Customer Lifecycle in Subscription services
Expert Tips and Best Practices for Keeping Your Customers Enjoying the Ride
Setting the Stage
Customer Lifecycle Management is the guiding force behind a business, tracking the entire journey of a customer's relationship with a company. It's more than a single transaction; it's a continuous process of understanding and engaging with customers at every stage of their interaction with your brand.
Typical customer lifecycle
A customer journey is not a one-act play. It's a saga, a series of stages each with its own plot and characters. There is a great value in thinking of customers in different lifecycle stages.
Imagine getting notified by Tesla about new driving functionalities, but at exact point when your car just broke down and placed in the service? Or being offered a new, upgraded Samsung model, when you just purchased one 3 days ago.
Customising your approach based on which stage users falls in is crucial. There are many ways to divide your customers journey depending on what business you are in, but commonly, framework would look like smth. this:
Onboarding: The First Step
First impressions matter. Onboarding is about helping customers realise value of your service. According to report from RevenueCat, which analyses the state of subscription applications in 2025, providing comprehensive performance benchmarks based on a vast dataset of over 75,000 apps - one of the key factors for subscription app success remains optimising early user engagement.
How to measure it:
Product usage in the first 2-4 weeks (Pro tip: set clear ‘actions’ that you believe onboarded customer should perform to be onboarded, guide user towards them and personalise based on data
Early NPS surveys
Tips:
Product-led onboarding comes first, emails second
Push awareness of paid features early
Slack and Duolingo both are great examples of clear, structured and effective onboarding experience: The 11 best user onboarding examples to learn from
Development: Build the Relationship
Once customers are engaged, help them do more. This is where upselling, cross-selling, and feature adoption happen.
How to measure it:
Lifetime Value (LTV)
Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)
Spotify starts free. Then it shows you why Premium is worth it: no ads, offline listening, better sound. Users don’t feel pressured—they see the value and upgrade.
Retention: Keep Them Coming Back
Retention: Customer retention refers to the activities and actions companies take to reduce the number of customer leaving. The goal of customer retention programs is to help companies retain as many customers as possible, often through customer loyalty initiatives, added value, discounts and extended trials.
Great example of retention tactics is shared by Duolingo, I highly encourage you to check this out.
Stages tell you where customers are. Segmentation tells you who they are. Combine the two, and your marketing starts feeling personal, not robotic.