The benefits of embracing proper relationship marketing are both numerous and extremely useful. Relationship marketing works to retain and engage customers on a consistent basis,
Need a more precise definition? Courtesy of BusinessDictionary, relationship marketing is defined as “Marketing activities that are aimed at developing and managing trusting and long-term relationships with larger customers.”
It’s all in the name. You’re building a relationship with the customer. Like a relationship you might form with a friend, it’s one that you’re going to carefully foster across many points of interaction.
Create an engagement plan. Building a relationship needs to go beyond a one-time purchase. You need to plan for re-engagement at a multitude of points. Can you turn that one-time purchase into a loyalty program sign-up? Then maybe you can send the customer an exclusive deal, incentivizing them to return? Try and chart out the process.
Get more active on social media. Want to build a relationship with your customers? Social media is the ideal environment to do just that. With the instant ability to communicate with many of your biggest fans, you can leverage social media to entertain, inform, and provide service.
Embrace Email and Text Marketing. More direct and personal than social media, email and text allow you to digitally connect with customers whether they’re at home, on-the-go, or even on-location at your business.
Keep your audience engaged with a digital loyalty program. Building a relationship with the customer is a lot easier when you’re rewarding them for staying involved with your brand. Make sure you’ve modernized your loyalty program though. Hole-punch cards aren’t exactly in style these days. We personally recommend setting your business up with a CoGoBuzz-powered, text-based loyalty program (but we’ll tell you more about that in a bit).
Social media, email/text marketing, and your digital loyalty program are great ways to learn more about your customer base. Find out who your customers are. Define their demographics. This will better inform not just your marketing plans, but all of your business plans. With more defined information, you’ll also be able to provide more relevant deals and content.
Run surveys, contests, and more. Whether you want to learn about your customers with a quick survey, or get them involved with your brand using a contest, shooting out one of these bite-sized engagements is never a bad idea. Again, you can run these on any of your various digital platforms.
Service, service, service. Quality service is one of the core tenets of good relationship marketing. Go a step beyond ensuring you’ve got friendly customer support staff ready-to-go. Refine the customer experience to its very core. Memorable service stems from being able to predict which parts of the customer journey will necessitate employee assistance, help, or information.
Build Relationships With CoGoBuzz
Want to keep your customers constantly engaged? With CoGoBuzz, our state-of-the-art digital service, we make relationship marketing easy with advanced WiFi, SMS, and Email solutions. Redefining your mobile experience, you’ll engage your customers on the devices that they use most, both in-store and out. Learn more about your customers thanks to the automatically-developed customer profiles we create for every login to your in-store HotSpot. Like I mentioned earlier, our service also comes packed with a fully digital, text-based loyalty program. Instantly engage and reward your customers with just a simple text.
Check out the rest of our website to learn more about CoGoBuzz!
—
Does your business have a relationship marketing strategy in place? Sound off in the comments!