February 1, 2026 • 41 mins
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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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_04 (00:34):
Welcome to I am Art.
I'm doing all block.
This show is made for soloconsultants who want to get
booked out without burning out.
If you've ever thought, I justwant that to feel easier, you're
not alone.
Around here, we focus on simple,sustainable growth that actually
fits into your life so growthfeels doable instead of
overwhelming.
SPEAKER_01 (00:55):
I'm Craig Zingerlein.
I'm the founder of a companycalled Growth Minded, and we run
performance marketing, lifecyclemarketing, and special ops
campaigns for SMBs up throughPE-backed companies.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, andso this is, I guess, my fifth or
sixth company overall.
And I spent much of my career inum started as a software
(01:18):
engineer and then was a productmanager for a really long time,
and then realized after buildingprobably a hundred websites and
products, that if you can'tactually get distribution
working and get people buyingwhatever you're selling, whether
it's a product or service, thenyou're basically gonna be in a
tough spot.
And so about uh about 10 yearsago or so, I started getting
(01:39):
into the field of marketing andgrowth marketing in particular.
And that's really where I'vebeen for the last 10 years or
so.
SPEAKER_04 (01:45):
Nice.
And today we are talking aboutlife cycle marketing,
specifically in email.
So, first for anybody, because alot of people who listen to this
show, they're not in marketing,they're founders.
Um, what is life cyclemarketing?
SPEAKER_01 (02:03):
It's a good question.
So, life cycle marketing, thinkof it as an engine that you can
set up that's running behind thescenes that sits between your
customer acquisition, so whatyou're doing out in the market
to try to find customers and getthem interested in your product
or service, and then connectingthem to their opportunities for
(02:24):
you to monetize them.
And so that's monetization, it'sretention, it's loyalty, it's uh
initial purchase, it'smembership sales.
And so lifecycle marketing froma platform and channel
perspective generally um spansSMS and mobile, email marketing.
If you've got a native app,maybe you're doing push
(02:45):
marketing or even in-appnotifications, those types of
things.
So lifecycle marketing sits kindof in between all the other
actions that you're taking.
And generally it's a series ofone-off things that you're doing
to try to move users throughyour buyer journey, uh, as well
as some automations, quite a fewautomations actually that you
(03:06):
can put in place to letlifecycle marketing do the work
for you while you work on otherthings, hopefully.
SPEAKER_04 (03:12):
So, what is the goal of life cycle marketing?
SPEAKER_01 (03:16):
Yeah, I mean, it depends on what stage you're
looking at.
So let's say common scenario isthat you are really, really good
at getting leads uh into yourecosystem.
But maybe you follow up with alead once or twice, and then
you've got new leads coming in,and you just the ones that are
starting to age out, you justdon't deal with anymore.
And so typically founders areleft with a decision like, do I
(03:39):
continue chasing leads that arecoming in or do I work with the
ones that are starting toconvert?
An example where you could uselifecycle marketing would be on
a um, you could build a sequenceor a flow that would take leads
that have not yet converted andactually present them with more
relevant information and contextabout your business, and maybe
you sprinkle in an offer or twowhile you're at it to try to
(04:01):
educate them and to get themmore aware of what you're
actually putting out into themarket and you let that do the
work for you.
But there's a whole bunch ofdifferent ways to use it.
I mean, there's there's aboutfive or six kind of core B2C
focused flows that you'd want toset up with lifecycle marketing
and a number with B2B as well.
But that would be a typical areathat you would look at with
(04:22):
lifecycle.
SPEAKER_04 (04:23):
Okay.
Now you mentioned flows in ourin our pre-conversation.
What is a flow?
SPEAKER_01 (04:33):
Yeah.
So a flow is basically it'sbasically a set of messages that
you're gonna put out to youraudience.
And again, depending on likewhat stage you're at, this is
gonna vary and in what you'reoffering.
That may be different.
But think of a flow as doingmultiple touch points against
(04:54):
your audience based on wherethey're at and you try to meet
them where you're at.
So that example that I just usedwhere you've got leads coming in
and maybe they're converting,but not at the rate you want
them to, you could put them intoa flow called something like
lead nurture flow.
And it's doing the work acrossmultiple touch points to push
them along the buyer's journey.
Or maybe you've got anonboarding flow after like
(05:16):
they've um signed up or donesomething with your with your
product.
And so a flow really is a fancyway of saying um that you're
running some set of multi-touchpoint sequencing um against your
audience as compared to like acampaign, which would be a
one-off, right?
And so, like when we think abouta campaign, which is kind of
(05:36):
where a lot of us start withlifecycle marketing, we might
not even know we're startinglifecycle marketing, but like an
email campaign or an SMScampaign, those are the starting
points for any good lifecyclemarketing program.
Those are generally kind ofone-dimensional, like you're
doing some amount of outreach topeople, but there's not a lot of
logic behind it.
So a flow is going toincorporate logic and it's also
(05:58):
going to have an entry point ora trigger that kind of puts
somebody into it, then it doesits work, and then there's going
to be some exit criteria thattells the flow, okay, this
person did the thing or didn'tdo the thing you you were hoping
them to do.
We're going to now pull them outof that so you don't keep
hitting them up with messaging.
SPEAKER_04 (06:17):
Yeah, that was going to be my next question.
How do we not annoy people whenthey're in that?
SPEAKER_01 (06:22):
Right.
Yeah.
So basically, like I generallythink that we I've rarely worked
with founders that are annoyingpeople to the point where it's a
detriment to their business.
Now, the big caveat andexception is there's almost
nothing that triggers me morethan getting put on a sequence,
especially a cold outreachsequence, which is different
than lifecycle marketing.
SPEAKER_04 (06:42):
So like cold outreach is definitely Yes,
those are so annoying.
I have a thousand of them thatare currently hitting my spam
folder.
SPEAKER_01 (06:49):
Yeah.
I and I market with spam too.
And and I I even post about thisand stuff on LinkedIn.
I'm like, founders, if you'regonna do outreach, which you
should do, right?
Like everybody needs to growtheir company.
I totally get it.
Like, I do cold outreach aswell.
Think about that though, as ait's a different thing.
And and especially if you'reputting somebody on a list that
you don't know or who hasn'traised their hand and said, Hey,
(07:10):
I'm interested in your productor service, don't spam them.
Like at a bare minimum, be adecent human and put an
unsubscribe link in.
If I see an unsubscribe link inan email from a founder, and
let's say the email just totallysucks, like it's either or it's
using a horrible AI, or it'sjust not good.
If there's an unsub link, I'lljust click the unsub link.
(07:32):
If there's none, it'sautomatically going to scream.
SPEAKER_04 (07:35):
Yes.
It annoys me so much.
Like, one, I didn't ask to be onthis list, you are just sending
it.
SPEAKER_01 (07:43):
It's like I understand that people, I mean,
you know, like you get desperateto find revenue and to connect
users to what you're doing, butthat is not the way.
By the way, the other thing thathappens with that type of
outreach, and this does relateto life cycle marketing, is
around deliverability.
So let's say you're a founderand you're doing, I don't know,
(08:06):
$10,000 a month in revenue, andyou are sending a bunch of cold
email, and then you're actuallykind of doing white hat tactics
around life cycle marketing, andyou've decided to build a lead
flow to try to take leads andeducate them a little bit more
before you really kind of pitchthem.
But you've already burned yourIP address by cold emailing
(08:28):
people and getting marked asspam.
I've seen nobody's gonna getyour emails when you send them.
Like you literally don't belike, and this is in the world
of deliverability, which kind oflives with inside life cycle
marketing as well.
SPEAKER_04 (08:40):
So yeah, that reminds me, someone asked me not
that long ago, should you have aseparate email for your cold
outreach as opposed to yourmarketing?
I would say yes, but I'm not theexpert.
What do you say?
SPEAKER_01 (08:52):
100,000 percent like LS.
So, okay, there's three, there'skind of three buckets that that
I would think about with emailin general, right?
Maybe even four.
There's like your personal emailor whatever you're doing with
your company, like I'm justcraget growth-minded, whatever,
right?
Then there's um there's coldoutreach, which really should be
(09:13):
put in its own little universe.
And there's a lot of coldoutreach tools that you can use
and ways you can pull lists andstuff.
That should be a totallyseparate infrastructure in email
address and even subdomain orprimary domain.
Because if you get blacklistedoff your primary domain, it
might take you months tobasically undo that process.
(09:34):
And we've actually helped someclients with that work.
It's really, really hard to getoff 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 mostlycommunicating with your clients
and with your leads, usuallythat'll be through, you know,
whether it's like a flow desk oran interval or HubSpot or
(09:57):
whatever CRM platform you'reusing, you'll run your lifecycle
marketing campaigns from that.
You'll probably even do your SMScampaigns from there.
And then the third bucket, andthis often gets overlooked, is
your triggered email.
