Why every company needs Lifecycle Marketing (and how to do it right)

Most companies are focused on getting more customers in the door. Dillon Nuanes wants to show you why what happens after they arrive matters even more.

In his sharp and energetic UNSPAM 2024 session, Dillon breaks down the evolving role of lifecycle marketing and why it might be the most important team you’re not investing in yet. As Director of Retention and Lifecycle at ClickUp, he offers a refreshingly honest look at the challenges marketers face today, from rising acquisition costs to fragmented customer experiences and the pressure to personalize everything.

This isn’t a conversation about sending more emails. It’s a call to rethink the full customer journey, build smarter cross-functional partnerships, and shift from tactics to outcome-driven strategy.

TL;DR:

• Acquisition is more expensive than ever. Lifecycle marketing helps you get more value from your existing customers.
• Retention is now more important than expansion. In today’s economy, keeping customers happy is the most reliable path to growth.
• AI and automation only work when they enhance real customer experiences.
• Lifecycle marketing starts with three core building blocks: adoption, retention, and reactivation.

Get ready to stop chasing clicks and start building customer relationships that actually last.

Dillon Nuanes: So, without further ado, why does every company have a Lifecycle team?

Here's me avoiding this guy at all costs. I'm the Director of Retention and Lifecycle at ClickUp. If you can't tell, we're a SaaS product. Task, project, and work management is our bread and butter. I'm going to talk a bit about ClickUp. If I talk too much about ClickUp, shout out, “You're talking too much about ClickUp.”

Those of you who work in Lifecycle know that lifecycle marketing is generous. I'm going to call that half. So, for the other half, this will explain what the field is, why it’s super important, and how Lifecycle can become one of the most important teams at your company. To do that, we need to understand the challenges and opportunities that exist, not just for Lifecycle but for everyone, especially in this macroeconomic environment. That sounds nerdy, but it’s true.

The first challenge is that customer acquisition has become expensive. It’s gotten astronomically expensive to pay Google or Facebook to acquire customers and run ads. Comparing 2022 to 2023, I don’t know where my little clicker is, but we went from 16 months to 22 months for CAC payback. CAC payback is just a fancy way of saying how long it takes to recoup the cost of acquiring a customer. That’s just breaking even, not making a profit. That’s simply what you pay to Google and Facebook.

That’s crazy, right? And it’s a massive opportunity for Lifecycle marketing. Why? Paid media requires that you pay to interact with your customers. But Lifecycle marketing uses channels that are free—email, product, website, and social. You can engage customers as much as you want. Sure, you might annoy them or get them to unsubscribe, but there’s no incremental cost to keep engaging them. That’s super important when the cost of acquisition has never been higher.

So that’s the first challenge, and the first opportunity.

The second challenge is expansion and maintenance. Again, these are nerdy graphs, but they show that from 2022 to 2023, it has become harder for high-revenue companies to expand revenue from their existing customer base. A few years ago, it was all about getting a customer in the door and then getting them to expand usage, so paying for more products, upgrading their plan, adding more seats, and things like that. That opportunity has dropped by about 25 percent. So now it’s not about expansion anymore. It’s about retention. Retention is king. That’s a huge opportunity for Lifecycle marketing. Why? because we focus on each stage of the customer journey, not just the initial monetization or expansion opportunities, but the full lifecycle, engaging customers, making them happy and successful with your brand, your product, and your website.

And the last challenge is AI, automation, and personalization. It’s wild right now. All the AI tools and products. I showed this slide to Iterable, and they asked if we could Photoshop their logo on it. It wasn’t on there, which was kind of funny.

We all know that customers want increasingly personalized and relevant experiences. And now there’s this added layer of AI. How do we use AI to deliver those experiences? It’s a huge opportunity. If you’re in email or Lifecycle marketing—call it whatever you want—you’re basically sending messages to users on an automated schedule based on triggers like product usage, website visits, or purchases. That’s a kind of domain expertise a lot of people wish they had. The added challenge is, how do you use AI to make that process easier and better? I don’t actually know the answer to that. Maybe someone will figure it out and talk about it next year.

