Longplay s Lifecycle Method How To Systematically Scale Profit, Retention & LTV

All right, Creative Con, let's be real for a second. A lot of brands treat acquisition like a one night stand. They spend all their energy trying to get that first order and then ghost their own customers the morning after. That hamster wheel might get you some quick wins, but it's not how you build a brand that lasts.

Our next speaker has made it her mission to fix that. She's the CEO of Longplay Brands, which helps DTOC companies escape the acquisition trap and start scaling profitably through life cycle marketing. Her longplay method is all about turning one-time customers into loyal repeat buyers and systematically growing profit, retention, and lifetime value. So if you're tired of living and dying by the roaz in your prospecting campaigns, this is the session you need.

So welcome to Creative Const Chan. Hi everyone, Jess from Longplay here. Um I'm the founder and CEO at LongPlay and so excited to be speaking with you all at the first creative con. Um and what I would love to share um today is going through longist life cycle method which is our way of helping DTOC brands and e-commerce brands in general systematically scale profit retention and lifetime value.

So before we get into the details and um a little bit more around longplay, I want to start with you know what what I want to be here to talk with all of you about and the the first thing is to really look at how e-commerce as an industry has changed over the last 3 to 5 years in particular. Um anyone who has been in ecom for a few years now or been in the game for a while has seen the overall industry start to mature. And what this means is that ecom is a wildly different industry than it was 3 to 5 years ago and especially 10 years ago. Um and because of that there's a lot of um there's a lot of marketers, agencies, brands still running off of tactics and playbooks that might have worked 10 years ago, might have worked 5 years ago, um but haven't really caught up to where the industry is at.

And because of that, we're seeing a lot of DTOC ecom brands struggle in being able to grow profitably or seeing that the strategies that they used to be using even 2 years ago and how they run ads, how they build out their business, how they grow just aren't working anymore. And a lot of growth plateauing. And what we've seen at Longplay is the brands that are able to continue thriving and continue growing um are shifting to a different way of marketing where it's not just acquisition, it's not just retention marketing, it's not just channel focus, but it's truly a life cycle approach. And so because e-com as an industry has matured so much, um you know, if we think back 10 years ago, it was so easy to grow an ecom brand in the sense where there wasn't a ton of competition.

Um it was still a very new exciting industry and so a lot of consumers were just excited to be buying things online. Um and really at that time as long as you had a decent product, a good website and you were running ads most brands were scaling pretty profit profitably. Now in the last 3 to 5 years industry has matured a lot which means there's a lot more competition um a lot more cost and also consu uh customers are a lot more discerning and most importantly too it's harder to scale an ecom brand really quickly and just get a profitable exit just from revenue and growth. What investors and um what investors are really looking for now is profitable sustainable scalable growth.

Um these are always the fundamentals of a really good business. And so what what this means really is that one, there's no more one-sizefits-all playbook. You know, you don't you you can't build a successful ecom brand off of a few good tactics or a few good ads. You really need a strong business model and and marketing strategies.

And second is DC brands also need a way to grow sustainably, scalably, profitably. It's not enough to just grow rapidly or acquire a lot of customers. You need to be able to actually keep your customers and then build your brand as well. And so there's three foundational changes that we've seen every Dc brand essentially need to make in this new era of of the industry.

Um the first is bringing it back to the basics and serving your customer. Um the thing that we always remind um brands of is that DTOC is a distribution channel. It's not a business model. Um at the end of the day, what wins is you still need a great product.

You still need to know who your customers are serving, how to reach them, um, and how to really solve a real problem for your customers and how to speak to them and resonate with them. The second is integrating all the different ways to serve your customer across your life cycle. So, way back then, it was easy to grow an ecom brand just from a few great ads or great website and maybe launching some email marketing. But now brands need to shift to a life cycle marketing approach where all of your different channels, tools, and programs are working together in a single ecosystem to convert your customers.

