Growth Marketing Playbook 2024: Focus on Customer Lifetime Value

Forget flashy ads and vanity statistics. 2024 will be all about strategic growth marketing aimed at building real customer loyalty.

Leading brands know that the most valuable customers are not one-time buyers, but passionate fans who generate recurring revenue.

Here’s how to structure marketing experiments that move users through the AARRR funnel, from acquisition to revenue and beyond.

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is a form of marketing that focuses on growing and scaling a business through customer loyalty and advocacy.

Unlike traditional marketing, marketing is less about acquiring new customers in the short term and more about acquiring the right customers and ensuring their loyalty to your brand in the long term.

Successful growth marketers deeply understand their buyers and how they navigate the entire customer lifecycle, from brand awareness to purchase, repurchase and referral.

These marketers then combine customer data and market insights to create an ideal consumer profile and experiment with creative concepts on the favorite channels of their most passionate fans.

Growth Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing: AARRR Framework

Venture capitalist Dave McClure’s AARRR framework (aka Pirate Stats) is the most popular growth marketing framework.

McClure saw that many of the startups he worked with placed too much emphasis on vanity metrics, without recognizing which metrics were actually indicative of business growth.

His philosophy? Your most loyal customers (and the users they refer) drive better ROI than any other marketing channel.

His AARRR framework extends the traditional marketing funnel beyond a user’s relationship with a product they purchase, to their lifelong relationship with the brand they buy it from.

The steps in the AARRR growth marketing funnel are as follows:

• Acquisition: User becomes aware of the brand.
• Activation: User experiences product or service.
• Conservation: User likes experience; returns for more.
• Reference: User recommends brand to friends/family.
• Gain: User becomes a reliable source of recurring revenue.

Growth marketing in 2024: getting started

Because growth marketing is about keeping your most trusted customers engaged and eager to recommend your brand to their friends, you first want to define who those customers are (or who they are likely to be) and what specific brand value or product they to have. quality keeps them coming back.

Use last year’s data to define your ideal customer

See your performance in 2023. Look for trends and similarities among returning users and use this data to define or redefine your buyer personas. Some places to look:

Demographic data from advertising campaigns

• User journeys and interests are constantly evolving. In some sectors, travel is evolving faster than in others.
• Your superfans today may be the same fans you had twenty years ago, but those fans may now be twenty years older.
• If you take a closer look at your demographics and the results surprise you, ask yourself two questions:
  • How can I adjust my marketing strategy so that I can continue to appeal to my current target group in the coming years?
  • If my marketing no longer resonates with people in this demographic, how can I modernize my message to reach this new, younger audience?

Purchasing trends, for better and for worse

• Do your most loyal users have similar shopping experiences? Are they purchasing similar products in a similar order and on a similar timeline?
• If you can discover a chronological relationship between user purchases, you can use sequential remarketing to increase brand loyalty among users who are most likely to engage in that purchasing behavior.
• On the other hand, if you notice a decline in brand loyalty after your returning customers purchase a specific product or service, you should solicit their feedback and be prepared to address their concerns directly in both private and public forums.
• Social media and email can be great marketing channels to make customers feel heard while having a little fun with your brand (if humor is part of your brand voice).

Results of the NPS survey

• Are there any products or services that stand out as obvious fan favorites? If so, ask yourself how you can best use these products in your growth marketing efforts.
• Are there multiple customers with the same complaint? Use this feedback to re-examine your user experience, customer service, and product roadmap to identify opportunities for improvement.
• Make responding to user feedback and pain points part of your content marketing strategy.

Dig deeper: How to create and execute a buyer journey-based content strategy

Define your North Star metric

Your North Star metric is a single metric that best represents the core value your product delivers to customers. It should be:

• Measurable.
• A long-term goal that won’t change within a year.
• Within your control and not dependent on external variables.
• A direct contribution to the general vision, mission or strategy of your company.
• Aligned with the core value proposition of your product or brand.

Some examples of successful companies:

Any KPIs you use to test the hypothesis of a growth marketing experiment should work their way up to your NSM.