So those are the challenges. And those are the opportunities facing Lifecycle. It sounds great, right? Then why doesn’t every company have an amazing Lifecycle team? Why didn’t every hand go up? Why isn’t everyone excited to be a Lifecycle marketer? The biggest reason is that a lot of people miss the forest for the trees when it comes to Lifecycle. Stick with me—this is going to be a bit of a labored analogy. We tend to treat marketing channels like trees. If you’re an email marketer, a social media marketer, or a push marketer, you are focused on making your one tree strong and healthy. You’re watering it and pruning it. Hyper-focused. But to be good at Lifecycle and make it impactful, you have to think about the entire forest. And the forest is made up of all those different trees. So a tree is a channel. Stay with me on this example.

You send an email to a customer advertising a sweatshirt. They click on the email and go to your website. Now they’ve gone from the email channel to the website. They see links to your social media page on the site, and they go check out Instagram. That’s the third channel. Then they bounce back to your website, have questions about the product or the return policy, and go to the support section. Maybe they’re in a live chat with an agent. That’s four different channels before they even decide whether or not to buy. That’s a lot more than just the email. But we often think managing one channel is enough. That our one tree can carry the weight of the others. That’s not how customers think. Customers experience the whole journey. If they get a great email but the website is hard to use, they’re not going to say, “Well, the email was great, so I’ll just deal with the bad website.” Maybe some people do that, maybe some people in this room, but most don’t. It’s the total experience that matters. That’s where the big opportunity is with Lifecycle—how do you create many seamless experiences that help users get what they want? 

Let me see if I can explain it clearly. To focus on customer experience and that full journey, you need to shift from input-based thinking to output-based thinking. What’s input-based thinking? Let’s say you’re an email marketer. If you’re an email marketer, you’re focused on inputs—emails. You think about what you’re sending and how you’re measuring success. You look at opens, clicks, website visits, and purchases. That’s good. You need to measure those things. But if you only focus on inputs, you’ll miss the bigger opportunity—outputs. And the output is a happy customer. If you get that, everything else follows. But the way to get happy customers is not to send more emails. We all know that. It’s not just having a better website. It’s about creating real solutions for your customers.

Back to the sweatshirt example. The solution is a simple, frictionless purchase journey. From the email to the website to support to social, it should be smooth. Customers should feel like they want to give you their money. You can only do that by focusing on the solution. 

When you do that—and this is what my second slide is about—you actually position yourself at the center of your company. You become influential across departments. We’ve all had headaches: “I’m great at marketing, but sales sends terrible emails.” Or, “The product is so bad.” The big opportunity for Lifecycle today is to be the connector, linking all these business units together and bringing a solution-focused mindset to the company. This is hard to do. I’m simplifying it. It’s not easy to get the sales team to change or get the product to listen. But this team, your CX team, is where you can start. That’s where you can build the relationships and perspective to bring this thinking into your company.

So, let's talk about the CX Lifecycle and CX.

CX—I don't know exactly when this term came about. I don’t know what we used to call them, but it’s customer support and customer success, right? They have cool branding now. I like the term CX, but this is the team you should start engaging with if you want to get involved in Lifecycle and grow your team. Their agents respond to customer tickets. You write, “I need help with X, Y, Z,” which generates a ticket. A support agent then goes in and tries to solve it. So, think about that feedback loop—it’s purely reactive. Customer support only responds when a ticket is generated. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s how they’re structured. The way support teams are measured is based on how many tickets are solved and how quickly. So, you want them to be efficient. Customers write in and get a quick, helpful answer. That, again, leads to a better customer experience.

Support teams are increasingly focused on efficiency because of the cost of goods and services. If you need a large support staff, that cost adds up fast. So, time and efficiency in resolving tickets matter even more. Then there’s customer success. Most people know what CSMs are or have interacted with them. Their main focus is meeting with customers. The best CSMs are proactive. They understand what you're trying to do with the product, give guidance, and help with roadmaps. But let’s be real—a lot of CSMs are still reactive. You bring them your problems, and they help solve them. That’s okay. It’s just how it works.