And sometimes we see whathappens is that like, let's say
you have a lot of transactionsthat are happening and a lot of
like receipt notifications andother things about membership
(10:18):
and accounts.
Like if you run a community orsomething, you'll have a lot of
those emails.
Sometimes those get into spamland.
Um, and and you have tobasically unpack that then from
like your main CRM.
And so, really, I would thinkabout like when you start
thinking about kind of growingyour 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
(10:40):
like your CRM.
SPEAKER_04 (10:42):
Yeah.
That's I'm glad you brought thatup because I haven't ever
thought about like thosetransactional emails.
They're coming from somewhere.
SPEAKER_01 (10:50):
Yeah, usually they're like big platforms, and
so they generally do a reallygood job.
But I mean, there's so many coolnew AI products and stuff that
are out there.
Like there's so many likehomegrown products that are out
there that some of them aren'tgonna have, they're not gonna
give you the capability to kindof disconnect it from your main
domain or whatever.
And so you could get intotrouble.
(11:11):
Um, but yeah, it's it's kind ofbecoming a bigger deal.
SPEAKER_04 (11:14):
Yeah, that makes sense.
I want to talk a little bit moreabout those flows.
So, one thing that I do to makesure that I'm sending those
emails to people who actuallycare about um what I'm talking
about is I set up a lot ofaction sequences.
So, like people who clicked onthe link for the product but did
(11:37):
not click on I'll I'll usuallyuse one of my like social media
links um because so many likeGmail will just automatically
click on all of your links tosee if there's spam.
So your analytics aren't veryaccurate.
So the only way that I can thinkto really find people who are
(11:58):
truly interested and clicked isto remove anyone who clicked on
every single link from thatsegment.
And then I'm able to send thenext email to just people who
are interested in that productbut didn't convert.
SPEAKER_01 (12:14):
Yeah, that's really smart.
And we have spammers to thankfor that too, the fact that you
have to like go through theexercise and do it.
Yeah.
So, but I mean, you're like 99%,like you're way ahead of what
most people do because it takesa bunch of work to do that, as
you probably experienced.
Like to set it up and to buildthe sequence, to build the
(12:34):
segments, build the lists andbuild the segments smartly is is
kind of hard to do.
It's just time consuming.
Um, and so but yeah, the otherthing to look at is if you can
even get one layer deeper.
So, like oftentimes, so likewhen we're thinking about, for
example, a lead flow or a flowthat like is doing the work or a
(12:55):
sequence that's doing the workfor somebody that hasn't ever
purchased, those types ofmetrics work really well.
Like they haven't done anythingyet around revenue, and they
click, click, click, click,click.
So that's a bot, we're gonnalike totally ignore them.
Yeah, and we actually put theminto a sunset flow um or
something that is like smartlykind of unsubscribing them.
(13:16):
And then the the deeper you getinto life cycle marketing, the
more personalization andsophistication you can put into
your flows.
And so, like, if you think aboutnow you might have a user who's
purchased one time, but let'ssay you sell a membership, let's
say they need to buy your thingthree times before they're
really going to be primed to bea member.
(13:37):
Okay, now you can build anonboarding sequence that's based
on an action that was like theydid 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 amembership potentially.
So you might you might triggeran upsell campaign at that point
to try to like I like that.
SPEAKER_04 (13:58):
So I use Heartbeat for my community, and um, you
(15:04):
can build workflows directly inthere.
So one thing that I've startedto do is like when someone
finishes one product, they'vecompleted it, it'll like maybe a
week before that completion isis meant to happen, I'll start a
workflow about the next productthat would make sense for them
based off of that.
(15:25):
But you could do multiple touchpoints, like you were talking
about at the beginning.
So they could get a pop-up, aping, like a notification, an
email or a DM.
SPEAKER_01 (15:34):
That is super cool.
And that's where, like, yeah, Ithink a lot of magic can happen
there.
And as you kind of to your earlypoint around like, how do you
know you're not annoying peopleor whatever?
That's a good area to actually AB test some of this stuff.
Um, I one of the first thingsthat I'll do when I work with
companies on email marketingstrategies, just kind of on
(15:55):
lifecycle marketing strategy ingeneral.
And this is true for like reallyearly stage companies, like um,
as well as much later stagecompanies, you'd be surprised at
how little work they've put intothis in some cases.
In other cases, they've builtout everything, and like you
can't find opportunities, butalmost every time we find
(16:17):
opportunities, and what we'll dois we'll kind of look at like,
okay, what's your baseline?
Like, what are you doing rightnow, and like how is that
working?
And let's put some likeguardrails around like the
measurement of that.
And then one of the first thingsthat we'll do is we'll put
together something called likethe aggressive version of
whatever it was.
And so in your case, it might belike getting a little bit out of
your comfort zone, but for likeall the founders listening to
(16:40):
your podcast, it's like it'sreally hard for us to sense like
when we're not pushing hardenough or when we're pushing too
hard, and like you can actuallylet you can let mad people tell
you, right?
Because people that aren'thearing from you aren't gonna be
like, hey Sarah, like you shouldbe hitting me up more
frequently, like that almostnever happens.
(17:00):
But if you you're hammeringthem, you're gonna tell me more,
you know what I mean?
And so, um, but it's somewherein 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 versionor like a variant of whatever
you've got currently running,just duplicate it, and then
double the outreach, you'lllearn pretty quickly.
(17:24):
Like, did that did it move theneedle at all?
Like, are people starting tocomplain?
And what what I always tell uhfounders is like, if you're not
hearing complaints and you'renot seeing a degradation in like
your not necessarily your sendquality or your deliverability,
because that would be bad.
But like if you're not seeing asmall increase in unsub ratios
(17:45):
compared to baseline, youprobably have a little bit more
room to grow within yourexisting audience in other makes
sense.
SPEAKER_04 (17:54):
Yeah.
So an A B an A B test on that,um, something because they don't
typically tell you if you'regonna computing them.
Yeah, um so something that I dois I'll just put a little like
click here if you're notinterested in in this product
(18:15):
and I won't email you about itagain.
And it just puts them on a list,like not interested in this
instead of unsubscribing.
SPEAKER_01 (18:21):
And it disarms them too.
So like they could come backeven relationships.
SPEAKER_04 (18:26):
They're not gone forever, but they have the
option to just be like, I'm notthat is not what I need right
now.
SPEAKER_01 (18:33):
Totally.
Absolutely.
That's good stuff.
SPEAKER_04 (18:36):
So it's just like adding a little bit of consent
into each step of it.
Now you said that there's sixmain flows every company should
have.
We've talked about a couple ofthem.
What which ones are we missing?
SPEAKER_01 (18:53):
So the big ones, and I go between five and six, but
for B2C, I would say that theabsolutely critical flows are a
lead nurture flow.
So this is where you've alreadyspent money and time trying to
acquire customers, but theyhaven't they haven't taken that
first step.
And so that's like always,always an opportunity that I
(19:15):
see, especially the earlierstage you go.
Because again, like we're busy,founders are super busy, and
like you're really gonna chasethe leads that are like warm or
hot instead of kind of dealingwith the ones that aren't.
But it the ones that aren't,they just might need a little
bit more context, or maybethey're shopping around a little
bit more.
So lead nurture flow, onboardingflow.
So, and again, this is gonnavary based on your business and
(19:38):
stuff, but your onboarding flowis really gonna go and work in
parallel with your productonboarding.
And so think of your onboardingflow as like your flow that kind
of lives in the stages that yourcustomer is going to be going
through while they're onboardingor as they just got through
onboarding, and you're trying toreconnect the value that they're
(20:01):
experiencing in the product in alike, you know, in a in an
offline manner or whatever, likethrough email and SMS.
So onboarding flow is key.
Onboarding is directly tied toretention.
And so, like what we found isthat if if you've got a good
product and you don't haveamazing retention, sometimes
tweaking onboarding is thefastest.
(20:23):
Usually, see, changingonboarding is the fastest way to
kind of increase retention byeither personalizing the
experience a little bit more orexplaining the value a little
bit more.
It doesn't always work, but youcan couple that with email and
SMS.
Um, the third key flow would bearound abandoned cart.
And a lot of people like justassume abandoned cart is just
(20:45):
e-commerce, but it's not.
So if you run service-basedretail or really anything where
somebody started to go down thepath of monetization and then
stopped, if you have if you havea way to kind of see that those
events were happening and you'vegot that person's info, you can
come back with a reallycompelling offer or another
(21:05):
touch point that could workwell.
SPEAKER_04 (21:07):
Can we pause there for one second?
Because I can see how that wouldwork too, with like a lot of the
people who listen to the showare consultants, they're service
providers.
And maybe you sent a proposaland just got ghosted.
So you can use this abandonedcart, like a version of it to
reinvigorate that conversation.
SPEAKER_01 (21:29):
It's actually for B2B, it's an amazing, like it's
a really amazing way to automatethe touch points.
