Customer relationship marketing is about cultivating deep, long-term and valuable relationships with customers. It’s about ensuring their satisfaction and continued interaction with your brand or service over time.  Achieving this requires a long-haul strategy that emphasises customer experience and lifetime value over any individual transaction.

Relationship marketing like personal relationships require that same crucial ingredient: hard work. Maintaining connections with valuable customers requires constant attention, and if the right kind of attention isn’t given, the relationship will falter. Here are some important tips for what you should do -- and avoid -- to build better customer relationships.

DO

 1.  Establish a dialogue, not a one-way conversation

If you are in a one-way conversation, you are talking at someone, rather than with someone. Whereas, if you are in a two-way conversation, you are both listening and talking. This is crucial for building a long-term relationship. So, you need to give your customer opportunities to engage with you, to tell you what they think and what they want. You can do this through surveys, forums and panels. You can even make it fun by using gamification techniques. A big word of warning, if a customer talks to you then you need to listen and act.

 2.  Speak to customers in the channel of their choice

Customers want to be understood and spoken to as individuals. They want to be engaged through their preferred channel, device or platform with smart timing and respectful frequency. It might be easier for a company to send out relationship marketing communications through email but if many of your customers are not engaging with emails then you are fooling yourself that you are building relationships with all your customers. You need to find out what channel or platform your customer prefers.

 3.  Deliver relevance on the customer differences that matter

Delivering relevant content and communications to customers must be the goal of every CRM Marketing programme. However, relevance isn’t just about personalisation, it is about understanding the customer wants, needs and motivations that really matter in relation to your brand. Understanding these key differences is a great way to build a customer segmentation.

 4.  Mix value added with selling communications

If all you try to do in your customer relationship marketing programme is overtly sell to the customer then it highly likely your programme will fail. A good relationship marketing programme has a mixture of selling messages and added value communications. The added value can come in many forms from inspirational content to pure entertainment, from educational content to competitions. You need to establish a rhythm of mixed communications but at the same time try to avoid being predictable. Be prepared to mix it up from time to time and never be afraid to try something new.

 5.  Avoid repetitive, meaningless contact

Sending an email every few days without fail doesn’t mean you care about a customer relationship -- it just means you want to sell more stuff. A better approach is to nurture relationships in varied and interesting ways based on a frequency that is acceptable and appropriate. If your customer is an infrequent purchaser then over communicating to them is not just inappropriate it is probably annoying. Equally, if you have nothing to say then it’s probably best not to say anything.

DON'T

 1.  Think of your CRM Marketing programme as a series of one-off campaigns

Your customer relationship marketing programme must have longevity, its content and theme must be driven by your consumers’ wants, needs and interests and offer the right balance of emotional and rational content and benefits. Where possible try to group your communications into types such as newsletters, new product pieces, surveys etc. This has the added benefit of allowing you measure how well types of communications perform rather than trying to evaluate each piece individually.

 2.  Let a relationship go cold

Common wisdom says that it’s harder to start fires from scratch than to use warm coals. That’s true in relationships as well. For customers to stay with your business, they need to see the value in an ongoing relationship. Refreshing the memories of customers who are starting to display signs that they are less engaged than they used to be is critical. Most customers will tire with a CRM Marketing programme at some point, it’s human nature. The trick is to act when a customer starts to show signs of going cold rather letting them go cold.

 3.  Assume you know your customers purely from purchase behaviour

Affinity analytics doesn’t always get it right especially for people with varied tastes. Hyper personalisation will not always deliver relevance. No matter how clever the data algorithms get one of the problems with affinity analytics is that it is often using arear-view mirror. Looking into the past is not always a good prediction of the future. Using a combination of data sources will help you understand your customers better. You need to develop a full, rich customer picture based not just on transaction data but also what interests them, and what type of person they are.

 4.  Expect to gather all customer information in one communication

All relationships should be learning relationships but don’t try to get all the learning in one go through one communication or survey. The relationship should be a continuous cycle of interaction, learning and understanding so that the customer finds it more convenient and beneficial to deal with the brand. The brand will be able to become smarter with respect to the customer’s individual needs and treat the customer in a more personal and relevant way if it is always trying to learn. Try to prioritise the key pieces of information you need and try to gather that first.

 5.  Prioritise short-term gain

Customer relationship marketing should not be focused on short-term wins, it should be focused on delighting an audience and your customers for the long-haul. CRM Marketing is based on the idea of the brand knowing its consumers. It uses data and insights to develop relevant customer relationships that create deeper emotional bonds to deliver long term growth. The focus of CRM Marketing should be the customer relationship and not the number of initial sales generated, the sales will come as a result of building the relationship.

Further Reading

There are so many topics covered in this article, and we have lots of blogs that cover off these areas in more detail, but this article talks about how the CRM principles can be used for prospects, employees and stakeholder management.