CSMs are measured by meetings over time. They manage a book of business and aim to meet with clients on a semi-regular basis, so there’s some ongoing engagement. The best CSMs drive customer retention. If they're doing their job well, customers stay longer and are happier. So now that we know who the CX team is, here are three simple things lifecycle teams can do to make their lives easier. By helping CX, you center solutions within your company, create happy customers, and start a flywheel effect. You build a strong partnership with CX, which earns you credibility and opens the door to collaborating with other teams, too.

First, customer support wants to solve tickets, but ultimately, they want fewer tickets. You can make that happen by better onboarding customers to your product, website, and brand. I call this the healthy customer principle. It's cheaper and easier to make a new customer successful than to save an at-risk one. Healthy customers submit fewer tickets, are easier to help, and usually aren’t furious when they reach out.

At ClickUp, improving onboarding reduced tickets by 23 percent, which translates to millions saved by the end of the year. With fewer tickets, support becomes more efficient, and they can focus on the more complex ones. This is a super-easy win that your support team will love you for.

Second, support doesn’t have to be only reactive. More companies now embed proactive support opportunities in automated emails or product journeys. This lets customers get help before they even ask for it. That leads to healthier, more confident customers.

I saw this with Wonder Valley, an e-commerce bath kit brand. I looked at this this morning.

It’s a bath kit-type product. What’s really interesting is how they’re approaching customer support as an e-commerce brand. They’re doing two things. First, they’re asking, “Do you still have questions? Come talk to us.” They want to eliminate any confusion before it happens. Second, they’re using their customer support team to help drive the sale. We digital marketers send emails. This is a great example of what you can do to get ahead of customer issues and also generate revenue.

Another example is Daring. I think this is B2C. They say, “Got a question? Text us anytime.” That’s support offered proactively, without the customer needing to reach out first. And then there’s ClickUp. Here’s what we do. When someone adds a lot of team members, we know that typically leads to questions. We don’t wait for support tickets. We reach out and say, “Come talk to us now. We’ll help onboard your team and make them successful.”

This approach has led to a significant increase in customer retention and revenue generated from our existing customer base. That increase comes from embedding opportunities to engage with support into our customer journeys.

The last thing you can do with your CX team is to use data to automate meaningful interactions. CSMs are great at working with customers, but they’re not always great at analyzing customer data to decide when and why to reach out. Most of them don’t have access to tools like Iterable or other marketing platforms. So they operate on gut feeling. That creates a huge opportunity for anyone here who does have access to that data. You can go to your CSMs and their leaders and say, “What if, instead of you trying to schedule meetings with customers, I help you get customers to book meetings with you?”

I don’t know anyone else doing this at scale, so I’ll share what we did at ClickUp. We sent an email to users who were actively using the product and invited them to book a call with our team. This led to a 30 percent increase in customer meetings booked. The best part is that CSMs now have full calendars and are spending more time doing what they’re best at—meeting with customers and thinking strategically about them. They’re not chasing meeting invites anymore. If you try even one of these three ideas, go to your CX team and say, “I’ve got something I think we can test.” Start small. This is how you begin building that partnership. Over time, it becomes a flywheel. You’re helping customers, reducing support volume, and enabling the support team to focus on more valuable interactions.

In return, they’ll be more willing to partner with you on experiments. And now the lifecycle team is not just improving marketing. You’re driving actual customer outcomes. That’s what gets you closer to the goal of creating solutions for your customers. This is how I think about the future state of Lifecycle. I wish someone had told me this three years ago. Because when it comes to Lifecycle, there’s a lot of noise. It can feel overwhelming. That’s why I keep going back to the foundational Lifecycle. It comes down to three things. If you do them well, you earn credibility with your teams, help your customers, and build internal trust so you can work with other departments like CX, sales, and product. But you have to do these three things really well.

The first is adoption.

Adoption means explaining your product and helping customers understand its value. Take Sundae, for example. They’re a healthy alternative dog food brand. If you're buying that product, you care about being a healthy dog parent. You want to connect with other people like you. Their email invites you to join them on Instagram so you can meet like-minded people. They’re using the community to help drive adoption, which is smart.

