How Do Businesses Do Relationship Marketing?
All kinds of businesses use relationship marketing techniques to engage their customers and promote brand loyalty. Here are just some of the techniques that marketers use to build great relationships with their customers.
Exceptional Customer Service
Relationship marketing must always be underpinned by exceptional customer service. Every other method of relationship-building with your customer will fail if you’re difficult to work with, unresponsive or can’t follow through on your commitments. Exceptional customer service means meeting your obligations as a vendor and ensuring that customers have what they need to succeed in their partnership with your organization.
Loyalty Programs
Some organizations offer loyalty programs for existing customers that include discounts or incentives for repeat purchases. Loyalty programs can be effective for B2B or B2C organizations.
Collecting Feedback
Collecting feedback from your customers is a great way to keep them engaged with what you’re doing and strengthen your relationship. Your customers can tell you where they’re getting the most value from your product or service and what you can do to improve (and potentially attract new customers).
Offering Incentives
Relationship marketing can include special incentives for long-term customers or discounts for customers that refer their friends or colleagues to work with you.

When Should You Use Relationship Marketing?
There are five situations where you should consider using relationship marketing to acquire and retain customers.
When the sales cycle is long, you will need to build a strong relationship with the customer as they go through the purchasing process. You’ll also want to invest in customer retention activities due to the high customer acquisition costs associated with long sales cycles.
When there are few target prospects in your industry, relationship marketing is necessary to ensure that you keep your customers happy and prevent them from leaving.
When the customer lifelong value is high, you can justify investing more time and money into building relationships with individual customers.
When there is a lot of competition, it is doubly important that you maintain excellent relationships with your customers to keep them loyal and prevent them from leaving you for a competitor.
When the customer depends on your support, relationship marketing is essential. If you sell a software product, the customer will depend on you for ongoing service and support. Delivering an exceptional customer experience during these interactions can create opportunities to up-sell or collect referrals.