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

Relationship marketing like personal relationships requirethat same crucial ingredient: hard work. Maintaining connections with valuablecustomers requires constant attention, and if the right kind of attention isn’tgiven, the relationship will falter. Here are some important tips for what youshould do -- and avoid -- to build better customer relationships.

DO

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

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

 2.  Speak to customers in the channel of theirchoice

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

 3.  Deliver relevance on the customer differences thatmatter

Delivering relevant content andcommunications to customers must be the goal of every CRM Marketingprogramme. However, relevance isn’t just about personalisation, it is aboutunderstanding the customer wants, needs and motivations that really matter in relationto your brand. Understanding these key differences is a great way to build acustomer 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 highlylikely your programme will fail. A good relationship marketing programme hasmixture of selling messages and added value communications. The added value cancome in many forms from inspirational content to pure entertainment, fromeducational content to competitions. You need to establish a rhythm of mixedcommunications but at the same time try to avoid being predictable. Be preparedto 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 dayswithout fail doesn’t mean you care about a customer relationship -- it justmeans you want to sell more stuff. A better approach is to nurturerelationships in varied and interesting ways based on a frequency that isacceptable and appropriate. If your customer is an infrequent purchaser thenover 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-offcampaigns

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

 2.  Let a relationship go cold

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

 3.  Assume you know your customers purely frompurchase behaviour

Affinity analytics doesn’t alwaysget it right especially for people with varied tastes. Hyper personalisationwill not always deliver relevance. No matter how clever the data algorithms getone 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 thefuture. Using a combination of data sources will help you understand yourcustomers better. You need to develop a full, rich customer picture based notjust on transaction data but also what interests them, and what type of personthey are.

 4.  Expect to gather all customer information in onecommunication

All relationships should belearning relationships but don’t try to get all the learning in one go throughone communication or survey. The relationship should be a continuous cycle ofinteraction, learning and understanding so that the customer finds it moreconvenient and beneficial to deal with the brand. The brand will be able tobecome smarter with respect to the customer’s individual needs and treat thecustomer 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 thatfirst.

 5.  Prioritise short-term gain

Customer relationship marketing should notbe focused on short-term wins, it should be focused on delighting an audienceand your customers for the long-haul. CRM Marketing is based on the idea of the brandknowing its consumers. It uses data and insights to develop relevant customerrelationships that create deeper emotional bonds to deliver long term growth. Thefocus of CRM Marketing should be the customer relationship and not thenumber of initial sales generated, the sales will come as a result of buildingthe 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.