It’s a lifecycle myth we’ve all seen for years:

The more you send, the more you’ll sell and the more revenue you’ll generate.

It sounds logical. More touchpoints, more opportunities to convert. But in practice, that’s rarely what drives performance.

The highest-performing lifecycle programs I’ve worked on weren’t the ones that sent the most messages or had the most campaigns along a drawn-out journey. They were the ones that got the timing right.

Because customers don’t engage more just because you show up more often in their inboxes, on their mobile devices, or anywhere they engage with brands more frequently.

Customers engage when what you’re sending actually matches where they are in their journey.

In my experience, the real lever isn’t volume – it’s relevance.

And with relevance comes fewer, smarter touchpoints rather than more.

breaking down the common misconception

As marketers, we’re constantly under pressure to deliver. Increase sales. Increase conversions. Drive deposits. Lift engagement. Between new customer acquisition and retention programs, budget discussions can get complex and overwhelming. And to add to the pressure are the one-off requests that come in at the end of the month or quarter to help drive immediate sales – raising the bottom line at key points in time.

Is this normal? Yes. However, most hurried strategies used aren’t necessarily beneficial. They involve overly discounted goods, heavy promotions and worse yet – high send volumes to blast a wider reach of your subscriber base. But the truth is, the real success to be had isn’t in sending more or sending bigger/better offers, it’s in how we communicate with the customers we already have. The customers we have behavioral data on.

Some brands still hold on to the belief that the more you send, the better your marketing programs will perform. But that isn’t the best way to engage with your customers. In fact, in most cases, it’s the best way to create friction, increase the propensity for program opt-outs and even seeing your customers falter in their loyalty with your brand, only to seek out your competitors.

putting the shoe on the other foot.

Consider your own personal email inbox or mobile device. At any given moment, how many messages from brands are you currently ignoring, have you turned off notifications for, are you systematically deleting, or even marking as spam? And of those brands, how many are you still actively engaging with and purchasing from?

Remember, the difference between an average marketer and a great customer relationship builder is understanding that communicating with your audience is not a “one size fits all” relationship. Instead, it’s:

• Understanding your customers’ needs
• Meeting your customers’ needs with accuracy
• Differentiating yourself to stand out
• Turn attention towards conversion & revenue
• Maintain engagement & transition to retention

How To: Convert Your Campaigns To be More Relevant

By enhancing the relevancy of your customer interactions, you can expect to see a significant increase in performance metrics. Don’t believe me? Test it. Test your current blast strategy against a more segmented, relevant campaign and see if you match some of the same improvements other brands see when switching to more relevant campaigns:

• Up to a 300% increase in new subscriber conversion rates
• As much as a 27% increase in customer loyalty and retention
• Faster revenue growth by as much as 40%
(CRM.org)

Making the switch from your current strategy to a more relevant, more personalized one doesn’t need to be a difficult one. Consider an upcoming campaign or promotion and now let’s optimize it to make it more relevant:

1. Ask yourself, What’s the purpose for this message? Why are we even communicating this to our customers?

2. Have your answer in mind? Perfect! Now look to understand when are you intending to communicate this message. It doesn’t have to be a specific day or date. If the promotion is “10% Off Tank Tops”, maybe the “When” is “As temperatures increase” – and instead of focusing on a date, we focus on something that can be relevant uniquely for each customer: when temperatures in their region start to warm up enough to make the switch from warm weather clothing to tank tops and summer wear.

3. Now that you’ve nailed down the Why and the When, all that’s left is the What – What are you going to communicate given the more intentional nature of your efforts?

Relevancy for the win

The content of your campaigns and answering the above three questions alone won’t necessarily drive the enormous lifts in your program performance. Sometimes considerations need to be made in who you’re sending to – especially if your CRM strategy is built heavily on batch and blast. Relevancy is about sending the right message at the right time to the right group of customers. From an orchestration standpoint, this means looking at your customer data and using this to implement personalization at the segmentation level.

At its core, the reason relevancy in CRM works is because it creates a personal line of communication between the brand and its customer. From a technical standpoint, the more relevant the campaign, the less likely your customer is to opt out, to mark messages as spam, to ignore, etc – all inactivity that causes mailbox providers to start the process of hindering inbox deliverability of messages.

Successful CRM programs belong to those that understand that the attention of their customers is earned and not an assumed given. And moreover, it’s earned through efforts that are timely, purposeful, intentional, and personal.

If you’re interested in transitioning your CRM strategies to ones that are more intentional and relevant, but you don’t know where to start – I’d love to hear from you.