And the third is shifting from tactics to strategy. Um, back then it was easy to say like, you know, there's top five, top 10 tips that's going to convert all of your um, convert your customers, top 10 CRO tips, top 10 email marketing tips, musthaves, things like that. And while there's still a lot of good strategies and tactics in there, having a way to solve unique business problems is more important than, you know, the hot tactic of 2025 or 2026. And great strategy really starts with knowing your business, your customers, what problem you're solving and where to start first.

And what I want to share with you is essentially uh the method that Longplay uses to diagnose and share and solve these problems for the e- confidence that we work with. Now, who are we to talk about these things? Um so Longplay we have 25 team members. We also have collectively have 40 years of experience across ecom um and business in general as owners, operators and consultants.

So we've really seen a a lot of businesses over long periods of time. Um we've seen how businesses can thrive in a year um and really struggle the next year. We've seen how businesses need to navigate through industry, economic and seasonal changes. And we've also had the perspective of consulting for businesses, operating businesses, and running teams.

And because of that, we're able to provide the holistic um lens that we're noticing a lot of ecom brands need um in this new um in this new chapter. And what we really do is we're essentially really a true life cycle marketing partner and strategic partner for the brands that we work with. Um we have our portfolio of owned e-commerce brands. Uh we've operated in-house at, you know, seuite director level um uh at brands.

We've also generated hundreds of millions of dollars for ecom brands as well. And um worked a lot across a lot of different industries and verticals um and different revenue sizes. And because of this, because of this deeper experience, we're able to see the deeper issues that cause brands um to struggle with growth plateauing um lifetime value not really growing the way they need to. Um, we've seen a lot of brands struggle with acquiring customers after co.

Um, we've also seen a lot of brands struggle with keeping customers um, even with great marketing and a great website. These are the higher level and deeper level problems um, that we're able to to help uh, e-commerce brands solve. So going to the first part which is what is life cycle marketing? We talk a lot about life cycle marketing in in e-commerce as an industry and we find everyone uses the term differently.

Um sometimes people are talking about life cycle marketing just when they're just talking about email, SMS and direct mail. But truly what life cycle marketing is is taking a step back from all the different day-to-day channels, tools, and programs that you use and looking at it from the perspective of your your customer, which is the entire journey that your customer needs to take on when they're learning about your brand for the first time, which is this awareness section to all the way in the future when they eventually ideally become a raving fan and drive word of mouth and they kind of become their own revenue channel. And what the customer life cycle looks at is what are all the key milestones and stages that a customer customer needs to go through um to learn about your brand to be becoming a raving fan. So they need to go through awareness section.

They need to learn about your brand for the first time. They need to go to your website. They might look at a product page, add a product to cart, start their checkout. Um they uh will place an order.

They want to make sure that they actually use a product. Eventually they want to buy a second purchase, start a subscription and then eventually try multiple products from your brand and uh become a raving fan. Now these are all the different steps that your ideal customer goes through in their life cycle. And the way that life cycle marketing works is what we want to do is essentially take a step back and say where are you losing customers the most and where are you losing revenue the most?

And let's methodically plug those holes up. Um, and what this allows marketers to do is take a look back at what's actually going to drive growth for the business rather than just email optimization or website optimization. Because in 2025 and 2026, the brands that are going to win are the ones who are most effectively able to drive customers through every stage of their life cycle rather than just optimizing individual channels. And so that's why life cycle marketing involves not just email, not just SMS, not just direct mail, but it really is the umbrella that connects all the different channels tools and programs across your entire website.

Essentially, all the different touch points that a customer is going to go through with your brand. That includes the website, but that also includes your ads, how you're positioning um your brand. Um it also includes things like your value prop, your positioning, how you're differentiating yourself in the market for competitors. um all the different channels that you're running uh your products across whether it's D to Z, Amazon or retail.

It also obviously involves your channels like email, SMS and direct mail. But it also involves um areas of your business that you might not think of um in your marketing such as your operations, your product, your shipping times, your CX um your CX team and things like your subscription and loyalty programs as well. Because ultimately all these things work together to either support customers going through a life cycle or cause customers to drop off. You might find that even though you have a great website and great ads, a lot of customers are dropping off your DTOC channel because it's not competitive with Amazon competitor pricing or maybe your CX team isn't really giving them the support that they need in the purchase process with the questions that they have.

