How to Implement Relationship Marketing

It’s all about being F.I.T.

Relationship marketing is hot, but it’s tough to know the best way to integrate it into your service model. In this episode of Stay Paid, Luke and Josh provide three tenets that will help guide you in making decisions about your marketing:

• It should be Frequent
• It should make an Impact
• It should build Trust

What is relationship marketing?

Not surprisingly, relationship marketing is defined in numerous ways, but at its heart, it’s a customer acquisition and retention strategy that emphasizes customer satisfaction rather than the pursuit of individual sales transactions.

When a business implements relationship marketing, they don’t give up trying to sell their products or services (that’s just crazy talk). Instead, their focus is on building and nurturing long-term associations with customers and clients. It’s unlike traditional marketing, which is all about targeting anonymous groups of consumers to generate as many sales as possible as quickly as possible.

Here’s how Josh defines it:

Relationship marketing is a form of marketing that emphasizes customer retention and satisfaction rather than sales transactions. It’s different from other forms of marketing in that it recognizes the long-term value of customer relationships and extends communication beyond intrusive advertising and sales promotion messages.

Why implement relationship-based marketing?

The economic beauty of relationship marketing is the value a business can derive from repeat and referred business. Done well, relationship marketing is an ideal customer retention strategy for small businesses because it gets you off the hamster wheel that causes you to be forever chasing leads.

The numbers, percentages, and costs may vary but across the board, it is much less expensive to retain a customer or client than it is to seek out and win a new one. (During the episode, Luke and Josh talk about some specific statistics.)

And when it comes time to find new business, companies with good customer relationship management strategies in place enjoy the referrals given by highly satisfied customers and clients to their friends, family, colleagues, and the people in their social circles. For these companies, current clients become volunteers who recruit new clients!

Putting relationship marketing into practice

A successful customer relationship management strategy needs to engage in marketing that provides for frequent contact with customers and clients, has an impact, and helps to build trust. In short, your marketing needs to be F.I.T.

Luke and Josh go into detail about the type of relationship marketing practices that meet the F.I.T. definition and why they work as well as they do. But essentially:

• Frequent contact with customers and clients works to keep you top-of-mind.
• Marketing that has an impact is something that customers and clients find useful, entertaining, and relevant.
• Finally, repeated exposure to you and your business coupled with the value you deliver breeds trust.

Listen to the episode, and if you have questions or comments, be sure to let Luke and Josh know. You can reach them on Instagram at @LukeAcree and @staypaidpodcast.

Key Points

• Relationship marketing works to build and nurture long-term, personal relationships with customers and clients.
• To be effective, your marketing needs to be F.I.T.
  • Is it Frequent?
  • Does it deliver an Impact?
  • Will it build Trust?

Action Item

Apply the F.O.R.D. method to the contacts in your database.

Connect | Resources

Throwback episode: Ep. 67 How Sales is Like Dating

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