Relationship marketing is about having multi-media, multi-touch programs in place that enable you to stay in touch with prospects, customers, constituents, donors, volunteers and members over time so they eventually convert.
However, as you may be painfully aware, relationship marketing campaigns can be difficult to implement. Staff distractions, time, budget constraints and lack of support are common culprits, plus keeping track of it all can be frustrating. Instead, many marketers go for the “low hanging fruit,” because these folks are ready to buy and they’re an easy sell.
Turns out, this can be a costly mistake. Reaching for low hanging fruit leads to 50% less sales because you ignore the “just-interested” prospects who aren't quite ready to buy right now but will buy from you eventually. Marketing Sherpa estimates that, “more than half of the leads in the typical marketing database are viable, qualified leads – even if those prospects aren't yet ready to buy.”
Ignoring potential leads is like ignoring someone who is “just-looking” in a store. You need to identify what their needs are and help them understand how your products or services can fulfill those needs.
The process of identifying, nurturing, retaining and maintaining customer and prospect relationships may take some work, but it’s worth it.
Here are the 7 steps to a relationship marketing campaign:
- Realize the need. Let’s say you've been a long-time customer of Frankie’s Pizza, but lately the service has been less than stellar and the pizza isn't as warm and cheesy as it used to be. You want to try another place but you don’t know where to go.
- Get in front of your customers. In your mailbox, you get a flyer from Louie’s Pizza, a new pizzeria just down the street. The flyer invites you to visit their website to register to win a free extra large pizza with unlimited toppings. You fire up your laptop, visit the website and register.
- Drive them to a webform to get their information. The form asks you for your name, email and address, plus your birthday and favorite kind of pizza, which you say is “pepperoni.”
- Reward them for their time with relevant offers. After you fill out the information, you receive a confirmation email and a coupon for 20% off your next order of “pepperoni” pizza. You save the coupon for later because you’re still not sure you want to try it out yet.
- Embrace multi-touch, multi-media. In addition to the flyer and email, you also get a postcard a couple days later. Louie's Pizza now has cheesy breadsticks and three different kinds of salads. You’re intrigued, so you save the postcard for later.
- Offer immediate gratification. About a week later, you receive an email from Louie himself, the owner of Louie’s Pizza. He’s giving away a free medium “pepperoni” pizza to new customers only, tomorrow from 5-7pm. Bingo! The next evening, you drive to Louie’s Pizza and see Louie at the counter, handing out free medium pizzas to the growing line of his new customers. You also pick up the cheesy breadsticks and a salad for a mere $5.
- Continue nurturing your customers. Louie hands you a BOGO coupon for your next visit.
2 comments:
I really like this post and the appraoch to relationship marketing in general. More companies need to grasp this concept especially at the moment when attaining new clients is difficult. You need to ensure that your client churn is kept to a minimum and if anything direct your marketing efforts to up and cross selling.
I believe that the ultimate aim is to create long term relationships with clients and not view them as a one off sale shifting focus from attaining new clients to keeping your current ones. Moving away from one-way short term transactions and shifting towards two-way ongoing relationships with your clients is the first step. Closing a sale should be viewed as the starting point of your relationship and be sustained by increased marketing to ensure they stay with you. Sounds simple in theory, but in practical terms for this approach to be successful everyone in your business must be heavily marketing orientated and realise the importance of why. Some businesses will tell you that they are already doing this however research has shown that 80% of companies believe they provide a superior client experience but only 8% of their clients agree!
It can be easy to become complacent with your clients when in actual fact they should be the main focus of your marketing efforts. The longer a client stays with you the less inclined they are to switch to a competitor because that have become accustomed to how you work and the services you provide. Other strategies to help keep your client churn to a minimum is by offering loyalty schemes and incentives, product bundling and cross promotions. Bear this in mind, increased customer retention will make your employees jobs easier and more satisfying meaning happy employees and better customer satisfaction.
When relationship marketing is applied well the benefits go far beyond just the value of the sale itself and lead to other organisational benefits. Clients will tend to buy a broader range of products and services so keep them aware of what else you can offer them to add value. On an operational level clients will cost less to maintain as they will become accustomed to your business practices and processes. A major benefit is that over time price will no longer be such as key issues due to the added benefits they receive through ongoing customer communication and service.
Thanks for your comment, Alastair. It's true: in today's economy it's important to focus on the clients you already have and whatever you can do to strengthen those relationships.
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