Um or maybe your shipping times are what's losing customers. Um, we also sometimes find that, you know, customers might be dropping off in certain areas of the life cycle because of issues earlier on. So, for example, we've seen a lot of brands where their customers are dropping off in, you know, when they land on the website, when they start shopping for products, not because the website is bad, but because their advertising is positioning their brand completely differently. And so, customers are actually kind of confused when they get to the website.

Um, but this is the lens that um allows us as life cycle marketers to truly look at your business as a whole and to look at the areas on where you're losing revenue and losing customers and plugging those holes because that's ultimately the most effective way to drive profit, sustainable growth and uh and more uh revenue as well. Now, everything that we do at LongPlay always goes back to what we call our DIA framework, which is essentially how what are the what what are the ways to turn data into information, information into insights and insights into action. A lot of ecom brands, but just digital marketing in general, always drowning in so much data. We have so many numbers, so many dashboards.

Every platform has their own um has their own reporting tools. Um but the but the area that we see a lot most ecom brands really struggle is turning all that data truly into information into action uh into insights into action. So how do we translate what numbers we should be looking at? Um are we measuring the right numbers that help us understand where customers are where we're losing customers in life cycle?

Um do we have a way of understanding what those numbers are telling us about our customers? Um, do we have a way to analyze it so we understand our customers behaviors, where they might be getting stuck, why they're dropping off at that time, and then also how how do we actually translate that into action in into order to understand which areas of our life cycle we want to optimize, what campaigns we want to run per month, what channels we want to test in, um, where, which areas, which levers we want to pull to drive growth. So everything goes back to data into information into insights into action. This is the core foundation to run effective life cycle marketing because we first need to know what our ideal customer life cycle looks like.

Then we need to know where customers are dropping off, where you're losing revenue, and then we need to be able to go deeper into each of those areas to figure out which channels and tools and programs need to be optimized and how do we optimize um those channels in order to stop losing customers at that stage and stop losing revenue at that stage. Now, one of the ways that we do this is with our customer life cycle mapping framework um at Longplay. And so this is a framework that we use internally and with our uh with the brands that we work with to help tie back the numbers and metrics that we're looking at to help us identify where where brands are losing revenue, where brands are losing customers the most. So essentially what you want is for each stage of the customer life cycle, you want to know which metrics are the key indicators to measure the number of customers who are at that stage of the life cycle.

And that allows us to see where customers are dropping off. So, as an example, um we might use website traffic as a way to um measure the number of people who are aware. You know, the more website traffic you're driving, the more people are aware um that your brand exists. And now we can measure how many people are uh interested in your brand by the number of people who actually opt into your email and SMS list.

So, if someone visits your website and opts into your email and SMS list, we can we can accurately say that they've they're aware of your brand and they're also showing some interest in your brand. And so we can measure the percentage of people who end up visiting your website to the percentage of people who end up on your email and SMS list. We're able to see how many people actually convert from the awareness stage into the interest stage. We're going to I'm going to show you an example of what this looks like uh for a brand a little bit later on as well.

Um but this also this framework essentially allows us to measure you know what are the different people going through your customer life cycle. How many people make it from each stage to the next and where are people dropping off. And what you want to do first is tie back the different metrics that you are measuring to the key indicators for each stage. So you might look at your website traffic.

How many of those people actually end up viewing a product? How many people who view a product add a product to cart? Who start checkout? Who make a purchase?

Um, how many of your purchasers actually end up making a second purchase or a third purchase? Um, how many of your purchasers end up spending, you know, 150 in lifetime value versus 250 versus 350? How many of them start a subscription? And out of the people who start a subscription, how many of them go on to three renewals and six renewals?

And what this allows us to do is focus on the key metrics that are actually going to measure our life cycle rather than drowning in metrics like open rate for email or click rate for email or uh we're just looking at conversion rates and AOV that's a lot of different metrics and all those things are going to matter. Um but if we don't know which problems we're solving if we don't know which areas of the life cycle we need to plug up first um we're never going to know how improving those metrics will actually drive growth. So this is always the first step to getting a highle overview of your entire customer life cycle. Second thing that we end up doing is looking at all the different channels, tools and programs that um are touch points for each stage of the customer life cycle.

