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There’s nothing wrong with wanting to grow your customer base. Increased patronage could drive higher sales, boost bottom lines, and enable business expansion.

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But while you’re focused on acquiring new customers, it’s also wise to keep existing ones happy. If you serve them well, they’ll remain repeat buyers and stay loyal to your brand. You can achieve this with relationship marketing.

As the term suggests, relationship marketing means nurturing your business relationship with existing customers. It’s about engaging them all through the customer lifecycle, and ensuring that they are continually satisfied with what you’re offering them.

Why You Should Adopt Relationship Marketing

We’ve already hinted at one benefit of relationship marketing: with it, you can keep more customers loyal to your business. But there’s more.

First, it’s often much easier to up-sell and cross-sell your products to existing customers. That’s because they’re likely satisfied with what you’ve offered them, and may believe that your upsells and cross-sells will be just as good.

You are also more likely to get feedback on your services from them than you would from a prospective customer. If they’re not happy with a product feature, they may let you know, enabling you to introduce adjustments that make your product better. Over time, this could be a win for all parties involved.

If they’re happy with the way you’re treating them, they could refer their contacts to you. They won’t just remain satisfied customers; they’ll become enthusiastic ambassadors of your brand.

How To Deploy Relationship Marketing For Business Growth

Here are some relationship marketing tactics you can implement to drive your business’s growth.

  • Work With A Great Customer Service Team

Your customer-facing units are crucial to nurturing valuable customer relationships. If they consistently take care of customer needs and inquiries in a sympathetic and professional way, it will be easier to keep existing customers loyal. It’s important to deal with their concerns as quickly and effectively as is possible.

If you’re going to build a team that’s sensitive to customers’ wants, you may have to train your staff to respect and empathize with them. Your team members should also be skilled enough to swiftly tackle customers’ problems, or escalate them to more competent staff when necessary.

  • Add A Human Touch To Your Brand

Do what you can to make your business come across as run by humans. Customers prefer to engage actual human agents and may be put off by automated responses to their questions. It’s difficult to build a relationship with a customer if they’re constantly having to interact with bots and pre-programmed responses.

Some ways to introduce a human touch to your business include assigning staff to respond to customers’ concerns; communicating with people who leave comments on your social media pages; responding to online reviews of your product; and having authors’ names and profiles included in the blog articles on your business website.

Your aim here should be to make your business respond to customers with the sort of warmth and situation-specific tones that customers expect from other humans.

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  • Communicate Across Multiple Channels

Don’t just stick to one channel or approach in communicating with customers. Adopt several channels, so they can interact with you via their preferred means. This is vital; by maintaining multiple paths of engagement, you increase your chances of getting through to (and keeping in touch with) your clients.

Channels you should consider include email, phone lines, and social media. Your approach to communication may differ across these options. Just be sure that you’re connecting with your customers and talking with them in ways that capture and keep their attention.

  • Build A Community Of Customers

Community-building is an effective way of strengthening business-customer relationships. It’s especially useful when members of such a community can share their views on the company’s products and services. When customers are made a part of such a group, they feel that their opinions are valued by the business.

But a community of this kind can be more than just about discussing a business’s products. It might take on any number of concerns, including making valuable connections and learning new things about the industry in which the business operates.

  • Ask For Feedback And Work With It

Your business exists to serve and satisfy your customers. So it makes sense to get their opinion on your products. Find out how well you’re meeting their needs, and what features and functionalities of your product they’d want to be improved or changed.

As we’ve already pointed out, customers feel that their views are valued by a business when it seeks their opinion. This move also makes them participants and stakeholders in the development of the products they use. This perception strengthens when their suggestions are implemented.

  • Reward Loyal Customers

It’s important to reward long-standing customers for their loyalty to your business. Perhaps they’ve stayed because they consider your products the best of their kind. Or they think your prices are a bargain. Or maybe they consider your business the most responsive to their concerns. Whatever their reason for staying with you, be sure to recognize them for their patronage.

The rewards you give to your loyal customers could include free products, hampers, an expenses-paid meal at their favourite restaurant or cinema, or some other kind of gift. It should be something that they’ll like. These rewards can help to strengthen your relationship with your existing customers and encourage steady patronage from new ones.

Final Words

It takes time to build a solid relationship with your customers. But it can be done. Use the tips we’ve discussed here, and you’ll be able to create and sustain customer relationships that deliver value for everyone involved.

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This article was first published on 22nd February 2022

ikenna-nwachukwu

Ikenna Nwachukwu holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves to look at the world through multiple lenses- economic, political, religious and philosophical- and to write about what he observes in a witty, yet reflective style.

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