Back in the day, Matt and I worked at Dragon, a sunglasses brand. There are a million sunglass brands out there. So why buy Dragon? Because you connect with the brand. One of the first emails they send is a brand story. They’re trying to help you see the value through emotional connection. Again, really smart.

At the other end of the spectrum is New Era. Their message is, “Here’s a promo code.” The value is financial. They make adoption frictionless by giving you the product at a lower cost. ClickUp does something similar in spirit. Our onboarding email focuses on tasks, which are the foundation of our product. If you understand tasks, you’ll get value. When we nail task adoption, we see a 30 percent increase in product stickiness. Users keep coming back every week and engaging.

The second part of the foundational Lifecycle is retention.

This may sound complex, but retention involves using data and automation to deepen the relationship with your customer. We are a SaaS product with around 50 features, but only 12 are truly key. Each feature can be used at different levels—basic, intermediate, and advanced. What we know is that customers who use more features and use them more deeply are more likely to stick around.

So we built what we call the feature engagement matrix. Every week, we analyze what features each user is engaging with. If they haven’t used a key feature, we send them an email highlighting it. If they’re using a feature like tasks at an intermediate level, we try to help them advance. The goal is to get more users to the advanced level across multiple features.

It sounds complicated, but the automation behind it is simple. The early results are promising. Compared to a control group not receiving these emails, users who do receive them show higher product usage. That’s exactly what we want. When you tell users, “Use the product this way,” and they actually do, that’s powerful.

The third piece is reactivation.

Even if you nail adoption and retention, some users will drop off. That’s just how it works. Your job is to bring back as many as you can using simple and scalable programs. Everlane does this with a low-effort email showing five popular products. If you’ve bought from them before, this email has a high chance of catching your interest again. Venmo re-engages users by announcing new features. Maybe someone left because Venmo didn’t have what they needed. Now they’re coming back to say, “We’ve got it now.”

Hulu takes a direct approach. “Here’s a free month.” Simple, no overthinking. Give people something for free, and they might stick around. I bet Hulu knows their average free-month user ends up staying for three months or more. At ClickUp, if someone hasn’t logged in for two weeks, we send them an email with a recap of everything they’ve missed. It plays on FOMO. That ugly little email gave us a 5 percent lift in reactivation. That’s hundreds of users per week, and hundreds of thousands over time.

It didn’t take long to write, and it wasn’t beautifully designed. But it works. And that’s what reactivation is all about. To recap, the foundational Lifecycle is made up of three core elements:

• Adoption
• Retention
• Reactivation

If you do those well, you’re 95 percent of the way there. That gives you the permission to expand into other teams and initiatives. It opens the door for you to lead in customer solutions. Now, since this wouldn’t be a real discussion without some metrics, let’s discuss the one I believe matters most—net dollar retention, or NDR.

It may look complicated, but here’s what it means. NDR is your starting revenue from existing customers, plus any expansion revenue, minus any churn or downgrades. I love this metric because it’s simple and actionable. Green is good. Red is bad. If your NDR is over 100 percent, you’re growing. If it’s below 100, you’re shrinking. That one number tells you whether you’re expanding your business or losing ground.

You can segment it by customer type, region, or other attributes. But the most powerful way to view NDR is by cohort. This is called cohort NDR. You group customers by the month they became paying users and track their NDR over time. Month zero starts at 100 percent. Ideally, their value grows over time. If it shrinks, you have a problem. This type of analysis helps you understand exactly when things are going well or going wrong. For example, maybe March was great and July was weak. Now, you can investigate what changed.

To wrap things up, here are four things I want you to take away:

1. Understand the opportunity in Lifecycle. Connect it to today’s business challenges like high acquisition costs, retention, and the need for automation.
2. Focus on outputs, not just inputs. What experience do you want customers to have, not just what message you’re putting in front of them?
3. Build a partnership with CX. These will be your best allies. Once you get this right, you can replicate that success with sales, product, or website teams.
4. Get the foundational Lifecycle right. Adoption, retention, and reactivation. Do those three things well, and you’ll unlock everything else.

That’s it. Thanks, everyone, for your time.