Top 5 Strategies of Relationship Marketing

Before seeing some strategies and examples of relational marketing, it is necessary to point out something very important: if you want to establish effective relational marketing strategies, you need to promote a relational attitude in your business. What does this mean?

It means, fundamentally, that you must structure all the processes of your company based on customer satisfaction. In particular, it would be ideal if the mission, vision and values of the company were conceived in terms of customer satisfaction.

In any case, if your company does not have a relational approach, there are a series of actions and recommended practices that we advise you to implement to develop such an approach. Here are some of the simplest and most effective:

Focus on the needs of your customers.
Maintain open and honest communication with your customers.
Welcome feedback from your most loyal customers.
Optimize your social networks and maintain a good level of activity on them.
Provides top-notch customer service.
Incorporate the feedback of your customers in the improvements and changes of your products.
Control what people in your business say and respond in a timely manner.
Offer a points or customer loyalty program.
Don't just give what you promise but try to add more value to your service.
Seek to fully personalize the experience of your users.

If you implement these types of actions and manage to develop a customer-oriented mental attitude, it will be much easier to implement the five strategies that we mention below.

1. Promote your business ethics

Publicly displaying your company's business ethics and values is a great way to nurture the relationship with those customers who shop at your store knowing that your brand aligns with their own values.

In this sense, the corporate image plays a very important role in maintaining a good relationship with your customers. In the following image, we can see how Starbucks Spain uses this strategy to promote relationship marketing with its customers:

2. Establish a customer loyalty program

We have already said that a customer loyalty program is one of the most useful practices when it comes to maintaining loyalty among your consumers. This is because such programs personalize the user experience creating a fairly strong link to the brand.

One of the companies that best use this tactic is American Express. In fact, the Membership Awards program offered by American Express pampers its customers with a myriad of prizes and exclusive offers.

3. Offer a good return policy

One of the best ways to make the customer understand that their satisfaction is a basic priority of your store is to facilitate the product return process.

4. Use storytelling

Storytelling is one of the best tools that can be used in relational marketing. In fact, much of its usefulness depends on the emotional ingredient that storytelling brings to the company's brand strategy.

For this reason, many companies today use storytelling within their marketing campaigns, especially through social networks. In the following image we can see how the Colombian brewery BBC uses its Instagram page to tell the story of its business:

5. Interact with your customers and take advantage of their feedback

As we saw before, one of the characteristics of relationship marketing is that it involves a high level of interaction with customers. Precisely one of the best ways to take advantage of such interaction is to receive feedback regarding the products in your store.