Tiny Marketing: Marketing and Sales Systems for Independent Consultants

Ep 174: Lifecycle Marketing That Doesn’t Annoy Anyone | Guest Expert: Craig Zingerline

• Sarah Noel Block • Season 5 • Episode 174

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We break down lifecycle marketing as a practical engine that connects acquisition to revenue with smart flows, clean lists and respectful cadence. Craig Zingerlein shares deliverability tactics, must-have sequences and simple tests to raise conversions without burning out.

• definition of lifecycle marketing and where it sits in the funnel
• flows versus campaigns, triggers and exits
• lead nurture, onboarding, upsell, abandoned cart, evergreen, sunset
• avoiding spammy outreach and protecting deliverability
• separating cold email, CRM marketing and transactional messages
• segmentation tactics to exclude bot clicks
• timing windows for B2B upsells and proposal follow-up
• using replies to shift from automation to one-to-one
• A/B testing cadence and watching unsubscribes
• mapping flows with goals, steps, content and CTAs
• tools for building flow maps and where to find Craig

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Craig Zingerline is a six-time founder and the CEO of Growth Minded, where he helps startups and scaling companies drive revenue through smart lifecycle marketing. With a background in engineering, product, and marketing, Craig brings a rare full-stack perspective to customer acquisition and retention. He’s also the creator of LifecycleOS, a tool that helps founders map out high-converting email and SMS flows. When he's not helping businesses grow, you’ll find him running marathons, playing drums, or experimenting with new product ideas.

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SPEAKER_04:

Welcome to I am Art. I'm doing all block. This show is made for solo consultants who want to get booked out without burning out. If you've ever thought, I just want that to feel easier, you're not alone. Around here, we focus on simple, sustainable growth that actually fits into your life so growth feels doable instead of overwhelming.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm Craig Zingerlein. I'm the founder of a company called Growth Minded, and we run performance marketing, lifecycle marketing, and special ops campaigns for SMBs up through PE-backed companies. I'm a serial entrepreneur, and so this is, I guess, my fifth or sixth company overall. And I spent much of my career in um started as a software engineer and then was a product manager for a really long time, and then realized after building probably a hundred websites and products, that if you can't actually get distribution working and get people buying whatever you're selling, whether it's a product or service, then you're basically gonna be in a tough spot. And so about uh about 10 years ago or so, I started getting into the field of marketing and growth marketing in particular. And that's really where I've been for the last 10 years or so.

SPEAKER_04:

Nice. And today we are talking about life cycle marketing, specifically in email. So, first for anybody, because a lot of people who listen to this show, they're not in marketing, they're founders. Um, what is life cycle marketing?

SPEAKER_01:

It's a good question. So, life cycle marketing, think of it as an engine that you can set up that's running behind the scenes that sits between your customer acquisition, so what you're doing out in the market to try to find customers and get them interested in your product or service, and then connecting them to their opportunities for you to monetize them. And so that's monetization, it's retention, it's loyalty, it's uh initial purchase, it's membership sales. And so lifecycle marketing from a platform and channel perspective generally um spans SMS and mobile, email marketing. If you've got a native app, maybe you're doing push marketing or even in-app notifications, those types of things. So lifecycle marketing sits kind of in between all the other actions that you're taking. And generally it's a series of one-off things that you're doing to try to move users through your buyer journey, uh, as well as some automations, quite a few automations actually that you can put in place to let lifecycle marketing do the work for you while you work on other things, hopefully.

SPEAKER_04:

So, what is the goal of life cycle marketing?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, it depends on what stage you're looking at. So let's say common scenario is that you are really, really good at getting leads uh into your ecosystem. But maybe you follow up with a lead once or twice, and then you've got new leads coming in, and you just the ones that are starting to age out, you just don't deal with anymore. And so typically founders are left with a decision like, do I continue chasing leads that are coming in or do I work with the ones that are starting to convert? An example where you could use lifecycle marketing would be on a um, you could build a sequence or a flow that would take leads that have not yet converted and actually present them with more relevant information and context about your business, and maybe you sprinkle in an offer or two while you're at it to try to educate them and to get them more aware of what you're actually putting out into the market and you let that do the work for you. But there's a whole bunch of different ways to use it. I mean, there's there's about five or six kind of core B2C focused flows that you'd want to set up with lifecycle marketing and a number with B2B as well. But that would be a typical area that you would look at with lifecycle.

