What is lifecycle marketing for SaaS?

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you just typed “what is lifecycle marketing” into Google because something in the business feels stuck.

Maybe trial-to-paid conversion rate is depressing, churn is keeping you up at night, or you’ve got a lot of people on your email list but no idea what to do with them.

Or maybe simply: you know that once someone signs up on your website, you don’t do anything to help them use, buy, or stick around in your SaaS product.

What all the other articles out there say is either:

• A response to the question “what is lifecycle marketing for SaaS” that’s obviously written to get you to hit some arbitrary SEO brief rather than actually to help you
• Or you get a checklist of email sequences every SaaS “should” have copied from all the other blogs out there. It’s a human caterpillar of lifecycle marketing: what goes in only gets more toxic as it goes along.

So let me tell you super fast so we can move on. This is what lifecycle marketing means for your SaaS company (not some generic company):

Lifecycle marketing for SaaS is the discipline of finding every moment in your customer journey where MRR could go up or down, then building marketing systems (sequences, content etc) that capitalise on those moments especially for the people already in your database.

That’s it.

In this post, I’m going to cover off:

• That textbook definition of lifecycle marketing in case you truly need it (I’m trying to be helpful!)
• How to identify the biggest opportunities in your lifecycle
• The easiest framework for getting started on actually plugging lifecycle gaps.

Throughout, I’m going to be talking about examples from the dozens of SaaS companies that I’ve actually worked with on lifecycle marketing.

These are real stories from client work. If you want, you can work with me too.

What lifecycle marketing is (and isn’t) for a SaaS company

A lot of SaaS companies focus the majority of their marketing effort on acquisition: getting someone to land on your website.

But that’s like looking at an iceberg and saying, “Hey, look how big that ice mountain floating on the water is.”

Like icebergs, 90% of the volume of revenue (or ice) is beyond that initial peak.

In practice, lifecycle marketing is simply looking at the different stages in the customer journey that your leads and customers are at and then working out what the next most important message for them to see is to take the action they need to get them to the stage of the lifecycle where they are maximally valuable to your company.

The stages of the buying cycle are best illustrated as the following:

• Acquisition – where most efforts are focused: getting someone onto the website and then to sign up for a free trial or a demo
• Activation – at this stage, you need the user to take specific high value actions that tend to lead them to whipping out a credit card to pay you or signing a contract (if you have a sales led go to market motion)
• Revenue – someone is paying you.
• Expansion (most resource on lifecycle don’t include this but you ABSOLUTELY should) – you have convinced someone to pay you more by increasing their usage, their seat allocation, their outcomes or some other variable in your pricing model such as add-on products or services. Many businesses do not consider this and that’s a HUGE mistake usually
• Retention – you’re trying to find the optimal way to get people to stick around for multiple billing cycles or to come back to your after they’ve churned
• Referral – your product or marketing has a way of getting people to recommend or otherwise get other people to use your product without you needing to market to them directly

Those are the stages of the customer journey that fit most SaaS companies and the marketing activities that you run at each one of those different stages varies but the goal is always to move people to the moment where they become most valuable to your company.

It’s worth noting, I think, that while a lot of the time people think of customers as belonging to a single lifecycle stage, the reality is that a lot of the time, they might belong to multiple.

For example, you may have a customer who has already bought from you, but you’re trying to get to expand their revenue (expansion) and simultaneously encourage them to send you new customers (referral).

But here’s the real rub that I’ve seen from working with all kinds of SaaS companies over the past decade.

If your lifecycle only reflects a generalised template or a mish mash of best practices that you’ve seen on Twitter or LinkedIn or podcasts, you’re probably only covering a fraction of the opportunities in your journey.

When I map this with clients, we usually find most of the Money Moments – the points where MRR can move – aren’t covered at all.

How Money Moments turn “lifecycle” into something you can actually run

Once you know what lifecycle marketing is and you agree that it’s important to work on, the next trap is inventing a giant programme of sequences because a blog said you need twelve of them.

Don’t do that.

Instead, use the simple framework I invented for discovering the real value in the lifecycle.

I call it Money Moments.

A Money Moment is any point in your journey where someone could increase or decrease your MRR.

You should have an email sequence that responds directly to those. Prioritise this work above using the general SaaS lifecycle map that I’ve shared here.

There’s three steps to this:

Map every way someone can give you more money or less

Many SaaS teams that I’ve worked with who have followed generic lifecycle playbooks have missed huge opportunities that only their business would benefit from filling.

For example, once I worked with a home service business management tool.

They had some general lifecycle sequences set up like a free trial onboarding and a win-back campaign for churned users.

But when I helped them to dive into their revenue figures, they saw that there was some very lumpy revenue in the winter months and again in the summer months.

When we broke that down by account type, we discovered that the reason was obvious and totally avoidable:

In the winter months, their customers who run pool cleaning businesses completely shut down their businesses and so they didn’t need my client’s tool. And in the summer months, their customers who run snow shovelling businesses do the same!

So two Money Moments emerged:

In winter and summer, we needed to find ways to encourage users to avoid cancelling their accounts and provide them with messaging about how to make the most of the down seasons in their respective industries and provide them with a “maintenance mode” subscription that would dampen the losses my client suffered in the seasonal weather dips.

This is Money Moments in action.

We discovered that there was a challenge at the retention stage of the customer journey but it wasn’t as simple as the generic advice to “do a churn winback sequence.”

To do this for yourself I recommend doing the following exercise with your team:

1. Start with acquisition and ask yourself: what are the ways that we could get closer to making money and further from losing money at this stage
2. Write down all your ideas or put them onto some kind of board
3. Repeat this process for every stage of the customer journey (AARERR)
4. Then move onto the next stage 👇

Prioritise your lifecycle work into a roadmap

Once you have been through the brainstorming exercise I described above, you’re going to realise: wow, there’s a lot of work here, where do I begin.

My client Balsamiq had this experience too. Here’s what their interim CEO Arielle said when I asked her about it:

“I looked at the list of projects that I had to do and I went, gosh, there’s no way. And so then I did this exercise in prioritizing them and like, what do you do? What do you do first?,” she said. “And then I looked at the goals and I went, well, this is silly. Like we have budget and we’re leaving money on the table.“

Here’s the prioritisation exercise and you can use it too:

Start with a quantitative approach to looking at where the biggest gaps in your revenue are

Numbers are hard to deny as a way of prioritising work. And it’s relatively easy.

You track a lot of data in your SaaS and pulling it, mapping it onto the lifecycle stages isn’t that difficult.

For example, let’s say your brainstorming exercise revealed that there’s an add-on that a lot of people should buy but don’t.

How would you size that opportunity?

Start by working out the average uplift in revenue when a person buys that add-on

Then multiply the amount by the number of people who could have that add-on but don’t have it

Then you’ll end up with a dollar amount

That’s quantitative opportunity sizing.

Add in qualitative signals

You can also do this qualitative sizing for the same add-on by adding in transcripts from sales calls where they mention the add-on. Do people know it exists? What’s the reaction of people who hear about it for the first time?

That’s not a number you can crunch, but it can add a different dimension to the conversation.

Build the roadmap

Once you’ve done that for every Money Moment, you’re going to have a super detailed idea of what you should be prioritising. You can add in an effort number if you like, but realistically, you probably don’t need to.

Then add every idea with the expected value of the Money Moment into a spreadsheet and just sort top-down.

Does this work?

Here’s Arielle again after I prioritised reactivating a dormant list, netting us $29K revenue within a few weeks:

“When I saw the results of the estimated annualized plan value… I was like, all right, well, Marc paid for himself… when you have a win that early on in the engagement, you go, well, anything else is a pretty easy yes.”

From there we built out multiple lifecycle sequences along a prioritised roadmap that we aligned on based on the process above.

Build the sequence or broadcast that fits that moment — not a generic template.

Once you’ve got a roadmap, you can start to work through those Money Moments systematically.

This helps to avoid the common failure of SaaS companies to launch lifecycle sequences which is that everyone ends up pushing different ideas of what’s important.

Having a spreadsheet with a roadmap allows you to focus on writing the sequences.

Here’s a couple of mistakes that people make when writing high converting lifecycle sequences and how to avoid them:

• Make it longer than you feel comfortable with – everyone tries to condense their lifecycle sequences into something that feels like they “won’t annoy anyone”. This is a mistake. Instead, work out what you feel comfortable sending and then aim to double the number of messages.
• Be helpful – Try not to let your promotional mind take over too hard. You need to sell a product, sure. But the best way to do that is to provide helpful, inspirational use cases for the features that align with how your buyers and users actually need to solve their problems.
• One CTA per email – avoid the temptation to include multiple things that you want people to do. Instead focus on resolving the money moment. If you want someone to pay you, then link to the billing page rather than the pricing page. If you want someone to try a feature, then point them to the in-app view where they can do that.

If you want to go into more detail, here’s an in depth article on Money Moments.

How to get started with lifecycle marketing for your SaaS business (and an offer from me)

Lifecycle marketing for SaaS isn’t a textbook stage model and it isn’t a borrowed sequence pack.

It’s the habit of finding Money Moments on the journey you already have, then filling the gaps before you assume the answer is more top-of-funnel.

Acquisition Addiction is why most teams never start.

If you want the top gaps filled in four weeks — sequences written and live in the tools you already use, not a 50-page recommendations doc — that’s what a Lifecycle Sprint is for.

Most clients who work with me start there.

I’d love to talk to you about that.