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Growth marketing experiments to try in 2024

Acquisition: Cross-platform content marketing for lead generation

Ask: How do I attract the most ideal customers?

Find out where your ideal customers hang out and what types of content they are likely to bring to your brand with a cross-platform content marketing experiment for lead generation.

Some suggested variables to test:

• Format: Manuals, ebooks, webinars, videos, industry reports, whitepapers, case studies, surveys and quizzes, and troubleshooting templates.
• Tactics: Lead magnets, promos, contests, giveaways, challenges, influencer partnerships.
• CTA: Sign up, subscribe, join the club, try it for free, create your free account.

The key is to start by testing a single variable across all available platforms and refine your strategy based on which formats/tactics/CTAs perform best on each platform.

Potential KPIs: Conversions per source/medium, conversions per landing page, conversion rate from MQL to SQL

Activation: conversion rate optimization

Ask: How can I improve the customer experience?

Before you can improve your customer experience, you need to identify where customers are dropping off.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of making intentional changes to your customer experience to determine whether those changes improve conversion rates.

Here are a few ways to simplify and improve the customer journey:

• Add clear product benefits to your Hero section copy.
• Reduce the number of steps to purchase.
• Reduce or reformat form fields.
• Removing unnecessary buttons, links or pop-ups.

You’ll also want to reassess your onboarding workflow. If users create accounts or sign up for trials but don’t become paying customers, look for opportunities to share how-to content that encourages them to use your product.

Potential KPIs: customer acquisition cost (CAC), abandonment rate per page

Retention: Reengagement Campaigns

Ask: How do I keep my customers coming back?

How do you cut through the vast sea of ​​marketing noise flooding the average user’s inbox, reading list, social media feed, and search results?

It should come as no surprise that retention is one of the most challenging parts of any business development strategy. At this stage of the growth marketing funnel, you should test different customer re-engagement methods to see which tactics are most likely to remind users why they love your brand.

Some suggestions to try:

• Personalized offers based on purchase history.
• Time-sensitive promos.
• Emails with new product or feature updates since the user’s last engagement.
• Remarketing ads.

While the “I hate to see you go” email has become a popular re-engagement marketing tactic, you can stand out and gather valuable customer insight by adding a short customer feedback survey to your own survey.

If someone has had a bad experience with your brand, you may not win them back, but you may be able to use their feedback to improve your customer experience for future users.

Potential KPIs: click-through rate (CTR), customer retention rate (CRR), re-engagement rate

Referral: Turn your super fans into influencers

Ask: How can I encourage my loyal customers to refer their friends?

Referral programs take time to gain momentum. While working with influencers is a way to increase awareness and highlight your referral incentives, your current fanbase may be more than happy to get the ball rolling.

Ask your customers to share their experiences with family and friends in exchange for benefits such as:

• Discount codes for new and referring users.
• Commission-based incentives via affiliate links.
• Improved service or gifts in exchange for testimonials or reviews.

Potential KPIs: customer referrals, social listening metrics (how many users mention your brand or share your content on social media?)

Revenue: Build a customer loyalty program

Ask: How can I increase my customer’s lifetime value?

Loyalty programs tell your fans that you see them, hear them, and value their relationship with your brand. The key to a successful loyalty program is to get your customers excited about the incentives.

How you structure your loyalty program depends on your industry and the purchasing behavior of your ideal customers.

Some popular loyalty program frameworks:

• Punch card loyalty programs: Punch card loyalty programs used to be associated with brick-and-mortar stores, but that is no longer true. Ecommerce stores can get creative with virtual options.
• Points-based loyalty programs: Points-based loyalty programs assign points to dollars spent. Points can then be redeemed for discounts, cash back or other benefits.
• Tiered Loyalty Programs: Tiered loyalty programs can be subscription-based or dollar-spent based. Tiered programs provide additional benefits as long as a user remains at a certain level.

Potential KPIs: Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), monthly/annual recurring revenue (MRR/ARR)

Is your marketing strategy ready for 2024?

If 2023 was any indication of the future, 2024 will be a year of widespread experimentation for marketers.

Plan ahead and your experiments could reveal new possibilities for you and your team!

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