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Creating a Lifecycle and configuring its stages

With BlueConic Lifecycles, you can orchestrate customer Lifecycles and specify the content and actions that accompany each stage in the customer's journey.

Key points: Creating Lifecycles and stages

You create, configure, and manage Lifecycles using the Lifecycles menu in BlueConic.
Each Lifecycle presents a sequence of stages that profiles meeting stage criteria will enter.
Using Lifecycle, stage, and completion criteria, you can shape the audience for the Lifecycle based on profile or group properties, segments, and objectives.
Profiles not assigned contains profiles that meet the Lifecycle criteria but not any stage criteria.
You can target the profiles in each stage with an unlimited set of marketing touchpoints, which can be a mixture of BlueConic dialogues and connection goals.
To control campaign pressure inside each stage, you can set touchpoint thresholds, so profiles in a stage experience no more than X touchpoints per day/week/month/quarter.
You can set a priority for each Lifecycle to control the relative priority of competing Lifecycles and Dialogues.
The Related items box on the right side of the page shows all the customer segments, dialogues, connection goals, and objectives used in the Lifecycle.

How to set up a customer Lifecycle in BlueConic

Follow these four main steps to create and configure a customer Lifecycle:

Design your Lifecycle by outlining your goals, your audience, the stages along the customer journey, potential customer data points along the journey, the marketing touchpoints at each stage, and how you define success. See how to design a marketing Lifecycle.
Define your audience: Which profiles enter and exit the Lifecycle as a whole, and which profiles are part of each stage along the way? See how to define a Lifecycle audience.
Create the Lifecycle itself and add Lifecycle stages in sequence. See these steps for creating and configuring a Lifecycle.
Add marketing touchpoints to each stage. See steps for adding marketing touchpoints to Lifecycle stages.

Creating a Lifecycle

The example Lifecycle shown below outlines a subscription renewal Lifecycle that targets subscribers nearing the end of an annual subscription cycle. Starting with one of several pre-built Lifecycle templates, you can tailor your customer interactions in detail within the BlueConic UI.

Select Lifecycles in the BlueConic navigation bar and click the Add lifecycle button.

The Add lifecycle gallery window appears, with a set of templates you can use to create a customer Lifecycle.
In the Add lifecycle window, choose the Upsell lifecycle template to get started.

The new Lifecycle appears, and you can show or hide the metadata section at the top of the page. Here you can tag a Lifecycle as a favorite, and add labels and a description to make it easy to find and sort among Lifecycles. You can also specify a domain that determines who in your organization can edit this Lifecycle.
Start by giving your Lifecycle a name. Notice in the upper right corner you'll see the number of profiles to which you can target this Lifecycle.

This example Lifecycle comes with four stages, with the first stage including all available profiles that have not (yet) joined a stage.
To determine which profiles enter the Lifecycle, click Select criteria and define the audience of profiles that will join your Lifecycle.

Defining the audience for a Lifecycle

For each lifecycle, you can set up different criteria that will determine if a profile is qualified to enter the lifecycle, or qualified to enter a specific stage, or if the profile has completed the lifecycle

In the newly created Lifecycle, click Select criteria (or Change criteria when the Lifecycle criteria are already defined). Building the audience for a Lifecycle and for each Lifecycle stage is similar to how you build BlueConic segments, by filtering profiles using properties, segments, and objectives.
Click Select condition to choose conditions for profiles to enter the Lifecycle.
To target profiles in an upsell lifecycle, you can start by choosing a segment of customers who have already made a purchase. All profiles with in the segment Customers will be part of this Lifecycle.
Click Close. BlueConic updates the number of profiles available for this Lifecycle.
Now you're ready to determine the Lifecycle's stages and marketing touchpoints.

Configuring Lifecycle stages

The BlueConic example Lifecycles are meant to serve as an easy starting point for you. Each one comes with several prebuilt stages, but you may want to define custom stages to suit your marketing plan.

Each stage has a name and a set of criteria that determine which profiles are eligible for this phase.

Click in the stage to customize its name.
Note that "Profiles not assigned" contains all profiles that meet the Lifecycle criteria but have not yet joined a stage.
Click the audience icon in each subsequent stage to set the stage criteria. Note: Stages are mutually exclusive, so be sure to set your stage criteria to have at least one criterion that differs from one stage to the next.
After you have defined which profiles are eligible for each stage, you can add the set of marketing touchpoints to each stage.
Click Add touchpoint to add BlueConic dialogues and/or connections to each stage.
An overlay window appears showing all eligible dialogues and connections.
When you select a connection with multiple goals as a touchpoint, you need to open the dropdown menu and select a specific connection goal.
You add stages by clicking the plus icon to the right of a stage, naming the stage, and defining its audience. You can add as many as ten stages to a lifecycle, including the 'Profiles not assigned' stage. To see all stages in a lifecycle if they go beyond your window, click the right arrow next to the stage names to scroll.

Creating the audience for each Lifecycle stage

To define stage criteria, click the profile icon and choose the profile properties, groups, events, segments, or objectives that determine which profiles are included in each stage.
Stages are mutually exclusive -- which means that within a given Lifecycle, a profile can belong to only one stage at a time. If a profile qualifies for multiple stages, it will be placed in the highest stage.

For details, see Defining criteria for Lifecycle audiences.