And so you and you have to do itin a non-obnoxious way.
And it has to, I the generalrule is like it always has to be
value add.
So if you don't have anything tosay, don't don't say anything.
But you should probably havesomething interesting to say if
(21:52):
you're trying to sell something.
It may be that the person's justit's not the right time or
whatever.
And so combinations of likerhetorical questions um plus uh
things like case studies orsocial proof tend to work really
well.
And in the goal for abandonedcart um with B2B, at least the
my goal typically is to eitheruh qualify or unqualify somebody
(22:16):
because I don't want to keepchasing somebody that is like
price shopping with with someother you know company that I
just can't compete with, right?
Because we just we're likeworking on different like sets
of value for the for the likewhat we focus on is different
and monetize is different.
So yeah, that's a really, reallygood one for a B2B.
(22:38):
Fourth one would be an upsellflow.
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 additionalvalue on top of what they
purchased, with um, you know,I've got clients that maybe
one's got a um, you know, a setof um uh like health and beauty
(23:05):
spas and salons.
And so if somebody comes in fora treatment, upselling them onto
a product that's relevant tolike the treatment they just had
is really compelling.
And a lot of that happens instudio, but much of it also does
happen seven days or 14 daysafter they came in in person for
whatever they were doing.
Um, and then another one that'soften overlooked, and then I'll
(23:27):
pause, is Sunset Flow.
You know, Sunset Flow is likeit's basically the email.
Flow that you put people into umwhen they're not responding to
anything, and then you take themoff your list.
SPEAKER_04 (23:39):
Okay.
I have questions about thatbecause I haven't heard of it.
Real quick though, I want to gothat one flow backwards.
Yeah.
Because I want to touch on whatyou said.
Seven to 14 days, they usuallycome back needing that.
And I want to talk about howthat is in like the B2B world
too.
SPEAKER_03 (23:59):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_04 (23:59):
Because like in my world, I'll sell a gateway
offer.
SPEAKER_03 (24:02):
Yep.
SPEAKER_04 (24:03):
And if it doesn't upsell on like the review call
into a main, a high-ticketoffer, that's where it usually
happens.
Just like in the salon, theyusually buy the product right
after their treatment.
But if that doesn't happen, thatseven to 14 days also gives them
time to sit in that pain alittle bit.
(24:23):
They tried to solve the problemthemselves.
They've learned that they can't.
So that's also a great time tocome back and reignite that
conversation because they've hadthe time to learn like that
isn't actually something I wouldwant to do.
And now I feel awkward goingback to them.
But if you go back to them, it'sdifferent.
SPEAKER_01 (24:42):
Well, yeah, it is.
And so it's like, and that'swhere I think you're the
important piece is kind ofunderstanding like what's the
natural evolution of like theprocess and what are the time
frames.
So there's no hard and fastrules with this stuff.
But it's funny because um, likeoftentimes I'll I will get a
(25:03):
lead that it comes in.
I get two types of leads thatcome in.
One, they're just like someevent happened and they need
usually like a marketer gotfired or left or something, and
they just they desperately needhelp.
And if they don't get help rightnow, they're in big trouble.
Um, and the other is that likethey're in this explorer mode
(25:25):
where they're kind of like maybeopportunistically looking at
what else is out there on themarket.
And for those, so the for thefirst one, it's a totally
different game, right?
SPEAKER_04 (25:33):
Like it's a different easy, it's like okay,
let's go.
SPEAKER_01 (25:36):
It wins like does our price and value align to
what you have, yes or no?
And it's like we can get thatdone quickly.
But the ones that are kind of inexplorer mode, if if they go
dark for a couple weeks, I knowgenerally that either they're
really busy or they're shoppingaround for price.
And so what I try to do in myautomations and my follow-ups is
(26:00):
address those two points.
Do you need more time?
Is there anything I can helpwith in the meantime?
Um, or is there anything I cando to make my bid more
competitive?
Um, and I I did a lot more ofthat with my last business, and
I don't do a lot of that with mycurrent business.
It's just not how we tend tomonetize, or it's not the type
(26:20):
of clients that we wouldtypically work with.
SPEAKER_04 (26:22):
Yeah, they usually end up being kind of hard to
work with when you have to youhate to admit that.
SPEAKER_01 (26:28):
Like sell yourself, like putting it that way.
It's like the more you have tosell yourself, almost like it's
not to say that they're not anideal customer or not
potentially an ideal customer,but it's very rare, at least in
consulting, where you findsomebody that you have kind of a
(26:48):
difficult, you know, startingset of conversations with, and
you keep getting asked for moreand more stuff, and you know
it's happening behind thescenes.
And if you're in a position tojust let that stuff go, you just
put some of that into your whatwould be the abandoned part
sequence, basically, and youjust let the system do the work
and ask those questions.
(27:09):
And if they come back, awesome.
But meanwhile, while that'srunning, you're not spending
time on it, you're focused onother things that are more
important in your business.
SPEAKER_04 (27:17):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, in in my world, usually ifthey didn't upsell from the
gateway offer, it's they thoughtthey could execute it
internally.
Um, it's rarely that they'reactually looking at other
partners.
If you built out the strategyfor them, they're gonna want to
(27:38):
work with you on it.
It's that they think that theycan do it internally.
SPEAKER_03 (27:42):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_04 (27:42):
So then, like for consultants who are listening to
this right now, that's those arethe objections that you would
need to address in the follow-upon that.
SPEAKER_01 (27:52):
How do you typically address it in your current
situation?
SPEAKER_04 (27:56):
Yeah.
So for me, I'll check in andI'll say, I know that at this
point that you should have hitthis milestone.
And I just wanted to check inand see if you were able to
accomplish that.
SPEAKER_03 (28:07):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_04 (28:08):
Just a little check-in and see if did you
actually execute it or is itjust sitting on your in your
drive right now, consuming yourmind?
SPEAKER_01 (28:17):
Yeah, I feel like listening to that, I I'm
probably like a terrible leadfor a lot of companies because
I'll I'm kind of a tire kicker.
Like, I try a lot of differentproducts and stuff, and so I'll
go into onboarding and then andthen I realized like, oh man, I
I'm not probably not going touse this.
And I'm getting the emails, I'mseeing the emails.
I'm like, I really just got toreply to the founder and be
like, no.
(28:37):
But sometimes you just replyback and like, hey, not
interested right now, andthey'll just get you off the
list.
But yeah, probably not a greatlead.
SPEAKER_04 (28:45):
No, I mean, absolutely.
If you say you're notinterested, I'm bouncing.
It's basically in the B2B world,it's follow up until they tell
you not to.
SPEAKER_01 (28:54):
Yeah, exactly.
Very cool.
SPEAKER_04 (28:58):
So the last one on our list was well, actually,
before we get into the flowmappings, I wanted to learn more
about the sunsetting.
SPEAKER_01 (29:07):
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 thesunset action, but it's like a
sunset.
Basically, like when the sungoes down, that lead is gone.
And so you you strive to getpeople off of your email list
(29:27):
and off of your SMS list so thatyou have a smaller list size,
it's easier to manage, it'sprobably cheaper depending on
what platform you're using, andyour open and click-through
rates go up if people areengaging.
So the Sunset Flow is a usuallya two or three email and SMS
sequence that says somethinglike, you know, hey Sarah, it
(29:49):
looks like you haven't read ouremails for a while.
We get it, like whatever,whatever.
Um, at company name, we reallytake um, you know, we take our
lists seriously and we want tomake sure that you're getting
value from what you see.
Keep me subscribed or justignore this.
We'll send you one more emailand then we'll unsubscribe you.
(30:10):
And if somebody clicks the keepme subscribed, actually, if
somebody opens the email, thenthey'll stay subscribed.
But if they click keep mesubscribed, then we know like
there's some level of engagementthere.
If they open it and don't clickand then they get the second
email and they don't click, wejust take them off the list.
And so we'll say, you know, hey,sir, I was promised.
We've officially taken you offof our list.
(30:31):
This will be the last time youhear from us from now.
Um, if you're still interestedin receiving emails from us, you
can just click this button toresubscribe.
And a lot of people end upfalling into this.
And it's really hard, especiallyfor um, especially for folks
listening that are dealing withend consumers, it's hard to say
goodbye to somebody that youthink might be like a lead or
(30:53):
whatever down the road.
But the faster you getcomfortable doing that, the
cleaner your list is going to beand the more manageable it's
gonna be.
And you can do that in anautomated way.
And it also keeps yourdeliverable deliverability
really high.
SPEAKER_04 (31:05):
Yeah, that matters so much.
So the when I was talking aboutthose bots that click on like
automatically open and click allof your links, and you said
you'd add them to the sunsetflow.
How would that work with thissince it's automatically doing
it anyway?
