Relationship Marketing for Your Business: A Beginner’s Guide

In order to make a business successful, you need to have a unique product along with good relationship marketing strategies. After the sales process is completed, it’s important to follow up with your customers and respond to their query and complaints. It helps in building brand loyalty and creates a strong customer connection so that you can repeat your business with the existing clientele. 

According to a report, if the customer retention of business is increased by 5 percent, then its profits are also increased by 25 percent. If you follow the right methods and strategies, then the happy customers would themselves share and promote your product or services on their own.  

First, let’s discuss what Relationship Marketing is?

Relationship Marketing is defined as the strategies employed by a business to build a long-term relationship with its clients and customers to interact with them for a long period. 

A business might have several products or services; however, a customer judges them just based on their first interaction.  If the company is able to satisfy the needs of the customers, then there is a high chance of repeat purchases of the same or different products from the same enterprise. However, if the customer satisfaction levels are low, then they might look for other options. 

According to the Small Business Trends Website, 80 percent of any business future depends on, 20 percent of their existing customer base. Hence, it’s essential to embrace relationship marketing due to the emerging technologies, and fierce competition among businesses. 

Strategies for Relationship Marketing

There isn’t an exact method to follow for relationship marketing. To get it right you have to strike a balance of technology, tools, and experience, and when you are able to get the right balance, it will provide you serious benefits in the long run. 

Marketing and its trends change with time. However, Digital Marketing Training gives you useful and fundamental insights about how to attract masses and eventually make them your long-lasting customers. Relationship marketing comes under this large spectrum where one can enhance his knowledge and skills by such well-formulated training and courses.

Here is the list of effective relationship marketing strategies a business can apply:

1.     Invest in appropriate technology 

With the expansion of the digital medium, the tiresome paperwork and storing data in excel sheets have been eradicated. Nowadays, several organizations are investing in ERP (enterprise resource management) tools and advanced CRM (customer relationship management) solutions. 

ERP is a type of technology in which different company functions are integrated into a single system for making critical decisions. 

CRM is all about storing important details like customer purchase, sales, personal information, and others. According to a report, it is one of the fastest growing software, and by the end of 2025, the industry is expected to have a revenue of more than $80 billion.

ERP reduces the overall expenditure and makes business more efficient by reducing the capital invested. CRM, on the other hand, increases sales with a central repository of clients and customer’s data. Some of the big enterprises in ERP includes IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle; however, nowadays, ERP is also available for medium and small organizations. 

Some of the popular CRM software include Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce which provides a proper system to collect and share client’s data and interactions. The primary goal of CRM is to increase sales through better customer retention and relationship. There is a one-time installation charge for using ERP and CRM solutions, but there may be upgradation cost depending on each platform. Organizations which have a small budget can opt for cloud-based solutions and open source digital experience platforms like Pimcore, for seamless digital experience management.

2. Using Loyalty Points for enhancing Customer Relationship

Several brands and enterprises reward their clients and users for being loyal to the business by providing cash back offers and discount coupons. There are different offers and loyalty points for new and existing customers. The customers can avail the reward points on their future purchases. 

With the help of powerful ERP and CRM packages, businesses can use the customer’s data and information for increasing the purchasing activity. Such loyalty points can be promoted by e-commerce, retail, book store, electronics companies which can be very beneficial to increase the overall conversion rate. 

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most popular forms of relationship marketing. Companies can send emails to their customers at regular intervals regarding new product launches, news, offers, updates and information related to their other services. 

It’s important to take extra care of the subject and title of the email so that users click and open to read the content. There are several email marketing tools available which help to send information to a large number of users without being considered as spam. 

You should also provide a feature to unsubscribe from the newsletters so that if a user does not want to get the emails, they can easily opt-out. It helps in increasing the trust and loyalty of the user for the respective company. 

4. Online chat on the website and toll-free numbers

If you have a business, then it’s essential to have an interactive and user-friendly website. The user experience of the website should be good so that none of your customers walks out of your site without making a purchase. The website should list the toll-free numbers and also have a feature of online chat so that customer can talk with your support staff in case of an emergency.

It’s essential to make your website mobile-friendly so that more people can access your site from phones without any difficulty. Use attractive images and tutorial videos related to your service and have an online form which can be used by your consumers to register any complaint. You can also hire people with excellent communication skills to attend the calls on the toll-free numbers.

5. Use social media for relationship marketing

Social media is one of the best platforms to engage with the existing customers as well to get new ones. Use the top social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and others to effectively promote your brand and company. Instead of creating personal accounts it's better to have business accounts for your brand. You can post about important events, product launches, seminars relevant to your industry. However, it is advised neither to post too much nor too little content. 

You need to engage your customers on the various social media platforms because it does not help to increase sales but also an important factor in improving your website search engine ranking. According to a report, fully engaged customers are likely to spend more than 23 percent as compared to average customers. Enterprises should also have some budget for paid advertisements to increase your reach to a new audience. 

6. Consumer Referrals and Campaign

Most of the big brands organize campaigns to interact with their consumers directly. 

For example, a mobile company can organize a free service campaign where their customers can bring old and damaged mobile phones to get it repaired free or at discounted charges. Referral campaigns are mostly used by several enterprises including credit card companies, banks, online marketing firms, and many more. 

The customers who refer to the company’s product or service to their friends and relatives are rewarded with cash points or coupons which they can use for future purchases. For example, airline companies reward their frequent flyers in the form of discounts, travel packages, and free flights. 

Conclusion

The ability of relationship marketing to get new customers as well as sustaining their existing clientele for future profits work in almost every industry and especially in B2C markets. Businesses need to make clear policies on how to interact with the customers for enhancing their buying experience. It’s also important to monitor the performance of the strategies for getting the best results. 

All the feedback, either positive or negative, should be analyzed and treated with the same approach. You also need to take necessary efforts to leverage the leads who have shown their desire in purchasing a product or service.