So this is just an example of one. Um but in the top you again you have your milestones, you have your different customer life cycle and in your awareness stage you might really focus on you know ads, organic social and direct mail are the main touch points. Those are the primary channels that potentially customers are getting aware and hearing about your brand for the first time. Um now once they get into interest they might be they might have touch points like your ads because you're still running retargeting ads.

Um your website is going to be a big uh touch point on the interest stage. You might have dedicated landing pages for specific offers or specific products. Um you're they might also be looking up reviews um either on-site or off-site and you also might still be using direct mail as another way to get interest. Now once they get into the consideration intent evaluation phase, which means they're kind of shopping, um your ads are still doing a bunch of retargeting.

Your website page um pages are going to be big as well. You're still landing pages, but you also now have email, SMS, and potentially customer service. Maybe a chatbot. uh maybe just people reaching out um become really important here as well.

And then further down your pipeline um you might notice that things like your packaging start playing into a role into your customer life cycle. Things like your blog or your account portal, your subscription loyalty portals um and even things like your organic social start playing a role because it's building community. And what this helps you map is all the different initiatives, channels, tools, and programs that you're running across your entire business and mapping it back to which areas of the life cycle does it actually affect. Um, and the reason this is important is it helps us look at one, where you're losing customers and revenue in the in uh your life cycle, but then two is which touch points you need to focus on optimizing if you want to solve that area of the life cycle.

Now, third is when we get into channels. So I'm going to use email and SMS as an example. Um but what we do is we then start to look at all the different um email and SMS flows that affect that area of the customer life cycle. So for example um we'll have you know in the interest phase right when someone opts in you have your welcome flow you have active on site flow you have your um quiz flows and those are all the different specific email and SMS flows that are going to directly impact customers in the interest phase.

You also have your add to cart flow that impacts customers in the intent phase. You also have your abandoned cart flow that impacts people in the evaluation phase. And what this allows us to do is know that if we want to improve email and SMS and we really want to drive more customers from evaluation to purchase. We want to get more customers who are starting checkout to complete purchase.

We know that the abandoned cart flow is the area that we want to start optimizing in. And this is when we can get more granular into email and SMS tactics and strategies, which is what are all the different ways we want to test abandoned cards, what offers we want to test, how can we optimize it creative. Um, but this honing in process allows us to really focus on first looking at all the different areas of your customer life cycle, where you're losing them, where you're losing revenue. Second is identifying the key touch points that are actually going to improve that area of the life cycle.

And the third is we can start drilling down on which parts of email and SMS actually can improve that stage. And so I'm going to go into a few different examples to um to show you what this looks like in practice. So this is an example of the customer life cycle um with actual numbers for a sample brand. So in this particular case, you might see that out of their entire website traffic, 5% of them end up on their email and SMS list, which is relatively low.

You know, a good benchmark is 8%. U minimum. So that means that we know that there's some loss of customers happening in this stage because it's in red. Um and then out of their entire email and SMS list, 62% of them haven't made a purchase.

Um, out of those non-purchasers, 23% of them haven't opened or clicked an email in the last 6 months. Um, we also can see here that out of their website traffic, 17% of them, only 17% of uh, website visitors actually end up viewing a product. And out of everyone who's viewed a product, 35% of them added product to cart. But if someone adds a product to cart, 76% of them actually start checkout.

Um, but only 27% of people who start check out actually complete a purchase. You'll kind of see all these numbers go all the way through. And what this allows us to see very uh very quickly up front is all the ones in red are the ones where this brand is losing the most customers, losing the most revenue. And so when we're looking at prioritizing the work that we want to do, we want to first first focus on plugging all the areas in red.

So we really want to plug the area of um getting more customers who are viewing um on site to view a product. We want to make sure there's more people who are starting checkout, completing a checkout. We also want to drive more um purchasers over to subscription, but we also know what's working well. We can see that they have a great repeat purchase rate.

