realm of a customer life cycle applies to word of mouth. If you can get your existing customers to recommend your products and services to other people, this is what really helps to create a loyal following.

Developing a customer life cycle and thinking in terms of this cycle every step of the way is an integral part to a successful relationship marketing plan and will help ensure the success of your online business.

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By: Christian Fea

Joint venture marketing and camouflage marketing together form a great strategy that will bring success to your Internet business. Joint venture marketing is a type of marketing and advertising that centers on forming a partnership with one or more other business to maximize profits for all of the companies involved in the partnership.

Camouflage marketing is implementing the use of a well-known trigger where people draw conclusions about the nature of something based solely on its appearance. It is human nature to do this, and the combination of joint venture marketing and camouflage marketing uses this principle to maximize marketing strategy for the utmost benefit to the parties engaged in the enterprise. This combination of joint venture and camouflage marketing can:


- Bring qualified prospects and leads to your website
- Maximize offline prospects
- Minimize your out-of-pocket costs

Camouflage Marketing

Joint venture marketing is a fairly straightforward concept to grasp, but camouflage marketing is a newer concept, which requires a bit more attention to understand.

Camouflage marketing is a way of marketing that is hidden (hence, camouflaged) in everyday language and images. It implements a psychological mechanism that is at work all the time in the human brain, where we draw conclusions about the actual nature of something based solely on its appearance.

This form relies upon the old belief that "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck." This principle is at work in our brains all the time and is the basis for many of the split second decisions that we as human beings make all the time.

Make your advertisement look like an article

Camouflage marketing, in combination with joint venture marketing, can create a tremendously successful campaign - especially in how your advertisements come across to potential customers. One trend that helps lend credibility to your advertisement is to craft your ad so that it looks like an informative article; this will lend credibility to your product and ultimately get more people to pay attention to your ad and your company.

The format of an article promises substantial and factual information, which will make your advertisement more authoritative. The editorial style carries the weight of integrity with it, as well as a positive emotional trigger, which can mean a boost in your sales!

This concept may initially sound a little suspect - as though you are manipulating your customers. This is not the case at all! Most people know when they are looking at an advertisement vs. a scholarly article - there is no trick here. The thing that you are capitalizing on is the illusion of a factual, editorial article. And, let's face it, all marketing and sales is about creating an illusion; we know that the pretty watch or the sexy car isn't going to improve our looks or our love lives, but that is the way that many products are marketed, and what we, as a consumer society, happily buy into.

This type of camouflage marketing, combined with joint venture marketing, has the possibility of taking your business to a new level.

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" The idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is only in the Vedas in which the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology (age is billions of years). A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Indians billions."
Dr. Carl Sagan, (1934-1996) famous astrophysicist


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