RELATIONSHIP MARKETING

Getting To Know Your Customer

Relationship marketing is putting the "CUSTOM" back in customer. This seems to be a radical idea in most marketing circles these days. The focus appears to be on attracting customers rather than training and supporting them so you keep them. This is also called offensive marketing. Things are beginning to change slowly, but not fast enough and if you want to keep your customers, then check it out and implement it. It will make you money.

Relationship marketing evolved from direct response marketing in the 1960’s, emerging in the 80’s to become a system that emphasizes the building of long term (relationship) customers rather than on single transactions. This marketing philosophy, called your customers "life cycle"

offers a range of products/services, as people actually need them. Why would focusing on your existing people be more profitable? 

If you’re constantly spending money and resources to land new team members, your profitability suffers. You aren’t building a loyal base of people who stay with you time and time again. Called "churn", these people won’t come back to you. 

Another term for attempting to keep people and increase their loyalty is also called "defensive marketing". Those who have already opened their wallets are the key to continued profitability and long-term residual income.

You can also view your customer lifetime value as a long-term asset. And what do you do with assets? You value them and treat them accordingly. You keep your customer assets happy so they wind up being loyal. Loyalty is worth money to your business, since the cost of keeping an existing customer is only about 10 per cent of the cost of getting a new one. Pay attention to your present customers.

The Customer Lifecycle!

Not everyone is the same when they come to you for a product, service or opportunity. They all need something specifically for THEM. If you're marketing online, first start communication and build a relationship with people. The methods are endless, such as: email, instant messaging, community forums, blogging and websites. Your objective is to show them what you have to offer and getting them to your website. That takes work. Once they’re there, get their e-mail address by giving something away right on the spot. The instant reward will keep them interested.

Provide meaningful quality information and credibility. This will often translate into program registrations. THIS is the beginning of your relationship, NOT the end. This is where you start your long-term love affair with your customer and offer value added extras to their commitment to participate. For reinforcement, show them how to get the best value and usage out of their purchase(s). This more than anything will set you apart from your competition. This step will ensure you word-of-mouth referrals (Think team building!) and retention of people.

Last, but not least, provide your customers with the tools or feeling of being

a valued member of a "community". This turns them into your biggest

promoters and new team builders. Your web site can use web-based relationship marketing, and it comes in two approaches: open content and premium content. Open content means your visitors can access everything on your site.

Premium content access is limited to people who have registered their e-mail address or have bought something. Figure out what works the best for you and do not deviate from your plan.

Remember web-based relationship marketing means you are marketing person to person – not as a business to a person. The distinction makes a difference, as people will actually open your e-mails and read them as opposed to hitting the delete key because they’re sick of reading junk-mail soliciting something This does not take a lot of money nor does it involve a

huge risk. 

It’s simply human-to-human communication, creating bonds with your existing customers, and generating referrals (Think: new customers). Once you have a person as a customer, doesn’t it make sense to keep your existing customers? Increase your loyal customer base? If you answered yes to these two questions, then relationship marketing is definitely for you.

Keep your main focus on achieving loyal relationships with new and existing customers.

Article Marketing

Normally when one thinks of search engine rankings, you think of search engine optimization (SEO) work. The race to juggle and something called algorithms to get a higher ranking with the search engines. SEO is highly over-rated and has been made way too complicated. What really happens is this: people go to search for something, say hair loss products, weight lifting information or home business opportunities, and they type certain search words into the browser. It’s the WORDS people use to search

that really affect your rankings.

Key Effectiveness Index is the ranking of words used by people when they search for product X. They get site X through N etc. as a result because the words they used to search are prominently used on those sites (either in the meta tags at the top of the page - something you can not see) or they are used in your copy (most often the top 25 words as that is what the engines typically crawl). How does that relate to you and article marketing?

You’ll be delighted at how easy this is, because anyone can do this effectively. Article marketing means YOU provide something you’ve written about marketing, home business opportunities, training, etc. to other Web sites, blogs, and eZines for FREE. FREE? Yes, free! Because in return you get to include a short bio and links back to your site in the "resource box" that appears at the end of your article. Your article will fit into a niche that you pick. So if you want to write about affiliate marketing or blogging, then your site link should lead back to a site that most directly relates to your topic. If you don't have a site of your own, as an affiliate you will likely have one available through the company you chose to represent (as an affiliate).

What a perfect opportunity for you to write something about being a marketing master, or lead generation. This establishes YOU as the expert and gives you several very nice benefits such as: lead generation, increased site traffic, and improved search engine ranking. This method of marketingis so popular you can find software packages and web sites to help you syndicate your articles easily to hundreds and even thousands of other sites.Imagine the number of people you could introduce to your business!

Here’s an example of what you can do: Marketer Jane Doe submits an article to iSnare (a web based article distribution service). It’s free to submit to them, but Jane decides to spend $2.00. Her article was sent to over 150 other distribution lists, which in turn sent the article to even more lists. Within a couple of weeks, Jane's article (she searched for it on Google) returned about 650 results. 650 other sites that posted her article and created links back to her site. THAT’S A LOT OF LINKS. That's a lot of team building potential.

Your article needs to be well-written, focused, easy-to-understand and helpful to your readers. DO NOT blatantly promote your product or service or it won’t get used. Put a link to your site in the resource box. Try to stay away from other links in your article because they will be removed by editors. Being subtle is the key with these types of articles. Subtle gets you a lot further in building your online business.

Here's where you can go to get started with your article marketing: iSnare and The Phantom Writers and Article Marketer. Google search for article distribution services and you’ll get hundreds of other places to place that expert article. You can choose to spend some money to do this, but if you do, research carefully to find the most cost effective way. In some cases, you

can even do this for free. This is a great way to accomplish your goals!

 

An affiliate can promote his or her products via various free and paid methods. There is software available that can automate multiple promotion processes which saves both time and money. I’m familiar with one software that specifically promotes Clickbank and Amazon products. This is not a new promotion method, but automation of the process maximizes the effectiveness of the method. Used properly to promote a sell-able product this  powerful traffic generator would drive 10s of thousands targeted visitors to your promotion and bring consistent profitable results. There's a 60 day money.back guarantee!