Um they have a great add to cardart to start checkout rate. They have great subscription renewals. And we kind of start start to see that if we want to drive profitable, sustainable growth for for this brand. Um plugging those red areas is what's going to help directly impact that bottom line most effectively.

Now from here let's say we really want to focus first on you know viewing a product um and starting subscriptions. We really want to prioritize those those two areas. Now we can start looking at um which touch points impact that the most. So we know that in the consideration phase ads website landing pages email SMS and um customer service those are all the different touch points that impact um this area.

We also know that in the retention expansion phase, the customer is actually impacted by their website, the account portal, subscription portal, CX, email, SMS, direct mail, blog, organic, social. There's a lot of different touch points um that drive more customers towards subscription. We know that those are the areas that we want to focus on the most. Now, these are all the different channels and tools and programs across the board.

And what you can start doing is doing essentially a red, yellow, green method across all these different areas. So, we kind of know like green is like we're pretty good on these things. they work really well. Red is like we might know we're missing some areas here or these channels are kind of low performing for these areas.

And yellow is, you know, there's probably some optimization that we can do here. Again, this this very quickly allows us to look at let's focus on optimizing all the red areas for the areas that we're bleeding the most. You know, we're bleeding a lot in the consideration phase and we kind of know our email, SMS, and you know, sales channels aren't really great there. Let's focus on that.

And we also know that we're bleeding a lot in this retention expansion phase. And we kind of know that our website account portal and subscription portals in this phase aren't uh aren't optimal as well. Let's let's focus on optimizing those specific channels before we do anything else. And then once we do that, we can do the same mapping towards our email and SMS flows.

So we kind of know that in the consideration phase, which is everyone who's landing on the site and viewing a product, the flows that are going to impact that most directly are the browse abandonment flows. So let's focus on optimizing and AB testing those um those email and SMS flows. Um in the retention expansion phase we know that things like a subscription upsell um an ED no or crossell subscription milestones those are all um those are all the email and SMS flows that are going to drive more subscriptions. So let's focus on optimizing um those flows.

And you can do a quick map. This is what we call our lollipop chart. But this allows us to quickly map what emails and SMS are actually live and what emails and SMS are missing and again patch in the holes here. And when we walk through this this approach to um to life cycle marketing, this is how we methodically drive sustainable, scalable, profitable growth deep ecom brands because we first start off with one, let's map out your ideal customer life cycle because if we don't know our ideal customer life cycle, there's no way that we can effectively drive customers through the through it.

Um so we want to set our ideal. The second step is once we have our ideal um like customer life cycle, we want to get the metrics to measure where we're losing revenue, where we're losing customers. So in other in other words, what areas of the life cycle is our business not really built very well to convert and push customers through. The third is once we have those metrics, let's map out which touch points, which channels and programs are affecting each area of the life cycle because that will help us identify which areas we can um you know we should focus on optimizing.

And then fourth is only when we know which channels and programs that we want to look at can we go deep dive um into each of those. So if we take email and SMS as an example, we can start mapping out what are all the different email and SMS flows that uh impact our life cycle and let's focus on those areas. And we can do the same thing for campaigns. We can do the same thing for website landing pages.

Um we can the same thing for ads um operations. Um but this method allows us to make sure that as a team we're always focused on the most important areas are actually going to drive the most growth for our business and there's a level of focus um that ends up happening. And really the biggest thing is that we've seen this shift in mindset. Um really critical for ecom brands to scale sustainably, scalably, and profitably.

Um it's a it's way harder now to grow an ecom brand. And it's um and it's also way more for each team to do. Um it's really really hard to drive growth in a way that where you're just focusing on optimizing all the emails or launching all these different channels. Um and that focus and that prioritization is uh what brands need the most.

So, I hope you um gain just different perspective on how to do life cycle marketing, what life cycle marketing is, and the role of life cycle marketing in growing your ecom brand. And um you can always reach me at longplays.com or justchan on Twitter. And um excited to hear all of your thoughts, questions, um conversations, and feedback um from this uh from this presentation.