Companies are building Lifecycle Marketing teams to be a growth engine. At Verizon Prepaid, that engine was worth about $140 million a year.
In 2019, I joined Verizon Prepaid to build the Lifecycle Marketing team. The mandate was to reduce churn, which had gone up every year for five years. Everyone agreed that lower churn meant more revenue. Nobody could say how much, or even whether it was possible.
Seven years later, companies are explicitly building Lifecycle Marketing teams to drive revenue growth. I suspect most of them can’t say how much revenue either, but they know it’s possible.
What I learned at Verizon Prepaid is that what the organization can build sets how much revenue is possible. That depends on clean data, the right people, a customer experience without broken journeys, the right CRM tools, and how quickly you can test and measure.
The build at Verizon Prepaid started simply. We stopped the 30 unnecessary text messages new customers received in their first five days. From there, we changed enterprise policy so existing customers could benefit from new pricing plans, and built a quick-pay feature in the My Verizon app that made digital payments much simpler. Then came value adds like free Disney+ on Prepaid plans, and step-down loyalty pricing with the ability to trigger events based on behavior. That build, plus much more, ended at about $140 million a year in revenue.
At the risk of sounding like the early 2000s, we have arrived at Lifecycle-as-a-Service. By that I mean:
A Lifecycle Marketing team whose service to the business is growth. It owns the expansion of the customer relationship after the sale, and it is measured on the revenue that relationship produces.
It can be built inside the company or brought in from outside.
Visa is hiring a Vice President to “Set the vision, strategy and multi-year roadmap for Lifecycle Marketing as a global practice.” ServiceNow is hiring a Senior Director to “Lead transformation from campaign-based to event-driven, always-on customer engagement model powered by AI,” with accountability for “customer activation, engagement, retention, and growth KPIs.” Fireworks AI wants someone to “power Fireworks’ growth engine.” Upstart’s Director of Lifecycle Marketing will “Own revenue and performance goals for Lifecycle Marketing.” Some companies even offer it to their clients. Imprint wants a marketer who will “operate as the CMO for your assigned partners.”
Job posts don’t put a number on the growth they expect. What they list instead are capabilities. Visa asks for depth in “data-driven marketing, segmentation, personalization, measurement, martech.” ServiceNow asks for “real-time segmentation, personalization, and experimentation at scale.” OpenAI asks for “holdout tests and cohort analysis to measure incremental retention and revenue impact.” That suggests these companies sense the growth depends on what they can build. My experience says the same.
If a pipe leaks, more water pressure only puts more water on the floor. When I arrived at Verizon Prepaid, the customer journey was leaking in several places.
Those 30 texts were annoying and unnecessary. They also added friction to the activation journey. I put one person in charge of uncovering pain points in the customer experience, and we fixed the leaks one at a time.
Within three months, churn improved about 10% quarter over quarter, in relative terms. We had not launched a single campaign.
Behavior. With the noise gone, we added one message with a job: get the customer on autopay. Testing showed one touch was enough and day 25 worked best. Then we split the journey by acquisition channel, plan and payment type, and one journey became 50. Autopay enrollment went from 31% to 43%. Customers on autopay stayed about 24 months, compared with about 18 for those who were not. That is six more months of revenue per customer, from reaching the customer at the right time with the right message.
Triggers. Next, we responded to what customers did. Turning off autopay was a possible sign of leaving, so it triggered a message about a better plan or the value of the current one. A customer who ran out of data often thought the slowdown was a network problem, so we offered more data. A customer who kept paying for data they did not use got a cheaper plan. Finance hated the monthly revenue step-down until we proved it paid off. Customers who felt their plan was fair stayed longer.
Models. Then we used data usage patterns and customer signals to predict which customers were likely to leave, and reached them first with an offer or added value. A/B and multivariate testing ran through every layer. Only after all of this did we move on to win-back, which carried its own acquisition and revenue targets.
Often, each layer needed the one below it. When the big builds take time, you keep shipping the small ones. Triggers only work when the journeys work. A churn model only helps if you have a clean signal and a message worth sending.
Churn came down 50% over three years and hundreds of builds. Already-high margins went up 15%. Lifetime value grew even as prices dropped, because customers stayed longer. Over time, the Prepaid lifecycle team contributed about $140 million a year in incremental revenue for Verizon.
This did not come from a single campaign. It came from one team owning everything that happens to a customer after acquisition: the customer experience, the journeys, the offers, the testing, the triggers and the models.
Read together, the job posts ask for the same five capabilities. They are the same five I found by doing the work.
When I built Lifecycle Marketing for Verizon Prepaid, I didn’t have a playbook. I had empathy for the customer and a mandate to reduce churn. I learned as I went, using gut and data. Companies now seem to see what it takes. If you’re building this and want help, I’d be glad to talk.
Lifecycle Marketing is a growth engine. At Verizon Prepaid, it was worth about $140 million a year. Companies as large as Visa and as young as today’s AI startups are now hiring to build that engine. None of them can say exactly how much revenue it will produce, and I couldn’t either in 2019. How much it grows depends on the customer, the data and how far you’re willing to build. You won’t know that number until you start.
Lifecycle Marketing is a growth engine. How much it grows depends on how far you’re willing to build.
