What Is A Relationship Marketing Strategy?
We're about to tear a page out of the marketing playbook of many successful big brands. They know who you are, they know what you like, they know what to offer you and they know when to offer it to you. Sure, some of that knowledge is inferred from past purchases, but for those who are doing it right, they listen to their customers to create truly conversational marketing opportunities. This is the age of relationship marketing and consumers demand you treat them as individuals.
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Let's define 'relationship marketing'. Tim Glomb, co-founder of Audience Approach, created this definition for the marketing landscape in 2023 during his tenure as a Global VP at the relationship marketing platform Marigold, the merged entity between Cheetah Digital and CM Group:
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"Relationship Marketing is the practice of growing long term relationships directly with consumers while understanding their true wants and needs to better deliver personalized products and services. This strategy results in long term loyalty & brand advocacy."
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There are 3 simple stages of relationship marketing of which all brands must abide. Our technology and services are anchored in this practice and can help you develop unique solutions for your brand.
1. Aquire New Contacts
You simply need to convert your addressable audience into a contact database. That's taking someone form the 'unknown' state to the 'known' state. Even before they become paying customers, get them to opt-in for your marketing campaigns across owned channels like email, sms or web messaging. We help brands turn paid, print, TV and social views and likes into actual email and/or sms sign ups. This affords brands more intimate channels to communicate within while crushing deliverability goals... far beyond any social algorithm can do.​
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2. Understand and Engage Your Audience
Knowing as much about your contacts (consumers and customers alike) is the key. Beyond tracking behavior, you want to collect zero-party dat into their profiles. These are the psychographic data points that can not be deduced or inferred. When you can gather this info you can now truly personalize all of your owned channel content and offers for a much higher conversion than what your competitors are doing. We're experts at executing surveys and sweeps that collect this critical data at scale while crafting the perfect offer and most relevant content that drives revenue.
3. Retain Your Customers, Foster Loyalty
Once you've been blessed with a sale, how will you retain them for maximum lifetime value? How will you upsell, cross sell or even get them to help building your recommendation engine? These are excellent areas of focus to drive more lifetime value. You also don't need a full blown loyalty platform or points/reward program to execute an effective retention strategy. The data you have on customers, both psychographic along with purchase history and intent actions, can drive a retention plan that is personalized and profitable.
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To summarize what relationship marketing means, it's the idea of asking questions and listening to your consumers in order get closer to them over time so you can make truly personalized and relevant offers at the right time and in the right channel leading to a long term relationship with repeat transactions.
On Marigold's website you can find videos of Tim discussing amazing relationship marketing results with executives from his clients such as Starbucks, American Airlines, English Football Association, Pepsi and more. Here is one covering what zero-party data is and over a dozen examples of brands using it to impact their revenue. ​
The same is attainable for brands and business of all sizes. All you need is to apply some tried and true tweaks to your marketing plan to reap the same results.
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It's time for you to turn on the tools and strategy to acquire, engage, personalize and retain your audience for lasting results. Stop spending endless dollars on ads. Stop offering discounts and specials. Start applying Relationship Marketing Strategy.
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The team at Audience Approach is ready to get you started.