The Power of Relationship Marketing

Today, I’m going to be talking all about my love for relationship marketing. It’s one of the key factors in how I grew a multimillion-dollar business from my kitchen table when I was 24 and it’s also something that I’ve always continued to teach and help my clients adapt and grow to build a really fabulous, profitable, sustainable business.

Relationship Marketing

Relationship marketing is anything designed to keep your customers from buying from you, depending on how broadly you take that definition. It can range from sending promotions, regular emails, and contacts to existing customers to providing just exceptional customer support. You could have things like reward programs, loyalty, VIP, redemptions, email marketing, and even turning something like your returns policy into something that’s favourable for your customers. Anything that is going to get them continually buying and coming back to you each time is so incredibly powerful. 

It’s obviously all about being social but having to engage with people that you might never have had a phone call with, who might never know about your product or your service, or who don’t know anything about you. 

We’re going to talk a bit about what the benefits are and also how you can stand out, how you can move the needle in your product-based business by just having awareness and doing things in a different way. 

Top 5 Benefits of Relationship Marketing

The top five benefits of relationship marketing are all about getting a massive return on your investment. 

Client retention

As with anything in terms of keeping staff, it’s always going to cost a lot less to do internal marketing than to find new customers. Over two-thirds of all companies report getting a better return on their investment through their marketing when they work to keep their previous customers and buyers happy than when they try to get new ones.

Getting great reviews

Now, another really major benefit is getting great reviews. The cornerstone of relationship marketing is really keeping the customer happy. Happy customers mean great reviews. Social proof for your product-based business is so vital and help you attract more customers and more buyers and sales. 

Positive reviews can have a deeper impact on your business if you are an eCommerce brand and you are worried about a really great rating or getting great feedback whether you are on Amazon or any of the great platforms for wholesale. 

More feedback

Customers who develop a relationship with you will share their opinions more often, after all, if they trust you, they will expect you to listen to them.

This will motivate them to tell you about the opportunities they see for improving your products or maybe services. By getting great feedback in terms of building relationships with your stockers, they’re going to be able to tell you what customers are looking for, what are the best sellers, what’s working for them and getting that feedback can be just so invaluable. If you act on it, you prove to customers that you really do listen and this can really raise their opinions of you to an even greater height. 

So it’s all about listening and being heard. Everyone wants to be heard and they want to add value. If someone loves your product then they want to be involved in it. They want to see your success and they want to be helpful. 

Word-of-mouth

There is that word-of-mouth power in which if you get a customer to really love your product brand enough to recommend it to others, you’ve just recruited a marketer more effective than anyone. You don’t even have to pay them!

They’re going to refer friends and family to buy from you and you are not even advertising anything. All it is being based upon is that they love your product, that they are a client that is a repeat return customer and that you’ve done some fantastic work with your relationship marketing. So that’s an effective way of being able to do your marketing.

I also did good old-fashioned face-to-face networking. I connected with people at the events I was able to pitch and tell them what I did. I had a website to build business rapidly and win really enormous corporate accounts just by having that word-of-mouth connection which is incredibly lucrative to do because the cost of marketing is very low.

Higher ROI

The best thing about relationship marketing is that it has a snowball effect by working hard to get more purchases from each customer will therefore see better returns for your business. 

Once you have a customer who likes your product, you continue the relationship by communicating with them, engaging them and involving them, and keeping them up to date with what it is that you are working on and what you’re going to release.

If you sell a product that most people will only buy once, then that can actually be hard if it’s not going to be a consumable or if it’s going to be something that someone would only order once. That’s difficult to maintain an ongoing relationship marketing to them. 

I think that if they love your product, they want to find out more and they’re eager to learn more. They sign up for your newsletter for that reason. They want to be kept in touch, they want to come back and spend their money. 

These are the things that I wanted to share today, talking about the amazing five benefits that you can have that can really impact your business at a pretty low cost but it can really rapidly grow your sales with repeat customers. It is much cheaper to retain a repeat buyer, a customer that loves your product than to have to try and find new ones. 

It’s time to pull up your big girl pants!

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