This report details the findings of a joint study by Demand Metric and Salesforce Pardot to study the current state of lifecycle marketing, measuring the adoption of this strategy and how it is performing.

1. © 2015 Demand Metric Research Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Benchmark Report
Customer Lifecycle Marketing
November 2015
Sponsored By:

2. TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Introduction
Executive Summary
Adoption of the Strategy
Ownership & Responsibility
Investment & Effectiveness
Benefits & Challenges
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Acknowledgements
About Demand Metric
Appendix – Survey Background
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Revenue Influence & Future Commitment
Analyst Bottom Line
26 About Salesforce Pardot

3. INTRODUCTION
That customers go through a lifecycle in their relationship with vendors is a fundamental marketing concept. The phases of the
lifecycle – Awareness (Attraction), Consideration, Purchase, Retention and Advocacy – are understood well enough. Marketing has
traditionally viewed its role as the owner of the Awareness and Consideration phases of the lifecycle, where it would devote its
resources to gaining mindshare with and qualifying prospects before passing them to sales to continue the journey.
Effective ownership of each phase of the customer lifecycle presents a number of challenges. Fragmented ownership of each
phase creates inconsistent levels of effort and results. There is often difficulty knowing exactly where a customer is in the lifecycle.
Gaps in phase ownership can occur where no nurturing is taking place at all. Or, ownership overlap can occur, which isn’t an
inherently negative state, but can create redundant nurturing efforts that confuse customers and are simply inefficient.
When overlap does occur, it’s rarely intentional; it is usually the result of a strategy or technology vacuum. The most egregious
problem, however, is that customers don’t see their relationship with vendors as a series of fragmented phases with varying levels
of nurturing, attention and care. Customers expect seamless, consistent quality across all touch points in their relationships with
vendors.
Customer lifecycle marketing has evolved as a holistic approach to marketing across each phase or stage of the lifecycle. A
commitment to a customer lifecycle marketing strategy involves strong alignment of the departments that have an ownership stake
in the customer lifecycle, ensuring a high level of coordination and communication between owners of each phase to create a
consistent customer experience.
Demand Metric and Salesforce Pardot collaborated to study the current state of lifecycle marketing, measuring the adoption of
this strategy and how it is performing. This report details the findings of this study.

4. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
A majority of this study’s participants were in marketing roles in B2B or mixed B2B/B2C organizations that reported revenue growth
in the most recently completed fiscal year. Study data was collected only from participants that acknowledged using video as a form
of marketing content.
The analysis of this study’s data provides these key findings:
§ The study found that less than 20% of organizations are currently marketing across the entire customer lifecycle.
§ Participants spend twice as much of their marketing budgets on acquiring new customers as on retaining existing ones.
§ Almost 90% of the study participants indicate that marketing currently owns the understanding and management of the
customer lifecycle.
§ Of the lifecycle stages – Awareness, Consideration, Purchase, Retention and Advocacy – Awareness enjoys the greatest clarity
of ownership, with marketing owning the stage 88% of the time. Retention is most fragmented, with few organizations defining
clear ownership of this stage.
§ The Awareness and Consideration stages enjoy “adequate” or “ample” levels of investment for over 70% of study participants.
Retention and Advocacy both fall at the “minimal” to “none” level of funding for 55% of study participants.
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5. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
§ The greatest benefit to executing a customer lifecycle marketing strategy is greater customer engagement.
§ The greatest challenge to marketing across the customer lifecycle is understanding customer content needs.
§ 72% of strategy adherents are experiencing a revenue lift from customer lifecycle marketing.
§ Over three-fourths of participants plan to increase their commitment to and investment in customer lifecycle marketing.
This report details the results and insights from the analysis of the study data. For more detail on the survey participants, please
refer to the Appendix.
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6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Demand Metric is grateful to Salesforce Pardot for sponsoring this benchmarking study and for those participants that took the time
to provide their input to it.
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7. ABOUT SALESFORCE PARDOT
Pardot, B2B marketing automation by Salesforce, helps customers drive sales with intelligent marketing.
Connect more effectively with smart, adaptive, personalized campaigns you can create, deploy, manage and measure from one
central platform. Together, Pardot and Salesforce empower every rep to act in the moment of engagement, and every marketer to
drive greater results.
To learn more, please visit: www.pardot.com.
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8. ABOUT DEMAND METRIC
Demand Metric is a marketing research and advisory firm serving a membership community of over 70,000 marketing professionals
and consultants in 75 countries.
Offering consulting methodologies, advisory services, and 500+ premium marketing tools and templates, Demand Metric resources
and expertise help the marketing community plan more efficiently and effectively, answer the difficult questions about their work with
authority and conviction and complete marketing projects more quickly and with greater confidence, boosting the respect of the
marketing team and making it easier to justify resources the team needs to succeed.
To learn more about Demand Metric, please visit: www.demandmetric.com.
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9. For more information, visit us at:
www.demandmetric.com
© 2013 Demand Metric Research Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Benchmark Report
© 2015 Demand Metric Research Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
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