Lifecycles enable marketers to precisely manage customer journeys, optimizing engagement through staged campaigns. They facilitate targeted interactions across acquisition, conversion, and retention, ensuring timely, relevant experiences. Marketers define touchpoints and criteria for each stage, driving goals like lead conversion, upselling, and retention through personalized journeys.
Common lifecycle applications range from converting anonymous visitors into known customers to nurturing repeat buyers through upsell and cross-sell strategies. Businesses can also leverage lifecycles for onboarding experiences, subscription renewals, and win-back campaigns—ensuring that each customer interaction is personalized, purposeful, and designed to maximize lifetime value.
Key components of lifecycles
Before building your first lifecycle, you will want to be familiar with the following lifecycle terms:
Criteria - Lifecycle marketing criteria might be an event (“signed up to receive emails”), a behavior score (“recency score hits 80+”), a state (anonymous web visitor), or a combination of them all. There is no limit to the number of criteria you can use to define a stage or lifecycle. For each lifecycle, you will define:
Entrance criteria: Which customer profiles should be part of this lifecycle?
Stage criteria: What properties or characteristics qualify profiles for each stage of the lifecycle?
Completion criteria: When has a profile completed this lifecycle?
Stages - Lifecycles consist of sequential stages, each with an audience defined by profile properties, segments, and consent. Customers can skip stages or transition to other lifecycles. A profile can belong to only one stage at a time, with later stages taking priority if multiple criteria are met. Profiles that meet lifecycle criteria but not stage criteria remain unassigned until they qualify.
Touchpoints - Touchpoints are marketing interactions within each lifecycle stage, spanning channels like websites, apps, emails, and ads. They deliver relevant messaging and enable data exports (e.g., stage info, profiles) to other systems for analytics and activation.
Thresholds - Thresholds are set to cap the frequency of touchpoints in each stage, to reduce campaign pressure.
Navigate to Lifecycles
Select Lifecycles from the main navigation bar.
The Lifecycles page displays a table of lifecycles that are configured in your tenant. Active lifecycles have a green dot; inactive ones have a red dot.
Search, filter, and customize the columns to adjust your view.
Click the name of a lifecycle to open its details.
Turn a Lifecycle on and off
At the top of each Lifecycle is a toggle switch for turning the Lifecycle on or off. Once you save your settings and turn the Lifecycle on, profiles in the lifecycle will be exposed to touchpoints for their current stage.
Note: In order to save a Lifecycle and turn it on, you first have to set up stage criteria for each stage in the Lifecycle.
Next steps
FAQs
Can a profile be part of more than one lifecycle?
Yes. A profile can be part of one or more lifecycles for which it meets the lifecycle criteria. For each profile, you can see the lifecycles (and stages) a profile is part of, on the Profile Overview panel of the BlueConic Profiles window.
Can profiles appear in multiple stages in a single lifecycle?
No, stages are mutually exclusive, meaning a profile, and therefore a person, cannot belong to two stages at the same time within the same lifecycle. Should a profile meet the criteria for more than one stage, they will be placed in the highest-numbered stage that is further along in the lifecycle.
How many stages can a lifecycle have?
You can add up to 10 stages to a lifecycle (including the "Profiles not assigned" category).
How do I test my lifecycles?
Use the BlueConic Simulator to test how profiles move through stages, which dialogues are shown, and connection goals active in lifecycle stages. The Simulator helps you make sure the lifecycle is behaving the way you intend. Additionally, using the Simulator will show the reason why a certain dialogue is not showing for a profile if you expect it to, such as conflicting criteria.