SPEAKER_01 (31:22):
I would probably I think for the automated bots,
maybe you're maybe you're goingto put them into their own
sequence and ask them to replywith why to the email if they
want to stay on it becausethey're just you just know that
(31:44):
you just know that they're bots.
And if they don't say yes, thenyou just get rid of them.
Now, if it's the but again, yourcriteria is that they clicked on
every single link, right?
That's how you know that it's abot.
SPEAKER_04 (31:55):
That's yeah, that's how I use it.
SPEAKER_01 (31:56):
So it's a great way.
Actually, like I hadn't thoughtof that until you presented that
scenario.
And I think I think the way youdo it is like should be a best
practice.
And so like I I'll probablyborrow that from you, which is
awesome.
So thank you.
I would say, yeah, like ifthey're if it's a bot and you
know it's a bot because theyclicked on all these things,
have them reply yes if they wantto stay on it.
And if they don't reply yes andthey're gone.
SPEAKER_04 (32:19):
Yeah, that makes sense.
My um, because I uh do a lot ofone-to-one, my favorite way to
to get engagement and movepeople to the next phase is to
ask them to reply and if ifthey're interested in the
product, and then I would movethem over to the next email.
Um, and that has helped too alot with like the automatic
(32:42):
clicking, but also then we canstart a conversation, they can
ask any questions they have.
SPEAKER_01 (32:47):
So that means I love email for that, like in asking
not necessarily like I thinksurveys have been a little
played out, but like asking arhetorical question in an email,
just asking a regular, like justlike it's just one-to-one, it's
not a big deal, and then seeingif you can get somebody to reply
back, and then like beingpersonalized on kind of how and
once you get to that point wherethere is a reply, you're you're
(33:09):
not these are not put into flowsanymore, right?
SPEAKER_04 (33:11):
This is like no, yeah, it's just a conversation.
SPEAKER_01 (33:14):
Exactly.
So you can't automateeverything.
SPEAKER_04 (33:17):
No, and it makes more sense to move that
conversation to that one-to-oneif depending on what your
product or or offer is.
SPEAKER_01 (33:25):
Absolutely.
SPEAKER_04 (33:27):
Okay, now that we covered that, let's talk about
the flow mappings.
How does that work?
And how do you drive moreconversions?
SPEAKER_01 (33:35):
Yeah, okay.
So think about when you thinkabout your overall strategy for
lifecycle marketing, there'skind of three buckets.
There's like what is the what isthe strategy?
Like, what are you actuallytrying to accomplish?
Then there's what are thedifferent flows that are
appropriate for my business?
(33:55):
Then there's like within a flow,what are the things you're
doing?
And then what's the contentgoing to be?
And so think about the flowmapping as basically the
strategy for that part of yourbusiness that you're trying to
work on.
And so I'll share my screen fora second here.
I can show you um, I can showyou just a sample that I have
(34:19):
here.
Um, and this is for a foodbrand.
Um let me make my screen bigger.
So this is sorry for the poordesign here, but basically, like
I abstracted this data from thisis real data from flow mapping
that we've done um with withthis partner of ours.
And so what you do with a flowmap is you say, okay, like what
(34:40):
is the overview or strategy thatI'm trying to accomplish here?
And so this is for a leadnurture for a D2C food brand.
And what we're trying to do istarget health conscious
professionals ages 25 to 45 whoexpressed interest in meal
delivery but have not yet madetheir first purchase.
So that's like the startingpoint, right?
Like that's the trigger andcriteria.
Okay, now what are we trying todo?
(35:02):
We have this$25 offer, andagain, your offer and all the
people listening, like youroffers are going to be totally
different.
But in this case, it's a$25 offyour first box that we can get,
which is pretty typical in likethe D2C food space.
And we've got eight touch pointsthat we've put together that run
over basically like a seven to10 day window.
(35:24):
And so what the flow map does isit forces you to think about
what are what's the goal ofthis?
How long do I want it to runfor?
How many touch points am I goingto have with a customer?
And then within each touchpoint, what am I actually trying
to do?
So, what we're looking at hereis the first one is step one,
it's an email that gets sentimmediately, basically after
(35:45):
somebody signed up but hasn'tlike purchased yet.
SPEAKER_04 (35:48):
Okay.
SPEAKER_01 (35:49):
The goal is to establish a brand connection and
set expectations whileintroducing them to like your
core value prop of the business.
The key messaging is welcome tothis food community, acknowledge
their health consciouslifestyle, acknowledge that
they're a busy professional orwhatever, they don't have time
to cook.
So these are like brandaesthetics that you bake into
it.
(36:09):
And then what is the call toaction?
The call to action is explorethis week's menu.
And you put one of these minimaps 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-offcompany 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 forfree, and you can actually
create these mappings and stuffjust.
(36:30):
Oh, that's cool.
It's super cool.
But in the olden days, likebefore we built that, we
actually built that because wewere doing so much of this
manually for clients.
We would build this in like FigJam or like in Miro or like some
other visual like collaborationboard.
So you don't have to use thisproduct, but if you want to use
it, like you feel free to.
But basically, you want to mapout the strategy visually so you
(36:53):
understand what you're doing andthen what those delays are going
to be.
So in here, you see it's likeone day later, you get this
quick nutrition facts set.
A day later, after that, thereal cost of healthy eating, et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And this is this is like thebones of a flow map.
And then, like, from the flowmap, what you end up doing is
you you then build out the fullcontent.
And so if you try to build theseflows, and let's say you're you
(37:17):
have to build like eight emailsand SMSs, it's like pretty
overwhelming because you'relike, where do I start?
Yeah, so the whole one justgives you the starting point,
and then you build the contenton top of that, then you put it
in your system and you launch.
So that that's my wayoversimplified version one.
SPEAKER_04 (37:32):
Yeah.
So is there a benchmark on howmany touch points you should
have?
SPEAKER_01 (37:39):
Yeah.
So it really, it really dependson your business.
And so it's hard to give like areal benchmark on this.
It actually, the LLMs are reallygood at giving you a sense of
like what your customerthreshold should be.
So if you're in Chat GPT or atlike cloud or whatever, you can
give it a scenario and be like,you know, I'm a XYZ type
(38:00):
company.
This is a you know, onboardingflow that I want to build.
So you know the nomenclature.
So get, you know, and feed itsome some data and it will come
back with recommendations.
But generally, I would say ouraverage flows are anywhere from
six to 10 or 12 touch points,with the exception of an
(38:20):
evergreen flow.
And this is probably the sixthkey flow that I would say is is
really important.
Evergreen flows typically willbe something that is using your
evergreen content, like you'realways on value add content that
you can kind of sprinkle out topeople while they're kind of
engaged with with your audienceor with whatever you're selling.
(38:41):
And um, that might be 50 touchpoints over six months, right?
Like those can be, you can justkeep adding on to the end of
those evergreen flows.
SPEAKER_04 (38:49):
Okay.
And evergreen is just to keepthem engaged until they're
ready.
SPEAKER_01 (38:56):
It think of it as like your auto follow-up that
has like some some custom stufffor them.
Some, you know, for my company,the stuff we would do would be
like it would be customer casestudies, it'd be some social
proof.
For B2B, it's a lot of socialproof.
Um, it might be uh edge cases,wins that you've seen, other
(39:18):
interesting things in theindustry.
It's just a way to kind of havea like low stress touch point
that they probably know isautomated, but it should add
value either way.
It's not something that'ssupposed to be spammy.
And so if you're running out ofcontent ideas for Evergreen,
then maybe it's time to stop.
SPEAKER_04 (39:37):
Okay.
Uh, that makes sense.
So can you share the link tothat tool you were telling me
about?
I just checked, I don't have it.
Um, because that sounds amazing.
And how can everyone connectwith you and work with you?
SPEAKER_01 (39:54):
Well, thank you so much.
Um, this was awesome.
Thanks for nerding out onlifecycle marketing.
SPEAKER_04 (39:58):
Um I love it.
SPEAKER_01 (40:00):
Yeah, it's I think it's like the it's like I always
tell founders it like yournumber one priority is to get
people interested in yourproduct.
So you have to do that first.
And then the next thing usuallyis like figuring out how to
connect people to your value.
And and so that's wherelifecycle comes in.
Um, I'm Craig atgrowthminded.co.
You can visit my website,growthminder.co, and I'm on
LinkedIn um quite a bit.
(40:21):
Uh, you just search for me onLinkedIn.
Craig the Dingerline and you'llfind me there.
And then the product for doingthese flow mappings and and
flows is called lifecycleos.com.
Um, so any of those places wouldbe awesome.
SPEAKER_04 (40:34):
Okay, cool.
Thank you.
SPEAKER_01 (40:36):
Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_04 (40:38):
If this episode made things feel a little more
doable, I'd love to help youtake the next step with the
booked out blueprint.
It's a practical, low pressuresession to clarify your offers,
your marketing, and whatactually moves the needle.
You can book yours through thelink in the show notes.
