Understanding Relationship Marketing
Building strong relationships with customers is essential for any business that wants to grow and thrive. But how do you ensure that your relationship marketing efforts are successful?
What Is Relationship Marketing?
Relationship marketing is a form of marketing that focuses on building strong, lasting relationships with customers. Relationship marketing involves creating an ongoing dialogue with customers and providing them with valuable content or offers that keep them engaged over time. Relationship marketing is especially important for small businesses, as it helps to build brand loyalty and increase customer retention.
5 Key Characteristics Of Relationship Marketing
As a small business owner, you can use relationship marketing to create loyalty and trust among your customer base. But to do this, you have to be intentional. These 5 key characteristics of relationship marketing will help you build the relationships you need to create a successful business.
1. Transparency
Customers want to know who they’re doing business with. To ensure that customers trust you and your business, it’s important to be transparent about your processes, products, and services. This includes being honest and open with customers about how you use their data or how pricing works.
It also means being willing to give away some of your knowledge. If you were to go back over the past two years of emails from ASMM Digital, you would find that we have given you enough information about digital marketing to do it all on your own. That's on purpose. Although some of our subscribers have implemented some of the tips we have given, many have called us to ask us to do it for them. They appreciate the fact that we are willing to be completely open with our information and that builds the trust they need to start working with us.
2. Engagement
Relationship marketing isn’t just about broadcasting messages to potential customers. It’s also about engaging with them, responding to their questions and comments, and creating an ongoing conversation. This helps you develop a better understanding of your customers’ needs and preferences as well as build trust.
Marketing has changed in the past ten years. Customers are spending more money with companies they feel a relationship with. Relationships don't happen without communication. It's important to have a specific process for responding to your customers when they call, email, or reach out to you on social media.
You may recall the debacle with the Donut Shack several years back. When the business was sold for the first time, the new owners made dozens of changes that upset their customer base. On a neighborhood Facebook page, people were complaining on a daily basis. The new owners never responded. Within a few months, they closed their doors. Luckily for our community, it reopened with new owners who were intent on engaging their customers and the Donut Shack is once again a thriving part of the Severna Park community.
3. Personalization
The more personalized your relationship marketing efforts are, the more successful they will be. That means sending personalized offers, messages, and content that are tailored specifically to each customer’s interests.
Personalization is critical in today's digital world. Customers expect companies to know their preferences and serve up content accordingly. Even if you don't have the budget for personalization technology, you can still provide personalized service by taking the time to get to know your customer's preferences and tailor what you serve them.
Consider this - The ASMM Digital team goes to the same conference every year. We sign up at the conference for the following year. Then for the next 12 months, we receive emails reminding us to sign up. Wouldn't it be better if we were put on a list of preregistered emails? They could send us updates when they sign a new speaker or get a new sponsor instead of bombarding us with emails that make no sense to us.
4. Consistency
Relationships don’t happen overnight. To build relationships with your customers, it’s important to be consistent in your message and delivery. Make sure that you are providing consistent content or offers over time so that the customer knows what to expect from you.
This could mean sending regular emails or sticking to a certain posting schedule on social media. Consistency is key when it comes to building relationships with your customers. We find that skipping a monthly email blast will elicit emails from our customers asking what happened and why they didn't get an email. We take that as proof that consistency matters.
At ASMM Digital, we send out an email newsletter once a month and post to our company blog once a week. This keeps our customers informed about what we’re up to and helps us build relationships with them.
5. Reward
Customers love rewards! Relationship marketing is all about giving something back to your customers, such as discounts or freebies. When you reward your customers, you show them that you appreciate their loyalty and that you value their business.
Rewards don’t have to be expensive. You can offer discounts or sales, give out freebies, or even just thank your customers for their loyalty with a handwritten note or small gift.
At ASMM Digital, we've found that our customers really respond well to rewards such as our Tervis cups or our warm winter blanket with our logo on it. These small tokens of appreciation go a long way in keeping our customers coming back for more.
By using these 5 characteristics of relationship marketing, you can start to build solid relationships with your customers and create a loyal customer base that will support your business for years to come. Relationship marketing isn’t just about sales, it’s about building meaningful relationships with your customers that will last. So start today and watch your business grow!