Today, customer relationships are at the heart of business strategy. Adopting a customer-centric approach and nurturing relationship marketing is more than ever at the center of all business concerns.
Relationship marketing involves supporting your customers throughout their purchasing journey through maximum targeting and personalization of actions directed towards them. As a business, it’s crucial that you adopt a customer-centered approach. However, what are the best practices to adopt for effectively managing your relationship marketing? Trustt tells you more…
8 Practices for Effectively Managing Your Relationship Marketing
1- Email Marketing, a Personalized Approach
Today, email marketing is one of the most effective customer acquisition channels as it allows you to build customer loyalty. It’s essential to pay utmost attention to your email strategy and newsletters.
Forget the overly promotional and marketing tone in favor of “a more familiar and warm tone. Personalize your newsletters as much as possible based on your audience. Show your customers that you” are not just there to sell them a product but that you are also listening to them. Drop the “you”; “we” and favor inclusive formulations like “we” to show your customers that you are a team and that you are moving forward together in developing products and services that suit them.
Put each person’s name at the beginning of your newsletter, don’t multiply “call to action” buttons.
Instead, favor URL links and show your customers that you have taken the trouble to find content that suits them and that you are speaking specifically to them.
2- Develop Your Presence on Social Media
Today, it’s crucial for your company to develop its presence on social media to increase its visibility but also to create a community. Today, adopting a customer-centric approach and good relationship marketing involves these new social media. It’s an excellent way to “interact with your community, to show yourself as a company that” listens to its consumers. You need to choose the social network that best suits your clientele and implement actions to give a voice to your community. For example, you can create polls to find out what your community’s favorite products are, what they think of your company or the latest product released.
Nurturing your community is now one of the keys to success in effectively managing your relationship marketing.
Trustt can help you build a proprietary community and develop your presence on social media. Through quantitative studies and product launch campaigns, develop a better understanding of your target audience and build an engaged community around your brand and products. Collect authentic reviews from ambassadors who share the same values as your brand and benefit from authentic post sharing on their social networks to increase your visibility.
3- Use Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is an inbound marketing technique that involves developing a personalized relationship with your consumers. To help them throughout their purchasing journey, you set up tailored content, designed specifically for them based on data collected during quantitative studies, surveys, etc. Lead nurturing is widely used in newsletters in particular.
4- Communication Adapted to the Target
For effective relationship marketing management, good communication is essential. You need to focus on the quality of your content and especially adapt the communication to the stage of the acquisition funnel (or marketing funnel) in which the prospect is located.
When developing your communication, be impactful, original, and make sure to remain memorable. Just as we quickly remember a song if the rhythm stands out, your company needs to stand out. Humor can be an intelligent and very effective way. However, be careful not to overuse it so that your message remains serious and you don’t lose credibility.
Your relationship marketing should prioritize the human aspect above all: to achieve this, it involves personalizing messages. Forget the purely transactional side and adopt a customer-centric approach.
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5- Nurture Brand/Customer Interactions
To effectively manage your relationship marketing, you need to be on point throughout your consumers’ purchasing journey. It’s important that they feel reassured and valued regardless of their position in the acquisition funnel.
When a consumer is a prospect, you must appear as the solution to a problem they’ve encountered and build trust in your brand. Make sure to optimize their purchasing journey, ensuring it’s simple, intuitive, and reassuring for your prospects and customers.
However, don’t neglect your customer after the purchase. It’s also in your interest that they repeat the action and recommend you: your customer service must be impeccable. Try to thank them for visiting your site by sending a personalized newsletter, for example, and offering them a promo code.
6- Maintain the Relationship
In the same spirit as nurturing interactions between your company and your consumers throughout the acquisition funnel, it’s crucial to maintain the relationship with your customers. Through newsletters and your social media, don’t hesitate to multiply interactions with your customers and encourage them to return to your site. Present yourself as a brand that listens to its customers, is appreciative, and offers them rewards. Organize, for example, a contest to win a gift card for your website via social media. Offer promo codes on products that might suit your customers, always with a personalized approach. They need to feel valued and heard by your company.
7- Content Creation
Strengthen your relationship marketing by adopting a good content strategy. Offer, for example, relevant articles or content on your site based on your consumers’ profiles and expectations. Creating content to help them solve certain problems they encounter truly shows your desire to go beyond a purely transactional relationship. Adopting a good content strategy will also bring more visits to your site, thus more traffic, and ultimately, can help boost your sales.
8- Optimize Your Database
It’s very important to emphasize the importance of opt-in in your relationship marketing. Indeed, collect as much information as possible to better understand your customers and their needs. Use registration forms, newsletters, ebooks, or white papers to download. The more data you have, the better you can meet your consumers’ expectations and personalize your relationship with them to the maximum.
Example of Relationship Marketing: The Case of Sephora
The famous cosmetics company Sephora implements a strategy based on relationship marketing. It puts the customer at the heart of its strategy, which allows them to build loyalty. At Sephora, customers must be pampered and benefit from the best possible experience whether during their visit to the store or online. However, it prioritizes quality over quantity, and each customer receives specific treatment whether they are new or very loyal.
The company has implemented personalized loyalty cards based on the customer’s engagement with the brand. For example, the White card is the first card offered to new customers, it’s the beginning of the relationship between Sephora and the customer. It allows discovering Sephora brands but has no specific advantages or services.
The Sephora Black card is the second one offered to maintain the relationship between Sephora and the customer. It is given to them from their fourth purchase in-store or on the website. It allows for discounts and accumulating points with each purchase.
Finally, for the most loyal customers, they benefit from the gold card, which allows them to enjoy all the advantages of the black card but also to have personalized follow-up and be recognized by the company. For example, having a dedicated advisor in-store or being exempt from delivery fees.