SPEAKER_04:

Okay. Now you mentioned flows in our in our pre-conversation. What is a flow?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So a flow is basically it's basically a set of messages that you're gonna put out to your audience. And again, depending on like what stage you're at, this is gonna vary and in what you're offering. That may be different. But think of a flow as doing multiple touch points against your audience based on where they're at and you try to meet them where you're at. So that example that I just used where you've got leads coming in and maybe they're converting, but not at the rate you want them to, you could put them into a flow called something like lead nurture flow. And it's doing the work across multiple touch points to push them along the buyer's journey. Or maybe you've got an onboarding flow after like they've um signed up or done something with your with your product. And so a flow really is a fancy way of saying um that you're running some set of multi-touch point sequencing um against your audience as compared to like a campaign, which would be a one-off, right? And so, like when we think about a campaign, which is kind of where a lot of us start with lifecycle marketing, we might not even know we're starting lifecycle marketing, but like an email campaign or an SMS campaign, those are the starting points for any good lifecycle marketing program. Those are generally kind of one-dimensional, like you're doing some amount of outreach to people, but there's not a lot of logic behind it. So a flow is going to incorporate logic and it's also going to have an entry point or a trigger that kind of puts somebody into it, then it does its work, and then there's going to be some exit criteria that tells the flow, okay, this person did the thing or didn't do the thing you you were hoping them to do. We're going to now pull them out of that so you don't keep hitting them up with messaging.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, that was going to be my next question. How do we not annoy people when they're in that?

SPEAKER_01:

Right. Yeah. So basically, like I generally think that we I've rarely worked with founders that are annoying people to the point where it's a detriment to their business. Now, the big caveat and exception is there's almost nothing that triggers me more than getting put on a sequence, especially a cold outreach sequence, which is different than lifecycle marketing.

SPEAKER_04:

So like cold outreach is definitely Yes, those are so annoying. I have a thousand of them that are currently hitting my spam folder.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. I and I market with spam too. And and I I even post about this and stuff on LinkedIn. I'm like, founders, if you're gonna do outreach, which you should do, right? Like everybody needs to grow their company. I totally get it. Like, I do cold outreach as well. Think about that though, as a it's a different thing. And and especially if you're putting somebody on a list that you don't know or who hasn't raised their hand and said, Hey, I'm interested in your product or service, don't spam them. Like at a bare minimum, be a decent human and put an unsubscribe link in. If I see an unsubscribe link in an email from a founder, and let's say the email just totally sucks, like it's either or it's using a horrible AI, or it's just not good. If there's an unsub link, I'll just click the unsub link. If there's none, it's automatically going to scream.

SPEAKER_04:

Yes. It annoys me so much. Like, one, I didn't ask to be on this list, you are just sending it.

SPEAKER_01:

It's like I understand that people, I mean, you know, like you get desperate to find revenue and to connect users to what you're doing, but that is not the way. By the way, the other thing that happens with that type of outreach, and this does relate to life cycle marketing, is around deliverability. So let's say you're a founder and you're doing, I don't know,$10,000 a month in revenue, and you are sending a bunch of cold email, and then you're actually kind of doing white hat tactics around life cycle marketing, and you've decided to build a lead flow to try to take leads and educate them a little bit more before you really kind of pitch them. But you've already burned your IP address by cold emailing people and getting marked as spam. I've seen nobody's gonna get your emails when you send them. Like you literally don't be like, and this is in the world of deliverability, which kind of lives with inside life cycle marketing as well.

