More Scope, Less Autonomy

For Lifecycle Marketers, it's the best of times & the worst of times. And nobody cares.

I’m speaking to a lot of decision-makers in the Lifecycle Marketing, Customer Marketing, and Retention space these days.

And while I don’t want to be an alarmist, I am concerned.

While nobody wants to get laid off, there is another growing issue for those that remain.

Increased expectations combined with decreased autonomy and investment.

The increased expectations are a catch-22. The quantitative and qualitative impact that email, Push, SMS, and in-product messaging can drive has never been better understood across Orgs all the way up to the C-suite.

We are no longer on the hook for superficial engagement metrics but more so for deeper retention, engagement, and product awareness KPIs.

We’ve earned that responsibility. But it is also a harder nut to crack.

To further illustrate how far we’ve come, hiring a first Head of Lifecycle Marketing is one of the most crucial decisions a high-growth company can make. And everyone knows it.

But I’m less concerned about these new hires at early-stage startups. These hires are usually pre-vetted as highly qualified and given a lot of trust & autonomy from the get-go. Plus, you’re going straight into build mode and (in most situations) won’t be expected to serve as a servicing function yet.

In other words, much more proactive than reactive.

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What about mature companies w/larger teams?

That’s where things get scary. Not only do these teams need to get smarter about tracking impact and results. There are many other headwinds & too many cooks getting in the way of creating something truly great.

Some of the headwinds I’m noticing:

• Servicing requests increase exponentially, and you are obligated to run with other team’s ideas for programs and campaigns that you don’t see as a top priority

• Leadership is either strong in Demand Gen or Lifecycle Marketing, and your organization wants you to do both at scale

  • File also under many leaders of functions not being experts in that function and therefore unable to properly empower their direct reports

• Product, Growth & Product Marketing teams are now seen as key influencers in your space, and so your company encourages a consensus approach

• Growth keeps launching experiments that have a Lifecycle Marketing component, but the scope of those tests doesn’t properly consider downstream impacts or contamination against existing customer journeys

• Your Tech Stack is dated or not properly architected to scale

• Your team is too small, and you are on a hiring freeze

What this all amounts to is a lot of people working really hard just to keep the boat afloat rather than reaching anything close to the more aspirational high-tempo-testing state I wrote about last week.

More importantly, at an individual level people know when their work is or isn’t making a difference in the grand scheme of things. Job security is one thing. Loving what you do and reveling in its impact is another thing altogether.

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Set Up to Fail Doesn’t Scale

Lifecycle & Retention marketing is going through a roles & responsibility reckoning. And in the short-term, many companies just throw more people on the boat rather than seeing the forest from the trees.

So, hear me out, founders, VPs, Head of Marketing & Growth, and anyone else that influences how your Lifecycle teams function.

PROTECT YOUR LIFECYCLE MARKETING TEAM’S AUTONOMY. NOBODY CARES ABOUT THE CX AS MUCH AS THEY DO. YOU NEED TO PROTECT THESE PEOPLE SO THEY CAN PROTECT THE FOREST FROM THE TREES.

Spending > 20% of their time on servicing requests is too much

Don’t give Growth, Product, or PMARK the ability to launch comms w/o Lifecycle Marketing input

Don’t hire generalists to manage these functions

Do find solutions to outsource day-to-day operations, QA, and other high-energy, low-strategy functions

Ultimately, I’m concerned that Lifecycle Marketing will seize to exist as a specialized team and will simply roll into product and growth.

And if that happens, the customer experience will suffer. But nobody will have heard the warnings because we were too busy drowning.