You don't have to figure it outalone.
Welcome to I am Art.
I'm doing all block.
This show is made for soloconsultants who want to get
booked out without burning out.
If you've ever thought, I justwant that to feel easier, you're
not alone.
Around here, we focus on simple,sustainable growth that actually
fits into your life so growthfeels doable instead of
overwhelming.
SPEAKER_01 (00:55):
I'm Craig Zingerlein.
I'm the founder of a companycalled Growth Minded, and we run
performance marketing, lifecyclemarketing, and special ops
campaigns for SMBs up throughPE-backed companies.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, andso this is, I guess, my fifth or
sixth company overall.
And I spent much of my career inum started as a software
(01:18):
engineer and then was a productmanager for a really long time,
and then realized after buildingprobably a hundred websites and
products, that if you can'tactually get distribution
working and get people buyingwhatever you're selling, whether
it's a product or service, thenyou're basically gonna be in a
tough spot.
And so about uh about 10 yearsago or so, I started getting
(01:39):
into the field of marketing andgrowth marketing in particular.
And that's really where I'vebeen for the last 10 years or
so.
SPEAKER_04 (01:45):
Nice.
And today we are talking aboutlife cycle marketing,
specifically in email.
So, first for anybody, because alot of people who listen to this
show, they're not in marketing,they're founders.
Um, what is life cyclemarketing?
SPEAKER_01 (02:03):
It's a good question.
So, life cycle marketing, thinkof it as an engine that you can
set up that's running behind thescenes that sits between your
customer acquisition, so whatyou're doing out in the market
to try to find customers and getthem interested in your product
or service, and then connectingthem to their opportunities for
(02:24):
you to monetize them.
And so that's monetization, it'sretention, it's loyalty, it's uh
initial purchase, it'smembership sales.
And so lifecycle marketing froma platform and channel
perspective generally um spansSMS and mobile, email marketing.
If you've got a native app,maybe you're doing push
(02:45):
marketing or even in-appnotifications, those types of
things.
So lifecycle marketing sits kindof in between all the other
actions that you're taking.
And generally it's a series ofone-off things that you're doing
to try to move users throughyour buyer journey, uh, as well
as some automations, quite a fewautomations actually that you
(03:06):
can put in place to letlifecycle marketing do the work
for you while you work on otherthings, hopefully.
SPEAKER_04 (03:12):
So, what is the goal of life cycle marketing?
SPEAKER_01 (03:16):
Yeah, I mean, it depends on what stage you're
looking at.
So let's say common scenario isthat you are really, really good
at getting leads uh into yourecosystem.
But maybe you follow up with alead once or twice, and then
you've got new leads coming in,and you just the ones that are
starting to age out, you justdon't deal with anymore.
And so typically founders areleft with a decision like, do I
(03:39):
continue chasing leads that arecoming in or do I work with the
ones that are starting toconvert?
An example where you could uselifecycle marketing would be on
a um, you could build a sequenceor a flow that would take leads
that have not yet converted andactually present them with more
relevant information and contextabout your business, and maybe
you sprinkle in an offer or twowhile you're at it to try to
(04:01):
educate them and to get themmore aware of what you're
actually putting out into themarket and you let that do the
work for you.
But there's a whole bunch ofdifferent ways to use it.
I mean, there's there's aboutfive or six kind of core B2C
focused flows that you'd want toset up with lifecycle marketing
and a number with B2B as well.
But that would be a typical areathat you would look at with
(04:22):
lifecycle.
SPEAKER_04 (04:23):
Okay.
Now you mentioned flows in ourin our pre-conversation.
What is a flow?
SPEAKER_01 (04:33):
Yeah.
So a flow is basically it'sbasically a set of messages that
you're gonna put out to youraudience.
And again, depending on likewhat stage you're at, this is
gonna vary and in what you'reoffering.
That may be different.
But think of a flow as doingmultiple touch points against
(04:54):
your audience based on wherethey're at and you try to meet
them where you're at.
So that example that I just usedwhere you've got leads coming in
and maybe they're converting,but not at the rate you want
them to, you could put them intoa flow called something like
lead nurture flow.
And it's doing the work acrossmultiple touch points to push
them along the buyer's journey.
Or maybe you've got anonboarding flow after like
(05:16):
they've um signed up or donesomething with your with your
product.
And so a flow really is a fancyway of saying um that you're
running some set of multi-touchpoint sequencing um against your
audience as compared to like acampaign, which would be a
one-off, right?
And so, like when we think abouta campaign, which is kind of
(05:36):
where a lot of us start withlifecycle marketing, we might
not even know we're startinglifecycle marketing, but like an
email campaign or an SMScampaign, those are the starting
points for any good lifecyclemarketing program.
Those are generally kind ofone-dimensional, like you're
doing some amount of outreach topeople, but there's not a lot of
logic behind it.
So a flow is going toincorporate logic and it's also
(05:58):
going to have an entry point ora trigger that kind of puts
somebody into it, then it doesits work, and then there's going
to be some exit criteria thattells the flow, okay, this
person did the thing or didn'tdo the thing you you were hoping
them to do.
We're going to now pull them outof that so you don't keep
hitting them up with messaging.
SPEAKER_04 (06:17):
Yeah, that was going to be my next question.
How do we not annoy people whenthey're in that?
SPEAKER_01 (06:22):
Right.
Yeah.
So basically, like I generallythink that we I've rarely worked
with founders that are annoyingpeople to the point where it's a
detriment to their business.
Now, the big caveat andexception is there's almost
nothing that triggers me morethan getting put on a sequence,
especially a cold outreachsequence, which is different
than lifecycle marketing.
SPEAKER_04 (06:42):
So like cold outreach is definitely Yes,
those are so annoying.
I have a thousand of them thatare currently hitting my spam
folder.
SPEAKER_01 (06:49):
Yeah.
I and I market with spam too.
And and I I even post about thisand stuff on LinkedIn.
I'm like, founders, if you'regonna do outreach, which you
should do, right?
Like everybody needs to growtheir company.
I totally get it.
Like, I do cold outreach aswell.
Think about that though, as ait's a different thing.
And and especially if you'reputting somebody on a list that
you don't know or who hasn'traised their hand and said, Hey,
(07:10):
I'm interested in your productor service, don't spam them.
Like at a bare minimum, be adecent human and put an
unsubscribe link in.
If I see an unsubscribe link inan email from a founder, and
let's say the email just totallysucks, like it's either or it's
using a horrible AI, or it'sjust not good.
If there's an unsub link, I'lljust click the unsub link.
(07:32):
If there's none, it'sautomatically going to scream.
SPEAKER_04 (07:35):
Yes.
It annoys me so much.
Like, one, I didn't ask to be onthis list, you are just sending
it.
SPEAKER_01 (07:43):
It's like I understand that people, I mean,
you know, like you get desperateto find revenue and to connect
users to what you're doing, butthat is not the way.
By the way, the other thing thathappens with that type of
outreach, and this does relateto life cycle marketing, is
around deliverability.
So let's say you're a founderand you're doing, I don't know,
(08:06):
$10,000 a month in revenue, andyou are sending a bunch of cold
email, and then you're actuallykind of doing white hat tactics
around life cycle marketing, andyou've decided to build a lead
flow to try to take leads andeducate them a little bit more
before you really kind of pitchthem.
But you've already burned yourIP address by cold emailing
(08:28):
people and getting marked asspam.
I've seen nobody's gonna getyour emails when you send them.
Like you literally don't belike, and this is in the world
of deliverability, which kind oflives with inside life cycle
marketing as well.
SPEAKER_04 (08:40):
So yeah, that reminds me, someone asked me not
that long ago, should you have aseparate email for your cold
outreach as opposed to yourmarketing?
I would say yes, but I'm not theexpert.
What do you say?
SPEAKER_01 (08:52):
100,000 percent like LS.
So, okay, there's three, there'skind of three buckets that that
I would think about with emailin general, right?
Maybe even four.
There's like your personal emailor whatever you're doing with
your company, like I'm justcraget growth-minded, whatever,
right?
Then there's um there's coldoutreach, which really should be
(09:13):
put in its own little universe.
And there's a lot of coldoutreach tools that you can use
and ways you can pull lists andstuff.
That should be a totallyseparate infrastructure in email
address and even subdomain orprimary domain.
Because if you get blacklistedoff your primary domain, it
might take you months tobasically undo that process.
(09:34):
And we've actually helped someclients with that work.
It's really, really hard to getoff 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 mostlycommunicating with your clients
and with your leads, usuallythat'll be through, you know,
whether it's like a flow desk oran interval or HubSpot or
(09:57):
whatever CRM platform you'reusing, you'll run your lifecycle
marketing campaigns from that.
You'll probably even do your SMScampaigns from there.
And then the third bucket, andthis often gets overlooked, is
your triggered email.
