Lifecycles enable you to organize and sequence the marketing touchpoints along customer journeys. BlueConic lets you add connection goals to the Lifecycle stages along a customer journey.
Placing connections in Lifecycle stages enables you to:
- Export information about the associated lifecycle stage to external systems.
When you configure a connection's export goal settings, you can map data about your profiles' associated lifecycles to a field in the other system.
For example, you could send to your ESP a list of profiles that attain a certain lifecycle stage along their customer journeys and use this information for targeted emails. This helps you use profile information from BlueConic in other marketing systems or analysis tools. You can even use this information to create new audiences or segments outside of BlueConic. - Restrict an export goal to export only the profiles in a certain lifecycle stage.
Using lifecycle stage information, you can control whether and when profiles are exported to your marketing systems. This lets you run a campaign for prospective buyers, for example, or to easily target different groups of customers or prospects. Another use might be to run stage-specific campaigns that cut across customer segments. - Set optional thresholds on lifecycle stages to limit exposure to connection goals in that stage.
With Lifecycles, you can limit campaign pressure on profiles in a certain stage by setting stage thresholds. For example, you can make sure a profile is exposed to only 3 marketing touchpoints per week/month/quarter during a particular stage on their customer journey. Some connection goals are counted toward the stage threshold limits. See the documentation for each connection for details on whether and how the connection works with Lifecycles.
Because of differences in how connections work, connections differ in how they interact with lifecycles and stage thresholds. See the BlueConic connections documentation for your system(s) for details on how each connection works.
Tips for adding Connections to Lifecycle stages
- Placing a connection goal inside a Lifecycle restricts the audience for that goal to only the profiles present in that lifecycle stage. So a best practice is not to reuse a connection goal outside the lifecycle – because its audience will be limited by the lifecycle criteria.
- A connection goal that is placed in a lifecycle cannot be used in other lifecycles -- nor can it be used outside the lifecycle. To reuse a connection goal in multiple lifecycles, create a copy or duplicate the connection goal.
- Connections differ in how they interact with lifecycles and stages, and whether they are aware of stage thresholds.
- A valuable feature of adding connections to lifecycles is that it lets you target profiles by stages or by segment.
- Targeting profiles by lifecycle stage helps you separate the timing of the interaction from the content of your marketing messages.
- Turning a lifecycle on or off has implications for which profiles are affected by connection goals that are included as marketing touchpoints in your lifecycles. See Turning lifecycles on or off for details.
Connection touchpoints excluded from threshold counts
Note that because of the way certain connections work, some connection export goals do not count toward the lifecycle stage threshold. These connection goals are marked with a blue infinity symbol 
in the lifecycle stage, for example, the HubSpot connection in this example:
See Adding marketing touchpoints for detailed steps for adding connection goals to lifecycle stages.
For detailed instructions for the BlueConic connections to other systems, find your connection in the Connections section.