What Is a Customer Lifecycle? Stages + Tips for Entrepreneurs

The customer lifecycle outlines the five stages that customers experience during their relationship with a business. It starts with customers learning about your brand and ends with them referring your business to others. 

Nurturing a customer all the way through to the advocacy stage can have powerful results, especially for new businesses. A 2025 survey found that word-of-mouth marketing was the most popular year-one growth strategy among Shopify merchants.*

This article covers the different stages of the customer lifecycle, with tips and examples from business owners on how to optimize each one.

What is the customer lifecycle?

The customer lifecycle is a framework for understanding a customer’s relationship with a business. It’s a long-term model focused on customer lifetime value (CLV) and retention instead of immediate conversions. 

Customer lifecycle management (CLM) refers to the tools and strategies businesses use to encourage customers to move through the five stages. For example, some businesses use customer relationship management (CRM) software to share and manage customer data across different teams. 

One application of the customer lifecycle model is lifecycle marketing, which involves tailoring your marketing strategy to each stage in the customer lifecycle.

Stages of the customer lifecycle

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Conversion
4. Retention
5. Advocacy

If you’ve made a customer journey map, you may already be familiar with the five stages of the customer lifecycle. Here are some strategies you can use to meet customer expectations at each point: 

1. Awareness

The awareness stage describes the period when someone discovers your brand, products, or services. At this point, you want potential customers to know you exist. 

Tactics during the awareness stage include digital ads, social media marketing, blog SEO, and traditional advertising, such as TV, radio, and print. These strategies cast a wide net, but one way to get your content in front of the right people is to use lookalike audiences. 

When bath bomb company Happy Hippo wanted to attract new customers, they used Shopify Audiences to run Facebook ads targeting users similar to those who previously engaged with the brand. Over a three-week period, 86% of the store’s sales came from customers new to the brand.

2. Consideration

In the consideration stage, you’ve captured the attention of your target audience. Now, it’s time to get prospective customers to engage with your brand and convince them that your product or service is the right choice.

To help customers at the consideration stage, you might add an AI chatbot like Shopify Inbox to your storefront, so you can answer questions about your products even when you’re offline. If a potential customer signed up for your newsletter during the awareness stage, you can send an automated welcome email flow. Your product pages are another opportunity to convince shoppers in the consideration stage. 

London-based K-beauty brand Skin Cupid uses social proof in the form of reviews to make customers feel comfortable that they are choosing the right product among a catalog with more than 1,500 SKUs. Above the Add to Cart button, shoppers can see excerpts of reviews from satisfied customers. Adding these review snippets led to a 6% increase in conversion.

ALT: Skin Cupid uses review snippets to help customers feel confident that they have the right solution for them. 

Skin Cupid uses Judge.me, which is available from the Shopify App Store, for product reviews. 

3. Conversion

The conversion stage, also known as the purchase stage or acquisition stage, involves turning prospects into actual customers by closing the sale. 

For ecommerce businesses, this means reducing friction on your website. Sara Mote, cofounder of web design agency Mote, says that small inconveniences can add up. 

“Let’s say the menu is unclear and someone is really struggling to find the collection page they’re looking for,” she says. “And then, once they find the product, the image isn’t loading. And the size guide takes three different clicks to navigate and open. If there’s resistance at every single step—even if each individual instance feels quite minor—by the time you’re getting to checkout, you’ve lost someone emotionally.” 

One of Sara’s top web design tips is to plan for the worst-case browsing experience, so that even someone using an old smartphone with spotty Wi-Fi can get the information they need.

Another strategy is to use an accelerated checkout like Shop Pay to prevent abandoned carts. 

4. Retention

The customer retention stage focuses on nurturing the customer relationship to encourage repeat business and customer loyalty. A few strategies include excellent customer service interactions, responding to customer feedback quickly and proactively, and distributing customer satisfaction surveys to help you understand what customers care about. 

A post-purchase email marketing campaign can also be a useful way to retain customers, according to Jacob Sappington, director of strategy at growth agency Homestead Studio. 

“On email, we have this opportunity to talk about anything [a customer needs] to know about your product that helps them use it better and increase their likelihood of repeating,” he says on Shopify Masters. “Teach them how to use your product. Teach them how to care for your product. A lot of times, retention is directly driven by the product itself.” 

You can set up a post-purchase series with Shopify Messaging, a tool to create email and SMS campaigns. Pair it with Shopify Flow, an automation tool, to send post-purchase emails at specific intervals. 

5. Advocacy

This stage is about turning customers into brand advocates who recommend your product to others. A great product will do some of the work for you. A referral strategy can also encourage happy customers to take the next step.

On an episode of Shopify Masters, Charlie Bowes-Lyon, cofounder and CMO of sustainable personal care brand Wild, says about 25% to 30% of the company’s sales come from referrals. Wild uses Mention Me, available on the Shopify App Store, to manage its referral program. Satisfied customers can send their friends 50% off. If the friend makes a purchase, the referrer gets 25% off their next order.

*Based on a November 2025 survey of 500 Shopify merchants conducted in English across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States. Respondents were established merchants with two or more years on the platform. Results reflect the experiences of this specific sample and may not be representative of all merchants.