5 Ways To Improve Your Relationship Marketing Strategy

It may seem obvious, but building a business is a long-term effort. As such, it requires a long-term strategy. You can’t succeed by only making quick sales. You need to build a customer base — it’s the only way to not only grow, but to survive. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses assume that once someone has made a purchase, that customer is part of their “customer base.” This is not how it works — they usually do not become loyal to your brand after one purchase. You need to nurture them past the point of the sale, which is why you need to implement a strong relationship marketing strategy.

What is Relationship Marketing?

What is Relationship Marketing? Relationship marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on building long-term relationships with customers, rather than simply making individual sales.

The Importance of Customer Retention

Keeping your existing customers is essential to your company’s success. As such, it’s important that you continue to build the customer relationships that you’ve established. If you don’t, they’re less likely to feel a sense of loyalty to your brand and will be more likely to jump to a competitor. If that’s not enough of a reason to put some effort into keeping existing customers, consider the following:

• Repeat customers spend an average of 67 percent more per purchase than first-time customers.
• It can cost up to 25 times as much to close a new customer than to keep an existing customer.
• Increasing your customer retention by as little as 5 percent can boost your revenue by as much as 25 to 95 percent.
• Existing customers will refer other leads to your business.

As you can see, customer retention is important. The best way to increase customer retention is by implementing an effective relationship marketing strategy.

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How To Improve Your Customer Relationship Marketing Strategy?

The following are a few tips to help you strengthen your relationship marketing strategy for increased customer retention.

1. Improve Your Customer Service

Poor customer service is going to result in a poor customer experience, making customer retention more challenging. Providing good customer service should be the foundation for any relationship marketing strategy. If your customers have questions, concerns, or even complaints, your customer service should be able to engage with them immediately to provide a solution or to provide helpful advice.

Besides making sure your customer service reps are friendly, respectful, and know how to handle every kind of situation, they also need to be easy to reach. There’s nothing more frustrating for a customer than being unable to reach customer service. Make it easy for customers to reach out through multiple channels, including phone, email, text, social media, and a live chat feature on your website. You want to be able to help your customers no matter where they are.

2. Listen To Feedback

Listening to feedback from existing customers can help you improve the customer experience. Doing so will help improve your ability to nurture customer relationships in the future. Not to mention that by showing existing customers that you care about what they think and actually do something with the feedback you collect, you help build trust in your brand. Don’t just listen to complaints when customers have them either — go out of your way to ask for feedback. You can do this by asking for specific feedback on social media or by emailing surveys to customers after they’ve made a purchase.

3. Create Content Targeting Existing Customers

As far as content marketing strategies go, a lot of companies focus solely on attracting and nurturing new leads. Don’t forget about your existing customers! The content you create can still be useful to them if you actually target them. Create content that better informs them about the problems you know they have. Use it to educate them about their purchases so that they can get the most out of them.

How To Develop Content To Build Customer Loyalty

4. Embrace Email Marketing

You should have information about existing customers that you can use to improve how you segment your email lists. This should allow you to email existing customers content that is more relevant to them and to potentially identify relevant cross-selling or up-selling opportunities that you can email to them. Email is a great way to nurture your customers and to keep your brand at the top of their minds.

5. Implement A Loyalty Program

A loyalty program rewards repeat customers. This provides them with an incentive to continue doing business with your company. With a loyalty program, customers are more likely to make additional purchases and are less likely to jump ship to a competitor.

A good relationship marketing strategy is vital when it comes to customer retention. Use these tips to strengthen your relationship marketing strategy so that you can nurture existing customers, increase brand loyalty, and generate more sales as a result.