You need to understand not only how that customer interacts with your brand but their wider activity in the category or marketplace. How they see you versus your competition. What is their likely route to acquisition? What are the touchpoints they’ll use? By understanding their needs and motivations it becomes a lot easier to understand how you can better serve them throughout that journey.

Every business will have its own customer lifecycle whose specific stages, triggers and KPIs are different. Broadly, though, as analysts we’ve found it useful to think in terms of three top level aims which together encompass most of what a business needs analytics and strategy for: Get, Grow and Keep customers. These goals aren’t mutually exclusive – a successful strategy for Growing customers may also attract new ones and make switching less tempting, for instance. But achievable strategies tend to focus on only one of them at once.

GET is acquiring new customers to grow a brand, gain share or offset churn. It means understanding competitor users, category entrants, and other groups of potential customers.

GROW is maximising the value of existing customers via upselling, cross-selling, smarter pricing or increasing share of use. It needs careful and accurate segmentation to identify customers with growth potential.

KEEP is customer retention – preventing customers leaving you or switching to competitors. The earlier you can spot a potential lost customer, the higher your chances of keeping them.

Customer journeys have a tendency to become overly complicated or just an idealised version that only reflects what the business would like customers to do and not the reality. By categorising all your activity under these three basics areas, it helps simplify the customer journey, brings out different touchpoints and presents opportunities for intervention.