And sometimes we see whathappens is that like, let's say
you have a lot of transactionsthat are happening and a lot of
like receipt notifications andother things about membership
(10:18):
and accounts.
Like if you run a community orsomething, you'll have a lot of
those emails.
Sometimes those get into spamland.
Um, and and you have tobasically unpack that then from
like your main CRM.
And so, really, I would thinkabout like when you start
thinking about kind of growingyour 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
(10:40):
like your CRM.
SPEAKER_04 (10:42):
Yeah.
That's I'm glad you brought thatup because I haven't ever
thought about like thosetransactional emails.
They're coming from somewhere.
SPEAKER_01 (10:50):
Yeah, usually they're like big platforms, and
so they generally do a reallygood job.
But I mean, there's so many coolnew AI products and stuff that
are out there.
Like there's so many likehomegrown products that are out
there that some of them aren'tgonna have, they're not gonna
give you the capability to kindof disconnect it from your main
domain or whatever.
And so you could get intotrouble.
(11:11):
Um, but yeah, it's it's kind ofbecoming a bigger deal.
SPEAKER_04 (11:14):
Yeah, that makes sense.
I want to talk a little bit moreabout those flows.
So, one thing that I do to makesure that I'm sending those
emails to people who actuallycare about um what I'm talking
about is I set up a lot ofaction sequences.
So, like people who clicked onthe link for the product but did
(11:37):
not click on I'll I'll usuallyuse one of my like social media
links um because so many likeGmail will just automatically
click on all of your links tosee if there's spam.
So your analytics aren't veryaccurate.
So the only way that I can thinkto really find people who are
(11:58):
truly interested and clicked isto remove anyone who clicked on
every single link from thatsegment.
And then I'm able to send thenext email to just people who
are interested in that productbut didn't convert.
SPEAKER_01 (12:14):
Yeah, that's really smart.
And we have spammers to thankfor that too, the fact that you
have to like go through theexercise and do it.
Yeah.
So, but I mean, you're like 99%,like you're way ahead of what
most people do because it takesa bunch of work to do that, as
you probably experienced.
Like to set it up and to buildthe sequence, to build the
(12:34):
segments, build the lists andbuild the segments smartly is is
kind of hard to do.
It's just time consuming.
Um, and so but yeah, the otherthing to look at is if you can
even get one layer deeper.
So, like oftentimes, so likewhen we're thinking about, for
example, a lead flow or a flowthat like is doing the work or a
(12:55):
sequence that's doing the workfor somebody that hasn't ever
purchased, those types ofmetrics work really well.
Like they haven't done anythingyet around revenue, and they
click, click, click, click,click.
So that's a bot, we're gonnalike totally ignore them.
Yeah, and we actually put theminto a sunset flow um or
something that is like smartlykind of unsubscribing them.
(13:16):
And then the the deeper you getinto life cycle marketing, the
more personalization andsophistication you can put into
your flows.
And so, like, if you think aboutnow you might have a user who's
purchased one time, but let'ssay you sell a membership, let's
say they need to buy your thingthree times before they're
really going to be primed to bea member.
(13:37):
Okay, now you can build anonboarding sequence that's based
on an action that was like theydid 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 amembership potentially.
So you might you might triggeran upsell campaign at that point
to try to like I like that.
SPEAKER_04 (13:58):
So I use Heartbeat for my community, and um, you
(15:04):
can build workflows directly inthere.
So one thing that I've startedto do is like when someone
finishes one product, they'vecompleted it, it'll like maybe a
week before that completion isis meant to happen, I'll start a
workflow about the next productthat would make sense for them
based off of that.
(15:25):
But you could do multiple touchpoints, like you were talking
about at the beginning.
So they could get a pop-up, aping, like a notification, an
email or a DM.
SPEAKER_01 (15:34):
That is super cool.
And that's where, like, yeah, Ithink a lot of magic can happen
there.
And as you kind of to your earlypoint around like, how do you
know you're not annoying peopleor whatever?
That's a good area to actually AB test some of this stuff.
Um, I one of the first thingsthat I'll do when I work with
companies on email marketingstrategies, just kind of on
(15:55):
lifecycle marketing strategy ingeneral.
And this is true for like reallyearly stage companies, like um,
as well as much later stagecompanies, you'd be surprised at
how little work they've put intothis in some cases.
In other cases, they've builtout everything, and like you
can't find opportunities, butalmost every time we find
(16:17):
opportunities, and what we'll dois we'll kind of look at like,
okay, what's your baseline?
Like, what are you doing rightnow, and like how is that
working?
And let's put some likeguardrails around like the
measurement of that.
And then one of the first thingsthat we'll do is we'll put
together something called likethe aggressive version of
whatever it was.
And so in your case, it might belike getting a little bit out of
your comfort zone, but for likeall the founders listening to
(16:40):
your podcast, it's like it'sreally hard for us to sense like
when we're not pushing hardenough or when we're pushing too
hard, and like you can actuallylet you can let mad people tell
you, right?
Because people that aren'thearing from you aren't gonna be
like, hey Sarah, like you shouldbe hitting me up more
frequently, like that almostnever happens.
(17:00):
But if you you're hammeringthem, you're gonna tell me more,
you know what I mean?
And so, um, but it's somewherein 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 versionor like a variant of whatever
you've got currently running,just duplicate it, and then
double the outreach, you'lllearn pretty quickly.
(17:24):
Like, did that did it move theneedle at all?
Like, are people starting tocomplain?
And what what I always tell uhfounders is like, if you're not
hearing complaints and you'renot seeing a degradation in like
your not necessarily your sendquality or your deliverability,
because that would be bad.
But like if you're not seeing asmall increase in unsub ratios
(17:45):
compared to baseline, youprobably have a little bit more
room to grow within yourexisting audience in other makes
sense.
SPEAKER_04 (17:54):
Yeah.
So an A B an A B test on that,um, something because they don't
typically tell you if you'regonna computing them.
Yeah, um so something that I dois I'll just put a little like
click here if you're notinterested in in this product
(18:15):
and I won't email you about itagain.
And it just puts them on a list,like not interested in this
instead of unsubscribing.
SPEAKER_01 (18:21):
And it disarms them too.
So like they could come backeven relationships.
SPEAKER_04 (18:26):
They're not gone forever, but they have the
option to just be like, I'm notthat is not what I need right
now.
SPEAKER_01 (18:33):
Totally.
Absolutely.
That's good stuff.
SPEAKER_04 (18:36):
So it's just like adding a little bit of consent
into each step of it.
Now you said that there's sixmain flows every company should
have.
We've talked about a couple ofthem.
What which ones are we missing?
SPEAKER_01 (18:53):
So the big ones, and I go between five and six, but
for B2C, I would say that theabsolutely critical flows are a
lead nurture flow.
So this is where you've alreadyspent money and time trying to
acquire customers, but theyhaven't they haven't taken that
first step.
And so that's like always,always an opportunity that I
(19:15):
see, especially the earlierstage you go.
Because again, like we're busy,founders are super busy, and
like you're really gonna chasethe leads that are like warm or
hot instead of kind of dealingwith the ones that aren't.
But it the ones that aren't,they just might need a little
bit more context, or maybethey're shopping around a little
bit more.
So lead nurture flow, onboardingflow.
So, and again, this is gonnavary based on your business and
(19:38):
stuff, but your onboarding flowis really gonna go and work in
parallel with your productonboarding.
And so think of your onboardingflow as like your flow that kind
of lives in the stages that yourcustomer is going to be going
through while they're onboardingor as they just got through
onboarding, and you're trying toreconnect the value that they're
(20:01):
experiencing in the product in alike, you know, in a in an
offline manner or whatever, likethrough email and SMS.
So onboarding flow is key.
Onboarding is directly tied toretention.
And so, like what we found isthat if if you've got a good
product and you don't haveamazing retention, sometimes
tweaking onboarding is thefastest.
(20:23):
Usually, see, changingonboarding is the fastest way to
kind of increase retention byeither personalizing the
experience a little bit more orexplaining the value a little
bit more.
It doesn't always work, but youcan couple that with email and
SMS.
Um, the third key flow would bearound abandoned cart.
And a lot of people like justassume abandoned cart is just
(20:45):
e-commerce, but it's not.
So if you run service-basedretail or really anything where
somebody started to go down thepath of monetization and then
stopped, if you have if you havea way to kind of see that those
events were happening and you'vegot that person's info, you can
come back with a reallycompelling offer or another
(21:05):
touch point that could workwell.
SPEAKER_04 (21:07):
Can we pause there for one second?
Because I can see how that wouldwork too, with like a lot of the
people who listen to the showare consultants, they're service
providers.
And maybe you sent a proposaland just got ghosted.
So you can use this abandonedcart, like a version of it to
reinvigorate that conversation.
SPEAKER_01 (21:29):
It's actually for B2B, it's an amazing, like it's
a really amazing way to automatethe touch points.
