Online marketing offers you the opportunity to expand your customer base, save on advertising costs, and grow your brand awareness. But before you scout online marketing on a bargain, it's more important to understand first the life cycle of the people you want to reach and become your loyal customers.
There are many ways to divide the phases of the customer life cycle, and here's the simplest:
1) Attract
Trying to get the attention of the people you want to reach.
2) Capture
Bringing the reached person into your influence sphere.
3) Convert
Establishing a better connection/relationship with the people that you have reached --whether they sign-up or purchase -- it's called conversion.
4) Nurture
Trying to keep your customers, also called retention. And you want them to become more than a customer -- but a loyal partner.
5) Up- Sell
Then trying to sell them more, whether up-sell or cross-sell.
Customer engagement is a process of relationship building from being completely unknown to building a customer base that supports, purchases and promotes your brand/product/service.
Remember, when you do not know the complete life cycle of your customers and you only tap into the first few phases, you are leaving money on the table.