"Acquire. Convert. Grow. Retain. Reactivate. These should be the objectives of your email strategy at different stages of the customer lifecycle. You start out with a welcoming campaign with a new customer. You nurture them with loyalty campaigns and grow them with cross-sell and upsell campaigns. You improve the lifecycle and avoid quick drop-offs."
I read the above in an article on the DM News. I very much believe in sending highly targeted email campaigns that reach customers at perfectly timed moments in their own unique lifecycles -- all automated of course. But I also know from experience that it's not easy to get there. You need to have good insights into the behaviour of the different segments in your user base, be able to translate these insights into actionable campaigns, have access to web behavioural data that you can integrate with your existing data in your database...
Just don't get frustrated or overwhelmed by this. Just take one step at the time, work together closely with the person responsible for customer insights and know that you can ask more than 600 fellow email marketers on the email roundtable for advice if you get lost!
Tamara Gielen is an independent email and digital direct marketing
consultant with over 10 years of experience in online, email and direct marketing. 
Jon, this is the article I was referring to: http://blog.dmnews.com/2007/02/01/responsys-offers-customer-lifecycle-campaign-management/
Posted by: Tamara | Feb 03, 2007 at 02:55 PM
Where is Using Email Marketing For Customer Life- cycle Campaign Management.
I went through 19 pages of DM News to find the article you referenced and I didn't find it.
Posted by: Jon | Feb 03, 2007 at 02:27 PM