SPEAKER_04:

So yeah, that reminds me, someone asked me not that long ago, should you have a separate email for your cold outreach as opposed to your marketing? I would say yes, but I'm not the expert. What do you say?

SPEAKER_01:

100,000 percent like LS. So, okay, there's three, there's kind of three buckets that that I would think about with email in general, right? Maybe even four. There's like your personal email or whatever you're doing with your company, like I'm just craget growth-minded, whatever, right? Then there's um there's cold outreach, which really should be put in its own little universe. And there's a lot of cold outreach tools that you can use and ways you can pull lists and stuff. That should be a totally separate infrastructure in email address and even subdomain or primary domain. Because if you get blacklisted off your primary domain, it might take you months to basically undo that process. And we've actually helped some clients with that work. It's really, really hard to get off those spam lists once you're on them. The second major bucket, though, is like your email automations and your CRM work. So, like however you're mostly communicating with your clients and with your leads, usually that'll be through, you know, whether it's like a flow desk or an interval or HubSpot or whatever CRM platform you're using, you'll run your lifecycle marketing campaigns from that. You'll probably even do your SMS campaigns from there. And then the third bucket, and this often gets overlooked, is your triggered email. And sometimes we see what happens is that like, let's say you have a lot of transactions that are happening and a lot of like receipt notifications and other things about membership and accounts. Like if you run a community or something, you'll have a lot of those emails. Sometimes those get into spam land. Um, and and you have to basically unpack that then from like your main CRM. And so, really, I would think about like when you start thinking about kind of growing your business and your email strategy as you move along, there's those three buckets. It's like non-transactional, it's triggered, and then it's like your CRM.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. That's I'm glad you brought that up because I haven't ever thought about like those transactional emails. They're coming from somewhere.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, usually they're like big platforms, and so they generally do a really good job. But I mean, there's so many cool new AI products and stuff that are out there. Like there's so many like homegrown products that are out there that some of them aren't gonna have, they're not gonna give you the capability to kind of disconnect it from your main domain or whatever. And so you could get into trouble. Um, but yeah, it's it's kind of becoming a bigger deal.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, that makes sense. I want to talk a little bit more about those flows. So, one thing that I do to make sure that I'm sending those emails to people who actually care about um what I'm talking about is I set up a lot of action sequences. So, like people who clicked on the link for the product but did not click on I'll I'll usually use one of my like social media links um because so many like Gmail will just automatically click on all of your links to see if there's spam. So your analytics aren't very accurate. So the only way that I can think to really find people who are truly interested and clicked is to remove anyone who clicked on every single link from that segment. And then I'm able to send the next email to just people who are interested in that product but didn't convert.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's really smart. And we have spammers to thank for that too, the fact that you have to like go through the exercise and do it. Yeah. So, but I mean, you're like 99%, like you're way ahead of what most people do because it takes a bunch of work to do that, as you probably experienced. Like to set it up and to build the sequence, to build the segments, build the lists and build the segments smartly is is kind of hard to do. It's just time consuming. Um, and so but yeah, the other thing to look at is if you can even get one layer deeper. So, like oftentimes, so like when we're thinking about, for example, a lead flow or a flow that like is doing the work or a sequence that's doing the work for somebody that hasn't ever purchased, those types of metrics work really well. Like they haven't done anything yet around revenue, and they click, click, click, click, click. So that's a bot, we're gonna like totally ignore them. Yeah, and we actually put them into a sunset flow um or something that is like smartly kind of unsubscribing them. And then the the deeper you get into life cycle marketing, the more personalization and sophistication you can put into your flows. And so, like, if you think about now you might have a user who's purchased one time, but let's say you sell a membership, let's say they need to buy your thing three times before they're really going to be primed to be a member. Okay, now you can build an onboarding sequence that's based on an action that was like they did an action one time, but they didn't do it the three times. Versus if they do it two times, now they're like only one away from converting into a membership potentially. So you might you might trigger an upsell campaign at that point to try to like I like that.

