Relationship marketing is the type of marketing that focuses on building a deeper and long term relationship with customers.
If you are not investing in relationship marketing yet, I think it’s high time, you may want to consider investing your time and resources in relationship marketing.
It’s a long-term strategy that aims to build brand loyalty, create strong customer connections and encourage regular, repeat business from your already existing clientele.
When you invest in relationship marketing you get a loyal customer group who are more likely to stick with the brand.
Relationship Marketing includes:
How to create an effective relationship marketing strategy?
Here’s what you need to create an effective relationship marketing strategy:
1. Customer service team to ensure customer satisfaction
If you want to focus on customer relationship you need to have a dedicated skilled team to ensure customer satisfaction.
Anyone who plays a role on the phone, in person or just on social media should be specially trained on customer interactions.
2. A good CRM tool
CRM tools help you store information on customers, track communication and ensure proper follow-up. They also make organizing and managing your customer relationships easier, too. So, having a good CRM tool is a must. Top CRMs include Nimble, HubSpot and Insightly.
Though you don’t have to automate all of your marketing, automation tools can definitely fill in the gaps when you’re short-handed or just want to be sure every customer is tended to in a timely fashion.
Use them to supplement your already awesome customer service team, and they can make your relationship marketing strategy much more effective.
3. A comprehensive customer-facing presence
Today’s customers can interact with you in dozens of ways. They can call you, stop by your store, chat with your messenger bot, email your customer service team.
If you want to satisfy those customers no matter how or when they contact you, you need to make sure your coverage is comprehensive.
Be comprehensive and make sure you have the resources to fully deliver on each potential touchpoint that’s out there. Quick, thorough and friendly responses are vital to a great customer relationship.
Relationship marketing is less transactional than traditional marketing strategies. It’s not laser-focused on closing one sale or making one conversion.
Instead, it’s all about developing a long-term, strong relationship with customers that already exist. This, in turn, encourages repeat business, rather than just one-off purchases.