Forge Better Bonds with Customer Relationship Marketing

TL;DR:

• Customer relationship marketing focuses on building better customer relationships in order to increase loyalty and boost customer lifetime value.
• This type of strategy comes with numerous benefits, including increased customer retention, enhanced satisfaction, and more brand advocacy.
• Successful customer relationship marketing efforts require a blend of strategies, such as data-driven segmentation, loyalty programs, personalized communications, exceptional customer support experiences, and consistent value delivery.
• As our Publishers Clearing House example illustrates, Jebbit can help you build better customer relationships through digital experiences that engage and entertain customers while helping you unlock insights into their preferences.

In a world where customer loyalty scores big, businesses recognize that customers aren’t loyal by default. Companies must earn loyalty — and step one is to understand the customer. This forms the basis of customer relationship marketing. 

It’s about learning what customers need and want — but it goes deeper than data. Smart brands realize that you can’t treat customers like a stack of metrics. Instead, you need to use the data you gather to find out what it takes to encourage a strong long-term relationship.

We’re going to show you how customer relationship marketing works and the kinds of benefits that you can get from it. You’ll also discover some of today’s top strategies for unlocking insights and fostering better relationships with consumers.

What Is Customer Relationship Marketing?

Customer relationship marketing is a strategic approach to nurturing and developing long-term relationships with customers. Unlike traditional marketing, which emphasizes one-time transactions, customer relationship marketing focuses on customer retention and loyalty. By understanding your customers' needs, preferences, and behaviors, you can create personalized experiences and targeted marketing campaigns that resonate deeply with them.

In an era where customers have more choices than ever before, establishing strong connections is essential to differentiate your brand and foster trust. Customer relationship marketing allows you to build emotional bonds, enhance customer satisfaction, and ultimately drive customer lifetime value. The aim is to build relationships so that the customer chooses to return to that business in the future.

Benefits of Customer Relationship Marketing

Businesses practicing effective customer relationship marketing techniques will enjoy lots of advantages that, in the long term, will lead to greater profitability. Let’s explore the key benefits of a customer relationship marketing strategy so that you can understand what makes this technique so important:

• Increased customer retention: By focusing on building strong relationships, this strategy fosters brand loyalty, which increases customer retention rates. Satisfied buyers are more likely to become long-term customers who continue purchasing from your brand, reducing customer churn and increasing revenue.
• Enhanced customer satisfaction: Customers' overall satisfaction increases when they feel understood and valued. Delivering personalized experiences, addressing specific needs, and providing exceptional service are customer relationship marketing techniques that help enhance satisfaction. In turn, it allows you to cultivate a loyal customer base and generate positive word-of-mouth.
• Improved customer lifetime value: Customer relationship marketing helps maximize customer lifetime value because it encourages repeat purchases, upselling, and cross-selling.
• Increased brand advocacy: Loyal customers are more likely to become brand advocates and recommend your products or services to others. Positive word-of-mouth generated through strong customer relationships can lead to new customer acquisition and expanded market reach.
• Improved competitive advantage: Customer relationship marketing delivers a competitive edge by helping you provide an exceptional customer experience. In a sea of options, this is a crucial way to make your brand stand out in a crowded marketplace.
• Increased data-driven insights: Customer relationship marketing requires customer data — and you can use that data not only to build better customer relationships but also to refine marketing strategies, optimize product offerings, tailor email marketing, make informed business decisions, and more.

8 Customer Relationship Marketing Strategies to Add to Your Arsenal

Customer relationship marketing has the power to set you apart from other brands in a highly competitive marketplace by turning the average consumer into a loyal advocate who happily comes back for more. Building these kinds of bonds requires smart strategies designed to make customers feel valued. 

Below, you’ll find some of today’s top techniques for improving customer relationships.

1. Data-Driven Segmentation

Data-driven segmentation allows you to take a more granular approach to your target audience by sorting them into narrow segments based on each group’s unique needs and preferences. To pull it off, you’ll need comprehensive customer data, including demographics, purchase history, and engagement patterns. From there, you can create your segments — then deliver ultra-personalized messages and experiences to each.

2. Personalized Communication

Personalization is huge, to the point that 71% of shoppers expect personalized customer interactions, and 76% are frustrated when they don’t get it. In terms of customer relationship marketing, you can offer personalization across multiple channels:

• Email marketing
• Loyalty program rewards and offers
• Dynamic website content
• Discounts and incentives

For personalization at this level, you’ll need automation, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, and comprehensive zero- and first-party data. 

Using automated CRM tools, you can use data to build customer profiles. The information within those profiles will enable you to automatically generate personalized communications that will help you boost customer engagement, address specific customer pain points, and increase conversions.