SPEAKER_04:

So I use Heartbeat for my community, and um, you can build workflows directly in there. So one thing that I've started to do is like when someone finishes one product, they've completed it, it'll like maybe a week before that completion is is meant to happen, I'll start a workflow about the next product that would make sense for them based off of that. But you could do multiple touch points, like you were talking about at the beginning. So they could get a pop-up, a ping, like a notification, an email or a DM.

SPEAKER_01:

That is super cool. And that's where, like, yeah, I think a lot of magic can happen there. And as you kind of to your early point around like, how do you know you're not annoying people or whatever? That's a good area to actually A B test some of this stuff. Um, I one of the first things that I'll do when I work with companies on email marketing strategies, just kind of on lifecycle marketing strategy in general. And this is true for like really early stage companies, like um, as well as much later stage companies, you'd be surprised at how little work they've put into this in some cases. In other cases, they've built out everything, and like you can't find opportunities, but almost every time we find opportunities, and what we'll do is we'll kind of look at like, okay, what's your baseline? Like, what are you doing right now, and like how is that working? And let's put some like guardrails around like the measurement of that. And then one of the first things that we'll do is we'll put together something called like the aggressive version of whatever it was. And so in your case, it might be like getting a little bit out of your comfort zone, but for like all the founders listening to your podcast, it's like it's really hard for us to sense like when we're not pushing hard enough or when we're pushing too hard, and like you can actually let you can let mad people tell you, right? Because people that aren't hearing from you aren't gonna be like, hey Sarah, like you should be hitting me up more frequently, like that almost never happens. But if you you're hammering them, you're gonna tell me more, you know what I mean? And so, um, but it's somewhere in the middle that we just don't really know as founders, like, how are we supposed to know that? And so if you set up a B version or like a variant of whatever you've got currently running, just duplicate it, and then double the outreach, you'll learn pretty quickly. Like, did that did it move the needle at all? Like, are people starting to complain? And what what I always tell uh founders is like, if you're not hearing complaints and you're not seeing a degradation in like your not necessarily your send quality or your deliverability, because that would be bad. But like if you're not seeing a small increase in unsub ratios compared to baseline, you probably have a little bit more room to grow within your existing audience in other makes sense.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. So an A B an A B test on that, um, something because they don't typically tell you if you're gonna computing them. Yeah, um so something that I do is I'll just put a little like click here if you're not interested in in this product and I won't email you about it again. And it just puts them on a list, like not interested in this instead of unsubscribing.

SPEAKER_01:

And it disarms them too. So like they could come back even relationships.

SPEAKER_04:

They're not gone forever, but they have the option to just be like, I'm not that is not what I need right now.

SPEAKER_01:

Totally. Absolutely. That's good stuff.

SPEAKER_04:

So it's just like adding a little bit of consent into each step of it. Now you said that there's six main flows every company should have. We've talked about a couple of them. What which ones are we missing?

SPEAKER_01:

So the big ones, and I go between five and six, but for B2C, I would say that the absolutely critical flows are a lead nurture flow. So this is where you've already spent money and time trying to acquire customers, but they haven't they haven't taken that first step. And so that's like always, always an opportunity that I see, especially the earlier stage you go. Because again, like we're busy, founders are super busy, and like you're really gonna chase the leads that are like warm or hot instead of kind of dealing with the ones that aren't. But it the ones that aren't, they just might need a little bit more context, or maybe they're shopping around a little bit more. So lead nurture flow, onboarding flow. So, and again, this is gonna vary based on your business and stuff, but your onboarding flow is really gonna go and work in parallel with your product onboarding. And so think of your onboarding flow as like your flow that kind of lives in the stages that your customer is going to be going through while they're onboarding or as they just got through onboarding, and you're trying to reconnect the value that they're experiencing in the product in a like, you know, in a in an offline manner or whatever, like through email and SMS. So onboarding flow is key. Onboarding is directly tied to retention. And so, like what we found is that if if you've got a good product and you don't have amazing retention, sometimes tweaking onboarding is the fastest. Usually, see, changing onboarding is the fastest way to kind of increase retention by either personalizing the experience a little bit more or explaining the value a little bit more. It doesn't always work, but you can couple that with email and SMS. Um, the third key flow would be around abandoned cart. And a lot of people like just assume abandoned cart is just e-commerce, but it's not. So if you run service-based retail or really anything where somebody started to go down the path of monetization and then stopped, if you have if you have a way to kind of see that those events were happening and you've got that person's info, you can come back with a really compelling offer or another touch point that could work well.

