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Relationship Marketing and Why It's Not Working --
But Can
Once you have customers you need
to keep up the selling process to retain them and grow their business.
One of the most effective ways to do this is to focus on the needs of
customers through a process that is generally called ‘relationship
marketing’.
The first sale was hard and expensive. You had to advertise to get the
customer, get them into a situation where you could sell to them, gain
their trust and finally gather enough information to satisfy your
marketing needs. Now that that’s behind you it’s time to think about
repeat sales, but now you’re working with a customer whom you know and
who already knows you.
There are a few ‘basics’ to relationship marketing to the customers
you’ve already acquired:
1. Listen to them. In one or more ways they’ll tell you what they want
from you and how to keep them satisfied.
2. Survey them to get their feelings and opinions. Get them to share
their thoughts with you.
3. Focus on satisfying their needs. Do this and the sales will follow.
4. Get them to help you leverage the relationship by introducing new
customers to you on the basis of their satisfactory experience.
5. Honesty is the best – and only, policy. If you can’t help them tell
them so, then do all you can to satisfy their needs through other
channels.
So why do we say relationship marketing isn’t working? To begin with,
consumer surveys generally show that their experience with even highly
sophisticated relationship marketing efforts is pretty unexciting.
Businesses have spent a lot of money but their customers don’t feel that
anything intimate is happening.
Obviously the basic idea is sound. Customers are logically going to
appreciate being given more attention than just a sales effort, and
companies that work to understand and serve their customers better
should logically come out ahead. The problems really lie with what
businesses use to reward their customers for their loyalty.
Too many marketers think that keeping in touch with their customers
means sending them a steady barrage of marketing messages. Special
offers, catalogues, notices of ‘special customer sales’ – these are
still just advertisements and who needs more of those? That’s not a
meaningful relationship as anyone but a die-hard salesman would define
it.
Too much of the success of a company’s relationship marketing is
determined by simple numbers. How many customers signed up for the
program? How many customers visited our website? All evaluations are
based on quantitative rather than qualitative factors.
Instead the business needs to manage its customer relationships with a
sense of balance between the company’s needs for sales and the
resistance of the customer to being ‘used’.
Trust, created in the initial
sale to the customer, now needs to be nurtured and grown – not abused!
This means asking them for
information about themselves in such a way that they can see it’s going
to lead to your giving them better products and better service. Don’t
ask “What can we sell you?”, but rather ask “What would you like us to
do for you?” and you’ll see the difference.
Remember that customers don’t want a relationship with any marketer
that’s too close. Building a relationship is done over a long period of
time with steady and regular efforts on your part. Keep in touch. Be
there, but not intrusively so.
David Lavietes, Senior Vice President of Strategic Services at
Healthworld Communications Group, sums up the situation as it should be
viewed by marketers seeking to benefit from the thoughtful application
of relationship management principles:
"Relationship marketing isn't a tactic. It's the art of using the
appropriate direct response tactics - teleservices, promotions,
interactive, - in concert to conduct an ongoing conversation with the
brand's most valuable customers.
“Successful relationship marketing, whether to physicians or consumers,
requires an underlying infrastructure that informs future communications
with the results of previous interactions and a commitment to developing
a relationship that will grow over time.
“CRM is not a quick fix, nor is
it appropriate in all categories; it requires investments of time and
money. But, when executed flawlessly, it can produce both brand fanatics
and superior ROI efficiency.”
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