3. Loyalty Programs 

Loyalty and reward programs provide customers with exclusive perks, discounts, or early access to new products. In some cases, these programs even include an element of gamification in order to entice current customers to achieve milestones. Well-designed loyalty programs encourage repeat purchases and increase customer satisfaction, fostering a sense of belonging and strengthening their emotional connection to your brand.

Loyalty programs can even help you gather vital data that you can use elsewhere in your customer relationship marketing efforts. One way to do this is to use Jebbit to create interactive digital experiences like surveys, quizzes, or customer feedback forms that are designed to help you learn more about customer preferences. 

Jebbit integrates with Yotpo Loyalty, which allows you to incentivize experiences to encourage a higher completion rate. Since Jebbit and Yotpo are integrated, all you need to do is create a Jebbit experience and then create an Earning Rule in Yotpo so that customers are awarded points for completing the experience. 

4. Exceptional Customer Support

Customer support is one of the most important touchpoints within the customer journey. People can either leave a support or service experience happy, which builds loyalty, or they can come away frustrated. Not only does that frustration degrade the relationship between the customer and the brand, but it also makes it more likely that the customer will seek out a different brand in the future. 

Provide exceptional customer service by being proactive in addressing customer needs and concerns. Implement chatbots, live chat support, and social media monitoring to promptly respond to inquiries, resolve issues, and show customers that their voices are heard. When customers interact with support agents, make sure those agents can access customer profiles, which will help them provide a more personalized experience specific to the individual customer.

5. Social Media Engagement

Engage with your customers on social media platforms to foster two-way communication. Respond to comments, reviews, mentions, and other interactions with personalized replies to add a humanized element to the customer relationship and to demonstrate that your brand hears and values the things that customers are saying. 

Along the way, it’s smart to encourage user-generated content to build engagement and loyalty, and to practice social listening to gain insights into customer sentiments and preferences.

6. Consistent Value Delivery

Building great customer relationships doesn’t happen in a single interaction. Brands that want to foster better customer relationships need to focus on consistent value delivery. This is an ongoing process in which brands meet or exceed customer expectations by continuously providing the content, experiences, and products that align with customer needs and preferences. 

In practice, consistent value delivery requires you to do a couple of things: 

1. Communicate clearly with your customers.
2. Listen to what they’re saying so that you can get a deep understanding of their needs and preferences. 

For example, brands often find that they need to adjust product pricing as supplier prices go up. That cost ends up passed on to customers — but are customers still happy with the value that they’re receiving? Listen to feedback to find out, and if need be, invest in market research to determine how you can deliver the value that customers have come to expect.

7. Omnichannel Marketing

Today’s world is a highly interconnected place — and that’s why omnichannel marketing is a key component of customer relationship marketing. Today’s consumers expect a seamless and integrated customer experience across all touchpoints, including online, in-store, social media, and mobile apps. Build stronger relationships by providing a consistent experience across all channels.

8. Brand Advocacy Initiatives

One of the best ways to build better customer relationships is to turn customers into brand advocates. To implement this kind of strategy, you need to reward customers for acts of loyalty, like referrals, social media shares, testimonials, or reviews. Not only does this help brand advocates build a deep sense of loyalty to the brand, but it also helps brands leverage the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

How to Enhance Customer Relationship Marketing With Jebbit

Data and exceptional customer experiences are two key components of customer relationship marketing — and Jebbit can help with both. The survey that Publishers Clearing House (PCH) created via Jebbit is the perfect example of how this can work. 

PCH is in the business of customer data. They gather insights from willing participants, then use them to create reports for brands around the world. Historically, PCH has relied on traditional surveys to gather customer data — but these surveys proved rigid and not particularly user-friendly. In an effort to build better relationships with consumers and enhance the survey-taking process, PCH turned to Jebbit to create digital experiences. These new experiences are fun for consumers — and they help PCH collect vital customer data.

The result? Prior to working with Jebbit, PCH saw a 25% survey completion rate. After launching Jebbit experiences, that number soared to a 70% completion rate. In other words, PCH was able to foster better relationships with their survey takers — and all they had to do was make the survey process engaging, enjoyable, and user-friendly, which they accomplished using Jebbit’s Experience Builder.

Start Strengthening Your Customer Relationships Today

Customer relationship marketing is a powerful strategy that focuses on building lasting connections with your customers. By understanding their needs, delivering personalized experiences, and providing exceptional service, you can cultivate loyalty, increase customer satisfaction, and drive business growth.

Remember: Effective customer relationship marketing requires a blend of smart strategies like data-driven segmentation, personalized communication, loyalty programs, consistent value delivery, and more. By implementing the strategies we’ve discussed here, you can unlock numerous benefits, including increased customer retention, enhanced customer satisfaction, and improved customer lifetime value.

If your business delivers an exceptional customer experience, takes time to engage with customers, and shows them that you value their custom and opinion, why would they go elsewhere? Start strengthening your customer relationships today. Schedule a strategy call with a Jebbit Experience Expert.