SPEAKER_04:

Can we pause there for one second? Because I can see how that would work too, with like a lot of the people who listen to the show are consultants, they're service providers. And maybe you sent a proposal and just got ghosted. So you can use this abandoned cart, like a version of it to reinvigorate that conversation.

SPEAKER_01:

It's actually for B2B, it's an amazing, like it's a really amazing way to automate the touch points. And so you and you have to do it in a non-obnoxious way. And it has to, I the general rule is like it always has to be value add. So if you don't have anything to say, don't don't say anything. But you should probably have something interesting to say if you're trying to sell something. It may be that the person's just it's not the right time or whatever. And so combinations of like rhetorical questions um plus uh things like case studies or social proof tend to work really well. And in the goal for abandoned cart um with B2B, at least the my goal typically is to either uh qualify or unqualify somebody because I don't want to keep chasing somebody that is like price shopping with with some other you know company that I just can't compete with, right? Because we just we're like working on different like sets of value for the for the like what we focus on is different and monetize is different. So yeah, that's a really, really good one for a B2B. Fourth one would be an upsell flow. So if you've sold somebody um, you know, let's say you sell a course and you've got a book, that's a great way to kind of cross-sell and upsell additional value on top of what they purchased, with um, you know, I've got clients that maybe one's got a um, you know, a set of um uh like health and beauty spas and salons. And so if somebody comes in for a treatment, upselling them onto a product that's relevant to like the treatment they just had is really compelling. And a lot of that happens in studio, but much of it also does happen seven days or 14 days after they came in in person for whatever they were doing. Um, and then another one that's often overlooked, and then I'll pause, is Sunset Flow. You know, Sunset Flow is like it's basically the email. Flow that you put people into um when they're not responding to anything, and then you take them off your list.

SPEAKER_04:

Okay. I have questions about that because I haven't heard of it. Real quick though, I want to go that one flow backwards. Yeah. Because I want to touch on what you said. Seven to 14 days, they usually come back needing that. And I want to talk about how that is in like the B2B world too.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

Because like in my world, I'll sell a gateway offer.

SPEAKER_03:

Yep.

SPEAKER_04:

And if it doesn't upsell on like the review call into a main, a high-ticket offer, that's where it usually happens. Just like in the salon, they usually buy the product right after their treatment. But if that doesn't happen, that seven to 14 days also gives them time to sit in that pain a little bit. They tried to solve the problem themselves. They've learned that they can't. So that's also a great time to come back and reignite that conversation because they've had the time to learn like that isn't actually something I would want to do. And now I feel awkward going back to them. But if you go back to them, it's different.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, yeah, it is. And so it's like, and that's where I think you're the important piece is kind of understanding like what's the natural evolution of like the process and what are the time frames. So there's no hard and fast rules with this stuff. But it's funny because um, like oftentimes I'll I will get a lead that it comes in. I get two types of leads that come in. One, they're just like some event happened and they need usually like a marketer got fired or left or something, and they just they desperately need help. And if they don't get help right now, they're in big trouble. Um, and the other is that like they're in this explorer mode where they're kind of like maybe opportunistically looking at what else is out there on the market. And for those, so the for the first one, it's a totally different game, right?

SPEAKER_04:

Like it's a different easy, it's like okay, let's go.

