Lesson 2: Relationship Marketing

Relationship Marketing
It is the process of building and maintaining profitable customer relationships by delivering
superior customer value and satisfaction, thus ensuring brand loyalty.

The 5 levels of relationship marketing strategies

 Basic marketing
Think of it as the Mad Men marketing approach: It’s marketing that simply aims
to entice the customer to buy.
It’s direct selling and doesn’t include following up with customers after they
purchase a product or service.
There’s no communication or customer feedback involved.
Basic marketing is when a business sells simply for the sake of making money (which
is not necessarily a bad thing).

 Reactive marketing
At this level, you encourage your customers to supply feedback, be it a complaint,
comment, suggestion, or random idea.
There is some effort required to build a relationship with the customer; It’s about
responding and interacting with customers when the situation or opportunity arises.

 Accountable marketing
As a business, it should be your duty to check on your customers shortly after a
purchase. This promotes confidence in what you offer and proves to customers that
you’re reliable. It also encourages customers’ honest opinions about your products
or services, which creates a deeper level of relationship marketing. This is
accountable marketing.
Businesses that use accountable marketing reach out to customers, remind their
customers of their purchase, and share why customer feedback is important. Or
they might reach out and directly respond to customer feedback or known needs.

 Proactive marketing
Proactive marketing takes things to an even more personal level. Businesses keep in
regular contact with their customers rather than just on a one-off basis and use
what they’ve learned to keep improving their products or services. Proactive
marketing uses data to understand your previous campaigns’ successes or failures
and create more engaging opportunities for the future.

 Partnership marketing
Partnership marketing is a collaboration with another business to create a marketing
campaign that benefits both parties.
Partnership marketing helps encourage and maintain customer satisfaction levels
through a mutually beneficial agreement with another business (or even with an
individual customer). This is the strongest form of relationship marketing between
businesses and their customers, and the deepest way to build a relationship, since
you’re bringing someone outside of your company in to serve a specific customer
need.

PERSONALIZED MARKETING
 An increasingly important ingredients here is of using the right technology.
Companies are using the following to foster continous contact between company
and the customers:
 E – mails
 Websites
 Call centres
 Databases
 Social Media is a powerful tool in CRM

Building Loyalty
1. Interacting with customers
2. Developing loyalty programs
 Frequency programs
 Club membership program
3. Creating institutional ties

Goal of Relationship Marketing (CRM)

 Customer acquisition
 Customer satisfaction
 Retention of customers
 Enhancing the customer base