Relationship Marketing: What it Is and Ideas on how to use it

Relationship Marketing with Your Target Audience

The great trend in Marketing today is Marketing aimed at building Relationships with customers because repeat purchases make a large part of the capital that goes into any company and because it is much easier to convince someone who has already bought from you before.

Why do most companies lose customers? Poor service? No. Poor quality? No. Well then why? Apathy after the sale. Most companies lose customers by ignoring them to death.

Mistaken businessman think that marketing is over as soon as they make the sale.

Marketing begins as soon as you make the sale. It is of great importance for you and your company, that you understand this.

It is six times more expensive to sell a product to a new customer than to an existing customer. There are businesses that, after one or two years garnering customers, survive, pay their bills, and grow entirely thanks to those customers the company already has and to whom the company directs its Marketing acts.

Furthermore, if you maintain a relationship with your customers, it will be easier for you to know what products they buy and like even long after the sale and what other products your customers like that you can introduce, they can even be from another industry, thereby helping you to diversify your entrepreneurship initiatives.

The objective of many marketing strategies in the last 10 years has been building the customer’s commitment to a brand or a dealer. This has taken three forms:

1. Creating Customer Satisfaction – delivering superior quality products and services.
2. Building Brand Equity – the sum of the intangible assets of a brand. Factors that contribute to this are: name awareness, perceived quality, brand loyalty, the associations consumers have towards the brand, trademarks, packaging, and marketing channel presence.
3. Creating and Maintaining Relationships.

Success with any of these strategies will result in high levels of repeat purchase, insulation from price increases and improved responsiveness to marketing communications by customers.

Initially, the quality movement placed customer satisfaction as the ultimate goal of marketing programs. However, as satisfied customers were shown to defect to other brands or providers, strategists looked to creating a greater commitment with the customer.

They come up with two ways to achieve this:

1. Create Brand Equity (mainly for consumer products) and

2. Build relationships (especially for industrial products.)

Brand equity used mass media advertising, corporate citizenship and public events sponsorship to build a brand image.

Relationship Marketing relied on one-to-one communications between the brand and its consumers.

With the growth of marketing databases and the Internet, the ability to reach customers individually became a viable strategy for a wide range of firms including consumer products companies.

This one-to-one interaction with customers leads to a growth in value that the product or service brings.

Customer retention is important because:

1. It costs less to serve long-term customers.
2. Loyal customers will pay a price premium.
3. Loyal customers will generate wordof-mouth referrals to other prospective customers.

Ideas for Relationship Marketing

Relationship Marketing is simple, you just have to be friends with your customers, which is easy because they are what sustain your business and are your reason to exist.

Let’s look at some ways to keep in touch with your customers:

Newsletter and Email

Newsletters can be either via email or printed, they contain information about your new products, prices and promotions. It may also be a way for you to inform your clients about your company’s news, what activities you have been doing, and about what charity events or sponsorships you have been involved with.

Always leave a page of the Newsletter dedicated to information on how you can be contacted.

Nowadays the best way to do Newsletters is from the internet, through email with services like MailChimp that manage your emails. You can collect emails from your customers after a purchase, but make sure you first become friends with your costumer before asking for his email, so the likelihood of him ever coming back and buying is higher.

Be extremely friendly to your customers, if you are an unfriendly person be unfriendly to others, but not to your customers.

Facebook

Facebook is practically a mini-website of yours where you can introduce new products, interact directly with your customers, exchange contacts and information with them and listen to their feedback after a purchase.

You can start with the friends you already have on Facebook or you can create a page for your company, brand, product or service. Be sure to respond to comments and messages that your customers send and always leave contact information and how to locate your store or office.

Whatsapp

Nowadays there are whatsapp groups for everything and why not for you and your customers. Create a group where you regularly post product news, depending on the type of product you provide, post regularly but in a way that does not tire your customers.

SMS

If you’ve been in the habit of getting the phone numbers of your best customers, one way to keep in touch with them is by sending them messages when you have a new collection, a new product, a new shipment, and so on.

Conclusion

The secret of Relationship Marketing is to make friendships, be kind to your clients, ensure that you exist to solve their problems and not only to take their money, and be professional.

Do not overdo it mainly with forms of direct contact like SMS and whatsapp, be periodic and consistent, a good tip is to send information weekly or every two weeks.

Never push the customer too hard.