SPEAKER_01:

It wins like does our price and value align to what you have, yes or no? And it's like we can get that done quickly. But the ones that are kind of in explorer mode, if if they go dark for a couple weeks, I know generally that either they're really busy or they're shopping around for price. And so what I try to do in my automations and my follow-ups is address those two points. Do you need more time? Is there anything I can help with in the meantime? Um, or is there anything I can do to make my bid more competitive? Um, and I I did a lot more of that with my last business, and I don't do a lot of that with my current business. It's just not how we tend to monetize, or it's not the type of clients that we would typically work with.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, they usually end up being kind of hard to work with when you have to you hate to admit that.

SPEAKER_01:

Like sell yourself, like putting it that way. It's like the more you have to sell yourself, almost like it's not to say that they're not an ideal customer or not potentially an ideal customer, but it's very rare, at least in consulting, where you find somebody that you have kind of a difficult, you know, starting set of conversations with, and you keep getting asked for more and more stuff, and you know it's happening behind the scenes. And if you're in a position to just let that stuff go, you just put some of that into your what would be the abandoned part sequence, basically, and you just let the system do the work and ask those questions. And if they come back, awesome. But meanwhile, while that's running, you're not spending time on it, you're focused on other things that are more important in your business.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. Yeah. Um, in in my world, usually if they didn't upsell from the gateway offer, it's they thought they could execute it internally. Um, it's rarely that they're actually looking at other partners. If you built out the strategy for them, they're gonna want to work with you on it. It's that they think that they can do it internally.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

So then, like for consultants who are listening to this right now, that's those are the objections that you would need to address in the follow-up on that.

SPEAKER_01:

How do you typically address it in your current situation?

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. So for me, I'll check in and I'll say, I know that at this point that you should have hit this milestone. And I just wanted to check in and see if you were able to accomplish that.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

Just a little check-in and see if did you actually execute it or is it just sitting on your in your drive right now, consuming your mind?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I feel like listening to that, I I'm probably like a terrible lead for a lot of companies because I'll I'm kind of a tire kicker. Like, I try a lot of different products and stuff, and so I'll go into onboarding and then and then I realized like, oh man, I I'm not probably not going to use this. And I'm getting the emails, I'm seeing the emails. I'm like, I really just got to reply to the founder and be like, no. But sometimes you just reply back and like, hey, not interested right now, and they'll just get you off the list. But yeah, probably not a great lead.

SPEAKER_04:

No, I mean, absolutely. If you say you're not interested, I'm bouncing. It's basically in the B2B world, it's follow up until they tell you not to.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, exactly. Very cool.

SPEAKER_04:

So the last one on our list was well, actually, before we get into the flow mappings, I wanted to learn more about the sunsetting.

SPEAKER_01:

So sunset flow is used when you have a list of people that are just not, they're either not you have to define what you want to be the sunset action, but it's like a sunset. Basically, like when the sun goes down, that lead is gone. And so you you strive to get people off of your email list and off of your SMS list so that you have a smaller list size, it's easier to manage, it's probably cheaper depending on what platform you're using, and your open and click-through rates go up if people are engaging. So the Sunset Flow is a usually a two or three email and SMS sequence that says something like, you know, hey Sarah, it looks like you haven't read our emails for a while. We get it, like whatever, whatever. Um, at company name, we really take um, you know, we take our lists seriously and we want to make sure that you're getting value from what you see. Keep me subscribed or just ignore this. We'll send you one more email and then we'll unsubscribe you. And if somebody clicks the keep me subscribed, actually, if somebody opens the email, then they'll stay subscribed. But if they click keep me subscribed, then we know like there's some level of engagement there. If they open it and don't click and then they get the second email and they don't click, we just take them off the list. And so we'll say, you know, hey, sir, I was promised. We've officially taken you off of our list. This will be the last time you hear from us from now. Um, if you're still interested in receiving emails from us, you can just click this button to resubscribe. And a lot of people end up falling into this. And it's really hard, especially for um, especially for folks listening that are dealing with end consumers, it's hard to say goodbye to somebody that you think might be like a lead or whatever down the road. But the faster you get comfortable doing that, the cleaner your list is going to be and the more manageable it's gonna be. And you can do that in an automated way. And it also keeps your deliverable deliverability really high.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, that matters so much. So the when I was talking about those bots that click on like automatically open and click all of your links, and you said you'd add them to the sunset flow. How would that work with this since it's automatically doing it anyway?

