Marketing can be termed as a collection of activities that are aimed at delivering value to clients by business enterprises. These activities include creation of products and services, communication efforts and the ultimate exchange of value for the products.
Relationship marketing focuses on creation and maintenance of long-term customer relations that ensure an emotional attachment to a brand. Such strong bonds lead to brand loyalty and continued business support. Your clients become your brand ambassadors and they market your products through word of mouth on your behalf.
In the current business world, it is prudent to focus on relationship marketing rather than transactional marketing that aims at only selling products and services. This is because when customers feel connected to your brand at a deeper level beyond the exchange of goods for cash, they automatically carry out the transactional marketing efforts for you without even realizing it.
Let’s look in-depth at how Relationship Marketing works and how best Businesses can take advantage of it.
How Does Relationship Marketing Work?
Relationship marketing works by changing its focus from sales to improving the overall experience with a brand. This means that the attention shifts to the client by getting to know them better, understanding the solutions they are looking for and finding creative ways to solve their problems using your products.
A business needs to know exactly what they need to achieve through relationship marketing. Some of the goals they may have in mind may include lowering the client turnover rate, raising the spending rate per client, increasing their revenues, and generally lowering the customer acquisition costs. With a set goal in place, its easy to reap the benefits of this marketing strategy.
5 Characteristics of Relationship Marketing
Given that each customer is unique in terms of wants and personalities, relationship marketing adopts different characteristics to accommodate them. Some of these include;
Is Relationship Marketing Effective?
Having a well-planned relationship marketing effort in place has proved to be effective in the long run for businesses. While initially the strategy may look expensive due to high infrastructure costs, everything evens out in the long run and the business gets value for money.
Relationship marketing works because the clients become loyal to your brand. Your business becomes the go-to solutions provider for their problems. Additionally, clients are willing to overlook the shortcomings of a company that they feel attached to.
Once you retain one client, you can be sure they will spread the word to several prospective clients and in this way, they bring in new sales on your behalf which in turn lowers the costs of new customer acquisitions.
Relationship Marketing Strategies
There are several strategies that a business will need to consider if they plan to be experts at relationship marketing. These strategies include:
