What is Relationship Marketing? Customer Retention and Customer Acquisition Marketing Strategies in Relationship Marketing

By Barbara Silva

What is Relationship Marketing?

 

Relationship marketing is a marketing strategy which emphasizes customer retention and satisfaction. Most new businesses focus on getting new customers and then making an immediate sale. Often, developing a customer retention strategy is overlooked.

The main difference in relationship marketing and other types of marketing is that the goal is to build healthy customer relationships over the long term. There are financial benefits to keeping the customers you already have as opposed to constantly having to re-invest in customer acquisition cost.

 

Customer Acquisition Marketing Strategies

While getting new customers is obviously crucial for any home business, the cost of customer acquisition in the form of advertising, pay per click, time spent attracting your target audience through article marketing, etc. is greater than the cost of serving someone who has already purchased from you.

Good customer acquisition marketing strategies are based on attraction marketing. By carefully researching the specific behaviors, wants and needs of your target audience, you “attract” them onto your potential customer list. You do this by providing information and solutions relevant to their unique circumstances.

However, if you don’t have a plan in place for building and maintaining a relationship with the customers you have attracted over the long term; you have, to be blunt, left a whole lot of money on the table.

Relationship Marketing – Learning to Speak Your Customer’s Language

At the heart of relationship marketing is the idea that having gone through the time and expense of gaining new customers, why not go the extra mile to be sure that you keep them?

Relationship marketing centers around providing customer care on a continual basis. You don’t disappear never to be heard from again the moment a purchase has been made.

Great care is taken to make each customer feel they are being treated as an individual and not a number. You must learn to speak TO your customers and not AT them.

For example, let’s say you were having a promotional contest for the opening of a new car dealership. You wouldn’t want to offer a two-seater sports car as your grand prize if your customer base was made up largely of people with families.

If you teach violin; giving away concert tickets to a hard core rap group would not likely appeal to your classical music students.

These promotions are not speaking the language of your customer.

 

How Do You Develop Trust in Relationship Marketing?

Building trust in relationship marketing is critical. People will buy from you when and if they trust you. Always operate from what will be in your customer’s best interests. The result should always be a mutually beneficial outcome for both you and your long term customer.

Rather than try to sell a high priced item to the customer right off the bat, you might suggest a low cost alternative or even a home remedy for them to try first.

What you lose in sales volume on a one time sale chance will be more than made up for by the customer who comes back to you again and again over a period of time. This is sometimes referred to as the “customer life cycle.”

You want that Life Cycle to be a loooonngg one!

 

Barbara Silva, as seen in MIM Mentors in Motion Magazine, brings over thirty years teaching experience to her coaching and internet marketing training business. She specializes in teaching attraction marketing, customer/team relationship building and quality article marketing to business owners through her own programs and Renegade Professional. Barbara works closely with the Super Guide program at Renegade Professional as well as heading up the Coaching Program. Barbara is the author of Romancing the Sale: How to Build and Maintain Highly Profitable Customer Relationships That Last.