SPEAKER_01:

I would probably I think for the automated bots, maybe you're maybe you're going to put them into their own sequence and ask them to reply with why to the email if they want to stay on it because they're just you just know that you just know that they're bots. And if they don't say yes, then you just get rid of them. Now, if it's the but again, your criteria is that they clicked on every single link, right? That's how you know that it's a bot.

SPEAKER_04:

That's yeah, that's how I use it.

SPEAKER_01:

So it's a great way. Actually, like I hadn't thought of that until you presented that scenario. And I think I think the way you do it is like should be a best practice. And so like I I'll probably borrow that from you, which is awesome. So thank you. I would say, yeah, like if they're if it's a bot and you know it's a bot because they clicked on all these things, have them reply yes if they want to stay on it. And if they don't reply yes and they're gone.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, that makes sense. My um, because I uh do a lot of one-to-one, my favorite way to to get engagement and move people to the next phase is to ask them to reply and if if they're interested in the product, and then I would move them over to the next email. Um, and that has helped too a lot with like the automatic clicking, but also then we can start a conversation, they can ask any questions they have.

SPEAKER_01:

So that means I love email for that, like in asking not necessarily like I think surveys have been a little played out, but like asking a rhetorical question in an email, just asking a regular, like just like it's just one-to-one, it's not a big deal, and then seeing if you can get somebody to reply back, and then like being personalized on kind of how and once you get to that point where there is a reply, you're you're not these are not put into flows anymore, right?

SPEAKER_04:

This is like no, yeah, it's just a conversation.

SPEAKER_01:

Exactly. So you can't automate everything.

SPEAKER_04:

No, and it makes more sense to move that conversation to that one-to-one if depending on what your product or or offer is.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04:

Okay, now that we covered that, let's talk about the flow mappings. How does that work? And how do you drive more conversions?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, okay. So think about when you think about your overall strategy for lifecycle marketing, there's kind of three buckets. There's like what is the what is the strategy? Like, what are you actually trying to accomplish? Then there's what are the different flows that are appropriate for my business? Then there's like within a flow, what are the things you're doing? And then what's the content going to be? And so think about the flow mapping as basically the strategy for that part of your business that you're trying to work on. And so I'll share my screen for a second here. I can show you um, I can show you just a sample that I have here. Um, and this is for a food brand. Um let me make my screen bigger. So this is sorry for the poor design here, but basically, like I abstracted this data from this is real data from flow mapping that we've done um with with this partner of ours. And so what you do with a flow map is you say, okay, like what is the overview or strategy that I'm trying to accomplish here? And so this is for a lead nurture for a D2C food brand. And what we're trying to do is target health conscious professionals ages 25 to 45 who expressed interest in meal delivery but have not yet made their first purchase. So that's like the starting point, right? Like that's the trigger and criteria. Okay, now what are we trying to do? We have this$25 offer, and again, your offer and all the people listening, like your offers are going to be totally different. But in this case, it's a$25 off your first box that we can get, which is pretty typical in like the D2C food space. And we've got eight touch points that we've put together that run over basically like a seven to 10 day window. And so what the flow map does is it forces you to think about what are what's the goal of this? How long do I want it to run for? How many touch points am I going to have with a customer? And then within each touch point, what am I actually trying to do? So, what we're looking at here is the first one is step one, it's an email that gets sent immediately, basically after somebody signed up but hasn't like purchased yet.