And so you and you have to do itin a non-obnoxious way.
And it has to, I the generalrule is like it always has to be
value add.
So if you don't have anything tosay, don't don't say anything.
But you should probably havesomething interesting to say if
(21:52):
you're trying to sell something.
It may be that the person's justit's not the right time or
whatever.
And so combinations of likerhetorical questions um plus uh
things like case studies orsocial proof tend to work really
well.
And in the goal for abandonedcart um with B2B, at least the
my goal typically is to eitheruh qualify or unqualify somebody
(22:16):
because I don't want to keepchasing somebody that is like
price shopping with with someother you know company that I
just can't compete with, right?
Because we just we're likeworking on different like sets
of value for the for the likewhat we focus on is different
and monetize is different.
So yeah, that's a really, reallygood one for a B2B.
(22:38):
Fourth one would be an upsellflow.
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 additionalvalue on top of what they
purchased, with um, you know,I've got clients that maybe
one's got a um, you know, a setof um uh like health and beauty
(23:05):
spas and salons.
And so if somebody comes in fora treatment, upselling them onto
a product that's relevant tolike the treatment they just had
is really compelling.
And a lot of that happens instudio, but much of it also does
happen seven days or 14 daysafter they came in in person for
whatever they were doing.
Um, and then another one that'soften overlooked, and then I'll
(23:27):
pause, is Sunset Flow.
You know, Sunset Flow is likeit's basically the email.
Flow that you put people into umwhen they're not responding to
anything, and then you take themoff your list.
SPEAKER_04 (23:39):
Okay.
I have questions about thatbecause I haven't heard of it.
Real quick though, I want to gothat one flow backwards.
Yeah.
Because I want to touch on whatyou said.
Seven to 14 days, they usuallycome back needing that.
And I want to talk about howthat is in like the B2B world
too.
SPEAKER_03 (23:59):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_04 (23:59):
Because like in my world, I'll sell a gateway
offer.
SPEAKER_03 (24:02):
Yep.
SPEAKER_04 (24:03):
And if it doesn't upsell on like the review call
into a main, a high-ticketoffer, that's where it usually
happens.
Just like in the salon, theyusually buy the product right
after their treatment.
But if that doesn't happen, thatseven to 14 days also gives them
time to sit in that pain alittle bit.
(24:23):
They tried to solve the problemthemselves.
They've learned that they can't.
So that's also a great time tocome back and reignite that
conversation because they've hadthe time to learn like that
isn't actually something I wouldwant to do.
And now I feel awkward goingback to them.
But if you go back to them, it'sdifferent.
SPEAKER_01 (24:42):
Well, yeah, it is.
And so it's like, and that'swhere I think you're the
important piece is kind ofunderstanding like what's the
natural evolution of like theprocess and what are the time
frames.
So there's no hard and fastrules with this stuff.
But it's funny because um, likeoftentimes I'll I will get a
(25:03):
lead that it comes in.
I get two types of leads thatcome in.
One, they're just like someevent happened and they need
usually like a marketer gotfired or left or something, and
they just they desperately needhelp.
And if they don't get help rightnow, they're in big trouble.
Um, and the other is that likethey're in this explorer mode
(25:25):
where they're kind of like maybeopportunistically looking at
what else is out there on themarket.
And for those, so the for thefirst one, it's a totally
different game, right?
SPEAKER_04 (25:33):
Like it's a different easy, it's like okay,
let's go.
SPEAKER_01 (25:36):
It wins like does our price and value align to
what you have, yes or no?
And it's like we can get thatdone quickly.
But the ones that are kind of inexplorer mode, if if they go
dark for a couple weeks, I knowgenerally that either they're
really busy or they're shoppingaround for price.
And so what I try to do in myautomations and my follow-ups is
(26:00):
address those two points.
Do you need more time?
Is there anything I can helpwith in the meantime?
Um, or is there anything I cando to make my bid more
competitive?
Um, and I I did a lot more ofthat with my last business, and
I don't do a lot of that with mycurrent business.
It's just not how we tend tomonetize, or it's not the type
(26:20):
of clients that we wouldtypically work with.
SPEAKER_04 (26:22):
Yeah, they usually end up being kind of hard to
work with when you have to youhate to admit that.
SPEAKER_01 (26:28):
Like sell yourself, like putting it that way.
It's like the more you have tosell yourself, almost like it's
not to say that they're not anideal customer or not
potentially an ideal customer,but it's very rare, at least in
consulting, where you findsomebody that you have kind of a
(26:48):
difficult, you know, startingset of conversations with, and
you keep getting asked for moreand more stuff, and you know
it's happening behind thescenes.
And if you're in a position tojust let that stuff go, you just
put some of that into your whatwould be the abandoned part
sequence, basically, and youjust let the system do the work
and ask those questions.
(27:09):
And if they come back, awesome.
But meanwhile, while that'srunning, you're not spending
time on it, you're focused onother things that are more
important in your business.
SPEAKER_04 (27:17):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, in in my world, usually ifthey didn't upsell from the
gateway offer, it's they thoughtthey could execute it
internally.
Um, it's rarely that they'reactually looking at other
partners.
If you built out the strategyfor them, they're gonna want to
(27:38):
work with you on it.
It's that they think that theycan do it internally.
SPEAKER_03 (27:42):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_04 (27:42):
So then, like for consultants who are listening to
this right now, that's those arethe objections that you would
need to address in the follow-upon that.
SPEAKER_01 (27:52):
How do you typically address it in your current
situation?
SPEAKER_04 (27:56):
Yeah.
So for me, I'll check in andI'll say, I know that at this
point that you should have hitthis milestone.
And I just wanted to check inand see if you were able to
accomplish that.
SPEAKER_03 (28:07):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_04 (28:08):
Just a little check-in and see if did you
actually execute it or is itjust sitting on your in your
drive right now, consuming yourmind?
SPEAKER_01 (28:17):
Yeah, I feel like listening to that, I I'm
probably like a terrible leadfor a lot of companies because
I'll I'm kind of a tire kicker.
Like, I try a lot of differentproducts and stuff, and so I'll
go into onboarding and then andthen I realized like, oh man, I
I'm not probably not going touse this.
And I'm getting the emails, I'mseeing the emails.
I'm like, I really just got toreply to the founder and be
like, no.
(28:37):
But sometimes you just replyback and like, hey, not
interested right now, andthey'll just get you off the
list.
But yeah, probably not a greatlead.
SPEAKER_04 (28:45):
No, I mean, absolutely.
If you say you're notinterested, I'm bouncing.
It's basically in the B2B world,it's follow up until they tell
you not to.
SPEAKER_01 (28:54):
Yeah, exactly.
Very cool.
SPEAKER_04 (28:58):
So the last one on our list was well, actually,
before we get into the flowmappings, I wanted to learn more
about the sunsetting.
SPEAKER_01 (29:07):
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 thesunset action, but it's like a
sunset.
Basically, like when the sungoes down, that lead is gone.
And so you you strive to getpeople off of your email list
(29:27):
and off of your SMS list so thatyou have a smaller list size,
it's easier to manage, it'sprobably cheaper depending on
what platform you're using, andyour open and click-through
rates go up if people areengaging.
So the Sunset Flow is a usuallya two or three email and SMS
sequence that says somethinglike, you know, hey Sarah, it
(29:49):
looks like you haven't read ouremails for a while.
We get it, like whatever,whatever.
Um, at company name, we reallytake um, you know, we take our
lists seriously and we want tomake sure that you're getting
value from what you see.
Keep me subscribed or justignore this.
We'll send you one more emailand then we'll unsubscribe you.
(30:10):
And if somebody clicks the keepme subscribed, actually, if
somebody opens the email, thenthey'll stay subscribed.
But if they click keep mesubscribed, then we know like
there's some level of engagementthere.
If they open it and don't clickand then they get the second
email and they don't click, wejust take them off the list.
And so we'll say, you know, hey,sir, I was promised.
We've officially taken you offof our list.
(30:31):
This will be the last time youhear from us from now.
Um, if you're still interestedin receiving emails from us, you
can just click this button toresubscribe.
And a lot of people end upfalling into this.
And it's really hard, especiallyfor um, especially for folks
listening that are dealing withend consumers, it's hard to say
goodbye to somebody that youthink might be like a lead or
(30:53):
whatever down the road.
But the faster you getcomfortable doing that, the
cleaner your list is going to beand the more manageable it's
gonna be.
And you can do that in anautomated way.
And it also keeps yourdeliverable deliverability
really high.
SPEAKER_04 (31:05):
Yeah, that matters so much.
So the when I was talking aboutthose bots that click on like
automatically open and click allof your links, and you said
you'd add them to the sunsetflow.
How would that work with thissince it's automatically doing
it anyway?
SPEAKER_01 (31:22):
I would probably I think for the automated bots,
maybe you're maybe you're goingto put them into their own
sequence and ask them to replywith why to the email if they
want to stay on it becausethey're just you just know that
(31:44):
you just know that they're bots.
