Monday, November 14, 2011

Relationship Marketing

By Christine Jackson


Relationship Marketing is targeted at building stronger and long lasting relationships with customers and other companies. The company is carried out with a strategic orientation, where the relationship is improved upon with current clients rather than discovering new customers. It's designed to cater to the needs of individual clients. Its major part involves studying the need of the client and how it changes in different circumstances.

Relationship marketing applies techniques like marketing, sales, customer care and communication. The relationship is not only improved but its life period is increased by these methods. And as the customer realizes the value of relationship, they are drawn closer. This advertising not just focuses on building relationship and attracting clients to their products and services but also how you can retain them.

A raw form of Marketing came into existence in the 1960s. But, organizations were nonetheless facing problems in promoting products, so a system was developed to sell low cost goods to larger group of customer. Leonard Berry and Jag Sheth originated this marketing, in 1982. It was started in B2B markets and industries, that involved long term contracts for many years. Over the period of time, numerous marketing methods had been enhanced and relationship marketing was one of them.

Relationship marketing is relevant where the customers have numerous options in the market for the same item or service and the client is eligible to make a selection decision. In such a kind of market, companies try to maintain their customers by providing comparatively better products and good service and hence, attaining client loyalty. And as soon as it's achieved it becomes difficult for competitors to do well in the market. The customer turnover wasn't paid attention on as the main attention was on client satisfaction. This kind of marketing was initially named as defensive marketing. Offensive marketing is the marketing strategy where not only new clients are drawn, but also the sales are stepped up by increasing the purchase frequency. This kind of marketing focuses on freeing dissatisfied clients and acquiring new customers.

According to a research, the cost of retaining an old customer is only ten percent of the cost of obtaining a new client, which makes sense to not to run around to get new clients in relationship marketing. And based on another research done by cross-sectional analysis, says that, a five percent improvement in client retention is responsible for twenty-five to eighty-five percent in the profit. Generally high price is incurred when getting new customers, so if sufficient number of existing customers is retained, there will be no require of acquiring new customers.

Once the client trust is gained his probabilities of switching to other company becomes fairly less, he buys goods in bulk, he buys other supplementary goods and he starts neglecting typical price variation. This maintains the unit sales volume and there's an increase in dollar-sales volume. The current clients will be like a living advertisement. If he is satisfied with the company he will suggest it to his friends and colleagues.

Since the existing clients are familiar with the process, it'll take less time and cash to educate them about the procedures putting less burdens on workers also and making them feel more content with their jobs. The clients are split into groups based on their loyalty. This process is known as relationship ladder of customer loyalty. The groups in ascending order are prospects, customer, client, supporter, advocate and partner.

Due to the advancement in computers and Web, software has been developed to facilitate customer relationship management. With the help of this software program the tastes, activities, preferences, and complaints of clients are tracked. Almost all the companies have this software in their marketing strategy, which advantages the buyer as well as the company.

Thus the primary goal of relationship advertising is to build and maintain relationship with dedicated customers who're meant to bring revenue to the business. The other advantages accomplished are confidence building and social benefits.




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