SPEAKER_04:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

The goal is to establish a brand connection and set expectations while introducing them to like your core value prop of the business. The key messaging is welcome to this food community, acknowledge their health conscious lifestyle, acknowledge that they're a busy professional or whatever, they don't have time to cook. So these are like brand aesthetics that you bake into it. And then what is the call to action? The call to action is explore this week's menu. And you put one of these mini maps together for every single touch point. And what you're looking at here, this is actually pulled from a product. Um, it's kind of a spin-off company that we have called Life Cycle OS. And if you go to Life Cycle OS, there's a whole bunch of stuff there that you could do for free, and you can actually create these mappings and stuff just. Oh, that's cool. It's super cool. But in the olden days, like before we built that, we actually built that because we were doing so much of this manually for clients. We would build this in like Fig Jam or like in Miro or like some other visual like collaboration board. So you don't have to use this product, but if you want to use it, like you feel free to. But basically, you want to map out the strategy visually so you understand what you're doing and then what those delays are going to be. So in here, you see it's like one day later, you get this quick nutrition facts set. A day later, after that, the real cost of healthy eating, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And this is this is like the bones of a flow map. And then, like, from the flow map, what you end up doing is you you then build out the full content. And so if you try to build these flows, and let's say you're you have to build like eight emails and SMSs, it's like pretty overwhelming because you're like, where do I start? Yeah, so the whole one just gives you the starting point, and then you build the content on top of that, then you put it in your system and you launch. So that that's my way oversimplified version one.

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah. So is there a benchmark on how many touch points you should have?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So it really, it really depends on your business. And so it's hard to give like a real benchmark on this. It actually, the LLMs are really good at giving you a sense of like what your customer threshold should be. So if you're in Chat GPT or at like cloud or whatever, you can give it a scenario and be like, you know, I'm a XYZ type company. This is a you know, onboarding flow that I want to build. So you know the nomenclature. So get, you know, and feed it some some data and it will come back with recommendations. But generally, I would say our average flows are anywhere from six to 10 or 12 touch points, with the exception of an evergreen flow. And this is probably the sixth key flow that I would say is is really important. Evergreen flows typically will be something that is using your evergreen content, like you're always on value add content that you can kind of sprinkle out to people while they're kind of engaged with with your audience or with whatever you're selling. And um, that might be 50 touch points over six months, right? Like those can be, you can just keep adding on to the end of those evergreen flows.

SPEAKER_04:

Okay. And evergreen is just to keep them engaged until they're ready.

SPEAKER_01:

It think of it as like your auto follow-up that has like some some custom stuff for them. Some, you know, for my company, the stuff we would do would be like it would be customer case studies, it'd be some social proof. For B2B, it's a lot of social proof. Um, it might be uh edge cases, wins that you've seen, other interesting things in the industry. It's just a way to kind of have a like low stress touch point that they probably know is automated, but it should add value either way. It's not something that's supposed to be spammy. And so if you're running out of content ideas for Evergreen, then maybe it's time to stop.

SPEAKER_04:

Okay. Uh, that makes sense. So can you share the link to that tool you were telling me about? I just checked, I don't have it. Um, because that sounds amazing. And how can everyone connect with you and work with you?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, thank you so much. Um, this was awesome. Thanks for nerding out on lifecycle marketing.

SPEAKER_04:

Um I love it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, it's I think it's like the it's like I always tell founders it like your number one priority is to get people interested in your product. So you have to do that first. And then the next thing usually is like figuring out how to connect people to your value. And and so that's where lifecycle comes in. Um, I'm Craig at growthminded.co. You can visit my website, growthminder.co, and I'm on LinkedIn um quite a bit. Uh, you just search for me on LinkedIn. Craig the Dingerline and you'll find me there. And then the product for doing these flow mappings and and flows is called lifecycleos.com. Um, so any of those places would be awesome.

SPEAKER_04:

Okay, cool. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_04:

If this episode made things feel a little more doable, I'd love to help you take the next step with the booked out blueprint. It's a practical, low pressure session to clarify your offers, your marketing, and what actually moves the needle. You can book yours through the link in the show notes. You don't have to figure it out alone.

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Sarah Noel Block

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