And if they don't say yes, thenyou just get rid of them.
Now, if it's the but again, yourcriteria is that they clicked on
every single link, right?
That's how you know that it's abot.
SPEAKER_04 (31:55):
That's yeah, that's how I use it.
SPEAKER_01 (31:56):
So it's a great way.
Actually, like I hadn't thoughtof that until you presented that
scenario.
And I think I think the way youdo it is like should be a best
practice.
And so like I I'll probablyborrow that from you, which is
awesome.
So thank you.
I would say, yeah, like ifthey're if it's a bot and you
know it's a bot because theyclicked on all these things,
have them reply yes if they wantto stay on it.
And if they don't reply yes andthey're gone.
SPEAKER_04 (32:19):
Yeah, that makes sense.
My um, because I uh do a lot ofone-to-one, my favorite way to
to get engagement and movepeople to the next phase is to
ask them to reply and if ifthey're interested in the
product, and then I would movethem over to the next email.
Um, and that has helped too alot with like the automatic
(32:42):
clicking, but also then we canstart a conversation, they can
ask any questions they have.
SPEAKER_01 (32:47):
So that means I love email for that, like in asking
not necessarily like I thinksurveys have been a little
played out, but like asking arhetorical question in an email,
just asking a regular, like justlike it's just one-to-one, it's
not a big deal, and then seeingif you can get somebody to reply
back, and then like beingpersonalized on kind of how and
once you get to that point wherethere is a reply, you're you're
(33:09):
not these are not put into flowsanymore, right?
SPEAKER_04 (33:11):
This is like no, yeah, it's just a conversation.
SPEAKER_01 (33:14):
Exactly.
So you can't automateeverything.
SPEAKER_04 (33:17):
No, and it makes more sense to move that
conversation to that one-to-oneif depending on what your
product or or offer is.
SPEAKER_01 (33:25):
Absolutely.
SPEAKER_04 (33:27):
Okay, now that we covered that, let's talk about
the flow mappings.
How does that work?
And how do you drive moreconversions?
SPEAKER_01 (33:35):
Yeah, okay.
So think about when you thinkabout your overall strategy for
lifecycle marketing, there'skind of three buckets.
There's like what is the what isthe strategy?
Like, what are you actuallytrying to accomplish?
Then there's what are thedifferent flows that are
appropriate for my business?
(33:55):
Then there's like within a flow,what are the things you're
doing?
And then what's the contentgoing to be?
And so think about the flowmapping as basically the
strategy for that part of yourbusiness that you're trying to
work on.
And so I'll share my screen fora second here.
I can show you um, I can showyou just a sample that I have
(34:19):
here.
Um, and this is for a foodbrand.
Um let me make my screen bigger.
So this is sorry for the poordesign here, but basically, like
I abstracted this data from thisis real data from flow mapping
that we've done um with withthis partner of ours.
And so what you do with a flowmap is you say, okay, like what
(34:40):
is the overview or strategy thatI'm trying to accomplish here?
And so this is for a leadnurture for a D2C food brand.
And what we're trying to do istarget health conscious
professionals ages 25 to 45 whoexpressed interest in meal
delivery but have not yet madetheir first purchase.
So that's like the startingpoint, right?
Like that's the trigger andcriteria.
Okay, now what are we trying todo?
(35:02):
We have this$25 offer, andagain, your offer and all the
people listening, like youroffers are going to be totally
different.
But in this case, it's a$25 offyour first box that we can get,
which is pretty typical in likethe D2C food space.
And we've got eight touch pointsthat we've put together that run
over basically like a seven to10 day window.
(35:24):
And so what the flow map does isit forces you to think about
what are what's the goal ofthis?
How long do I want it to runfor?
How many touch points am I goingto have with a customer?
And then within each touchpoint, what am I actually trying
to do?
So, what we're looking at hereis the first one is step one,
it's an email that gets sentimmediately, basically after
(35:45):
somebody signed up but hasn'tlike purchased yet.
SPEAKER_04 (35:48):
Okay.
SPEAKER_01 (35:49):
The goal is to establish a brand connection and
set expectations whileintroducing them to like your
core value prop of the business.
The key messaging is welcome tothis food community, acknowledge
their health consciouslifestyle, acknowledge that
they're a busy professional orwhatever, they don't have time
to cook.
So these are like brandaesthetics that you bake into
it.
(36:09):
And then what is the call toaction?
The call to action is explorethis week's menu.
And you put one of these minimaps 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-offcompany 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 forfree, and you can actually
create these mappings and stuffjust.
(36:30):
Oh, that's cool.
It's super cool.
But in the olden days, likebefore we built that, we
actually built that because wewere doing so much of this
manually for clients.
We would build this in like FigJam or like in Miro or like some
other visual like collaborationboard.
So you don't have to use thisproduct, but if you want to use
it, like you feel free to.
But basically, you want to mapout the strategy visually so you
(36:53):
understand what you're doing andthen what those delays are going
to be.
So in here, you see it's likeone day later, you get this
quick nutrition facts set.
A day later, after that, thereal cost of healthy eating, et
cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And this is this is like thebones of a flow map.
And then, like, from the flowmap, what you end up doing is
you you then build out the fullcontent.
And so if you try to build theseflows, and let's say you're you
(37:17):
have to build like eight emailsand SMSs, it's like pretty
overwhelming because you'relike, where do I start?
Yeah, so the whole one justgives you the starting point,
and then you build the contenton top of that, then you put it
in your system and you launch.
So that that's my wayoversimplified version one.
SPEAKER_04 (37:32):
Yeah.
So is there a benchmark on howmany touch points you should
have?
SPEAKER_01 (37:39):
Yeah.
So it really, it really dependson your business.
And so it's hard to give like areal benchmark on this.
It actually, the LLMs are reallygood at giving you a sense of
like what your customerthreshold should be.
So if you're in Chat GPT or atlike cloud or whatever, you can
give it a scenario and be like,you know, I'm a XYZ type
(38:00):
company.
This is a you know, onboardingflow that I want to build.
So you know the nomenclature.
So get, you know, and feed itsome some data and it will come
back with recommendations.
But generally, I would say ouraverage flows are anywhere from
six to 10 or 12 touch points,with the exception of an
(38:20):
evergreen flow.
And this is probably the sixthkey flow that I would say is is
really important.
Evergreen flows typically willbe something that is using your
evergreen content, like you'realways on value add content that
you can kind of sprinkle out topeople while they're kind of
engaged with with your audienceor with whatever you're selling.
(38:41):
And um, that might be 50 touchpoints over six months, right?
Like those can be, you can justkeep adding on to the end of
those evergreen flows.
SPEAKER_04 (38:49):
Okay.
And evergreen is just to keepthem engaged until they're
ready.
SPEAKER_01 (38:56):
It think of it as like your auto follow-up that
has like some some custom stufffor them.
Some, you know, for my company,the stuff we would do would be
like it would be customer casestudies, it'd be some social
proof.
For B2B, it's a lot of socialproof.
Um, it might be uh edge cases,wins that you've seen, other
(39:18):
interesting things in theindustry.
It's just a way to kind of havea like low stress touch point
that they probably know isautomated, but it should add
value either way.
It's not something that'ssupposed to be spammy.
And so if you're running out ofcontent ideas for Evergreen,
then maybe it's time to stop.
SPEAKER_04 (39:37):
Okay.
Uh, that makes sense.
So can you share the link tothat tool you were telling me
about?
I just checked, I don't have it.
Um, because that sounds amazing.
And how can everyone connectwith you and work with you?
SPEAKER_01 (39:54):
Well, thank you so much.
Um, this was awesome.
Thanks for nerding out onlifecycle marketing.
SPEAKER_04 (39:58):
Um I love it.
SPEAKER_01 (40:00):
Yeah, it's I think it's like the it's like I always
tell founders it like yournumber one priority is to get
people interested in yourproduct.
So you have to do that first.
And then the next thing usuallyis like figuring out how to
connect people to your value.
And and so that's wherelifecycle comes in.
Um, I'm Craig atgrowthminded.co.
You can visit my website,growthminder.co, and I'm on
LinkedIn um quite a bit.
(40:21):
Uh, you just search for me onLinkedIn.
Craig the Dingerline and you'llfind me there.
And then the product for doingthese flow mappings and and
flows is called lifecycleos.com.
Um, so any of those places wouldbe awesome.
SPEAKER_04 (40:34):
Okay, cool.
Thank you.
SPEAKER_01 (40:36):
Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_04 (40:38):
If this episode made things feel a little more
doable, I'd love to help youtake the next step with the
booked out blueprint.
It's a practical, low pressuresession to clarify your offers,
your marketing, and whatactually moves the needle.
You can book yours through thelink in the show notes.
You don't have to figure it outalone.
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