Relationship Marketing Strategies That Just Work

The widening choice of goods and services has made consumers more demanding and more skeptical about the ability of influential brands and businesses to deliver on their promises.

The modern-day customer sees more than 4,000 ads daily, which increases the complexity of making decisions. With more choices and information, customers gain more power over the media, making it overly complicated for businesses to break through the noise and connect with them.

This shift in the balance of power made every brand and business look for ways to regain ownership of the customer journey. Innovators and industry disruptors achieved the mission by emphasizing customer satisfaction and implementing the basic tenets of relationship marketing.

While it’s not a new concept, not every business taps into the power of relationship marketing to leverage the opportunities it presents.

Let’s examine in more detail how utilizing customer relationship marketing can help your brand cultivate a deeper connection with consumers, improve retention rate, and differentiate your products.

What Is Relationship Marketing?

Relationship marketing is a strategic aspect of customer relationship management (CRM). Out of many marketing tactics, this revolves around lead nurturing and customer retention, which drives the most company revenue.

Customer relationship marketing aims to build meaningful long-term connections with the audience and favor lifetime customer value (LCV) over short-term customer acquisition goals or sales transactions. In other words, it offers real solutions to specific pain points that provide genuine value to customers.

But here’s the thing: not every marketing effort stems from relationship marketing. Some marketing tactics focus solely on driving traffic, increasing conversions, and moving consumers down the sales funnel.

Taking a personalized approach right after the customer makes a purchase is a perfect moment to implement all the elements of relationship marketing. Sure, it might be complicated to integrate into customers’ lives genuinely. But the lack of trust and connection between your brand and the end consumer can cost you dearly.

5 Tenets of Relationship Marketing

The excellence of this marketing tactic involves five fundamental pillars through which a brand can create meaningful connections with customers.

1. Customer Engagement: Essentially, it implies a two-way communication that demonstrates a sustained interest of a business in all future interactions.
2. Customer Experience: The way a brand provides its products and services differentiates them from competitors.
3. Customer Segmentation: Businesses segment customers based on their behavior and preferences. It allows them to tailor specific offers and deliver personalized experiences to clients.
4. Permission-Based Model: This model inspires trust and delivers value to consumers. With customers’ consent to receiving specific marketing offers, brands access behavioral data across different channels. That, in turn, allows them to understand the needs and cater to individual or group interests.
5. Sense of Community: Every customer’s wish is to belong to a larger, elite group. By fostering a sense of community, marketers can engage with consumers and create a strong sense of friendship and support.

Ultimately, the importance of relationship marketing in any industry is undeniable. Before a prospective customer becomes a first-time or returning buyer, every business needs to ensure that the audience loves your products, trusts your products, and connects with your company.

Let’s look at real-life examples of relationship marketing in action.

Top Examples of Effective Relationship Marketing

Many companies create loyalty programs, request customer feedback, and send personalized holiday greetings and corporate gifts to build strong connections with clients. These relationships increase your brand recognition since customers develop familiarity with your logo design, brand voice, and other elements.

There’s no denying that focusing on customer experience will keep people coming back for more. But at the same time, it’s crucial to make it easier to shop with your business, implement omnichannel strategies, and collect customer data across different channels.

Here’s how two well-known brands manage to keep customer experience top of mind and successfully utilize different forms of relationship marketing.

Starbucks

Starbucks is known for using a reactive form of this marketing tactic. The company maintains communication with customers and builds brand loyalty and ambassadorship by asking clients for ideas, offering unique branded gifts in exchange for a specific number of consumed drinks, regularly sharing user-generated content on social media, and much more.

Source: Starbucks

In a nutshell, the company regularly shows appreciation to loyal customers and fans of the brand. This way, they create a strong sense of friendship and belonging to the community.

Domino’s Pizza 

Domino’s Pizza is another brand that managed to tap into its digital audience and bring an old but famous campaign during the 1980s called Avoid the Noid back to life. But this time, in a slightly different format.

Source: Domino’s

The famous villain, the Noid, is now part of the new installment of the Crash Bandicoot mobile gaming series. This is an excellent example of how the brand communicates with the audience online and manages to genuinely integrate into their lives. By engaging with its clients on digital platforms and social media, Domino’s managed to reinvent its product and business.

Brands are no strangers to using a combination of different tactics, practices, and technology, especially when managing the quality of customer service and driving sales growth.

One of the critical factors affecting the success of any marketing tactics, including relationship marketing, is the ability of a company to compile and analyze customer data. That’s when customer relationship management comes into play.

What Is Customer Relationship Management?

Customer relationship management, otherwise known as CRM, refers to a mix of technologies and strategies that enable businesses to manage and analyze customer data and interactions.

A CRM system compiles customer data across various digital channels and touchpoints, including the company website, social networks, phone calls, and direct mail.

When integrated with other marketing solutions like Phonexa’s call tracking or lead management system, CRMs can provide support agents, sales representatives, and marketing experts with detailed customer data and personal information, including purchasing history and buying preferences.

With this information, businesses can align their relationship management efforts with other marketing initiatives to grow sales and boost retention and conversion rates.

On top of that, CRMs help different departments to prioritize their tasks and ensure the most significant impact on customer engagement and sales processes.

Objectives and Goals of CRM Tools

As a marketing solution, CRM can help any business find new prospects, build stronger relationships with customers, and keep them engaged and satisfied with the product and service quality.

Brands equipped with the right marketing automation solutions and a CRM system can significantly benefit from consolidating the critical data across all the marketing channels, including phone calls, and improving overall workflow.

Naturally, CRM has pros and cons, but marketing benefits prevail.

Challenges

Here are some of the challenges you can face when implementing a customer relationship management system:

• Introducing and utilizing omnichannel marketing tactics
• Limited integration capabilities
• Implementing additional software and tools
• Operating in a bubble without company-wide adoption

Benefits of Relationship Marketing

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits CRM and relationship marketing can offer businesses of all sizes.

1. 1. Improved bottom line: Adopting a CRM system along with marketing automation solutions can help brands yield impressive results like an increased number of closed sales deals, improved customer retention and satisfaction, enhanced customer experience, and as a result, improved bottom line.
   2. Better lead management: Focusing on the right leads is imperative for any business. With the right tools and marketing solutions, lead qualification, distribution, and nurturing will come at no extra cost or effort.
   3. Increased LCV: By gaining visibility on every marketing output and customer interaction, brands can better grasp how to handle communication with clients according to each sales stage. This way, brands can build strong customer relationships and uncover cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
   4. State of readiness: Customer expectations keep changing, which requires businesses to react fast and adapt even faster. CRM, relationship marketing, and automation solutions can help brands remain agile and ensure business growth regardless of circumstances.

To Wrap It Up

Relationship marketing is a challenging but strategic aspect of successful customer relationship management. While it requires extra time and effort to ensure real-life engagement with the target audience, it helps brands lay the foundation for brand loyalty and ambassadorship.

With access to detailed customer data and interactions throughout the customer journey,

businesses can ensure that they appropriately personalize their outreach efforts, map their relationship tactics, and build a strong long-term connection with the audience.

Schedule a consultation with one of Phonexa’s knowledgeable experts to learn how our suite of solutions can help you enhance the customer experience and harness the power of relationship marketing.