The real challenges lifecycle marketers face in 2025 

You know what good lifecycle marketing looks like. You understand the power of personalized onboarding, behavior-triggered campaigns, and data-driven segmentation. You're adopting AI tools faster than ever and have access to more sophisticated platforms than any generation of marketers before you.

So why are so many of us still stuck fighting the same fundamental problems?

We dug into this question by talking with lifecycle marketers across industries about their biggest challenges and how they’re tackling them head-on. Here's what marketers told us about their top challenges, straight from people doing the work every day.

P.S. You can dig into our full research on lifecycle marketing in 2025 for the complete picture.

The number one challenge isn't creative block or budget. It's that your marketing tools are basically strangers living in the same house.

Over half of the marketers we surveyed said "data and integration - our systems are out of sync" is their biggest blocker. One person put it perfectly: "Need insights into our large amount of data to know what is driving purchases, cancellations and winbacks of our audiences."

What marketers want AI to fix: When we asked what you'd solve with a magic wand, responses kept coming back to unified data. You want AI that can "fact-check and reconcile conflicting metrics across tools" and "auto-update dashboards with connected reporting."

What's actually working: Teams solving this are taking a hub-and-spoke approach. Instead of trying to connect everything to everything, you can choose one platform as your customer data hub and funnel information through it. Notion, for example, uses Customer.io to centralize its customer journey data, then builds segmentation and campaigns from that single source of truth.

The smartest teams also focus on data quality over data quantity. Rather than syncing every possible data point, identify the 5-10 attributes that actually drive your lifecycle decisions and make sure those flow cleanly between systems.

Right behind integration issues, nearly half of marketers surveyed struggle with measuring their campaign success. They genuinely can't tell what's working when attribution is broken and reporting happens in spreadsheets.

The wish list is clear: lifecycle marketers want AI to "clarify attribution across channels and predict funnel leakage" and to help "create more robust, dynamic segments."

What's actually working: The most successful teams we talked with focus on leading indicators instead of trying to track everything. Monarch Money, for example, tracks one key activation behavior (connecting a bank account) and measures how its campaigns influence that action. They can see results in real-time instead of waiting for conversion data weeks later.

You can also get smarter about attribution by using holdout groups for your major campaigns. Instead of trying to track every touchpoint, run controlled experiments to measure true incremental impact.

Despite all the automation tools available, lifecycle marketers are still drowning in repetitive tasks. Almost half of the marketers we surveyed said that manual processes and a lack of automation slows them down.

This shows up everywhere. One marketer told us their biggest problem is "managing multilingual emails. Content translation, and more tedious, link translation. When you need to translate a content newsletter with many links into 15 languages it becomes really time consuming."

How marketers are responding: 65% of marketers now use AI for copywriting, and 54% use it for data analysis and reporting. The average team reports significant time savings, with 72% seeing 20%+ time back in their day.

What's actually working: The teams seeing real efficiency gains aren't trying to automate everything at once. Pick one repetitive task per quarter and build a solid process around it.

For content, use AI as a first draft generator, then edit for brand voice. For segmentation, use dynamic logic to automatically route users based on behavior instead of building separate campaigns for each use case. The multilingual team mentioned above started using AI translation tools combined with automated link updating, cutting their localization time by 60%.

While these operational challenges create daily friction, marketers are still focused on the fundamentals that drive business results.

Retention takes the lead: 52% of marketers prioritize retention and churn, slightly ahead of acquisition at 46%. This matches what we found in our broader research - marketers are doubling down on keeping customers, not just getting them.

Activation is the middle child: 40% of marketers focus on activation and onboarding. It's important, but they seem to treat it as a bridge between acquisition and retention rather than a priority in its own right.

Everything else is secondary: Expansion and upgrades (24%) and win-back (16%) are afterthoughts for most teams, though this likely reflects resource constraints more than strategic choice.

Here's what's interesting: you're optimistic about AI but realistic about its current limits. Teams rate their confidence in hitting lifecycle goals at 68% — cautiously optimistic, tied to better tools and clearer strategies.

The top AI concerns are data privacy and security (31%), followed by creativity and authenticity (20%). Marketers want speed but not at the cost of sounding like robots.

What's next: The biggest AI opportunities for 2026 are personalization (32%), copywriting (29%), and segmentation (29%). We’re moving from AI efficiency to AI effectiveness.

Today’s lifecycle marketers are finding ways to work with what they have while pushing for better integration and measurement. Many marketers are using AI to bridge system gaps, others are getting creative with existing tools, and some are building processes that can work regardless of platform or tools.

The key insight from our research: the teams that solve data and measurement challenges first will have a significant advantage as lifecycle marketing gets more sophisticated.

Want to see how other marketers are tackling these same challenges? Our 2025 lifecycle marketing insights report has the full picture, including case studies from Notion and Monarch Money showing how they turned these obstacles into opportunities.