Fractional CMO Leadership
The senior marketing brain your company needs, at the fraction of the cost it can actually afford.
Lifecycle & Retention
Lifecycle Marketing & LTV Optimization
Acquisition costs are rising every year. Retention is the only lever that gets cheaper the better you get at it.
The Problem This Solves
Nearly all the budget goes to acquiring customers and almost none to keeping them. Meanwhile a two-point improvement in repeat rate would fund the entire growth plan without a dollar of additional ad spend.
Typical EngagementDelivered inside a Core Marketing CMO retainer, or scoped as a standalone project.
See pricingLifecycle marketing is the system that maximizes the value of a customer you have already paid to acquire: onboarding that drives activation, flows that trigger the second purchase, win-back sequences, and loyalty mechanics that make leaving feel expensive.
What’s Included
Six things that actually change.
01
Lifecycle stage mapping
Every stage from first purchase to advocacy, with the trigger and message each one requires.
02
Email and SMS flow architecture
Welcome, post-purchase, replenishment, browse abandonment, win-back, and VIP tracks.
03
Segmentation and RFM modeling
Recency, frequency, and monetary segments that determine who hears what and when.
04
Churn prediction and intervention
Leading indicators of departure and the intervention that reverses them.
05
Loyalty and referral design
Program mechanics that reward the behavior you actually want repeated.
06
LTV and cohort reporting
Cohort curves that show whether retention is genuinely improving over time.
Engagement Shape
How it runs.
Phases overlap in practice, but this is the shape of the work and roughly when each part lands.
What You Should Expect
- Higher repeat purchase rate from existing customers
- Owned channel revenue growing as a share of total
- Churn intercepted before the customer is gone
- An LTV-to-CAC ratio that justifies more aggressive acquisition
| Phase | Deliverable |
|---|---|
| Analysis | Cohort retention curves, repeat purchase intervals, churn driver review |
| Architecture | Flow map, segmentation model, and trigger logic specification |
| Build direction | Oversight of your team or agency implementing flows and automations |
| Optimization | Test roadmap and monthly LTV reporting by cohort |
Answers
Questions about lifecycle & retention
No. Subscription, SaaS, and services businesses often have more to gain, because their entire model depends on renewal. The mechanics differ — onboarding and expansion rather than replenishment — but the discipline is the same.
For established DTC brands, owned channels commonly drive 25 to 40 percent of revenue. If you are meaningfully below that range, there is usually significant recoverable revenue sitting in flows that were never built.
I design the architecture, the segmentation logic, and the trigger conditions, then direct your team or agency through the build inside Klaviyo, HubSpot, Braze, or whatever platform you run.
Faster than most acquisition work. Automated flows go live in weeks and produce revenue immediately from traffic you already have. Cohort-level LTV improvements take a full purchase cycle or two to appear in the data.
Related
Works alongside
Interim CMO Leadership
Your CMO left. The executive search will take six months. Marketing cannot sit still for six months.
CMO Consulting
Sometimes you do not need a marketing leader. You need one hard question answered properly, once.
Next Step
Find out what your marketing is actually costing you.
Every engagement starts the same way: a straight conversation about your growth plateau, your current spend, and whether a fractional CMO is genuinely the right answer for you. If it isn’t, I’ll say so.
Free 30-minute call · No pitch deck · Direct answer either way