Relationship marketing puts a clear focus on building customer loyalty and long-term customer engagement over short-term (one-off) sales and mass email signups. The end goal is to build strong relationships with people who will become long-term, brand loyal customers.

The Difference Between Building Relationships and Marketing Tactics

Marketing tactics are designed to generate sales. Common tactics include collecting email addresses to market promotions, offering BOGO deals, and running scarcity promotions.

Generating sales with marketing tactics can be as simple as getting a steady stream of impulse buys through a successful landing page offer. The difference is, impulse buys (even a steady stream), don’t generate relationships. Relationships are the key to customer loyalty and, therefore, long-term sales.

Relationship Marketing Has High Profitability Potential

According to a study in the European Management Journal, relationship marketing increases profitability for several reasons:

• Loyal customers come back to you instead of competitors. Good deals from competitors won’t sway loyal customers.
• Relationships generate word of mouth advertising.
• Long-term customers are more likely to purchase other products, cross-sells, and up-sells.
• Acquisition cost is lower. By word of mouth, loyal customers bring new people to you for free.
• Companies that generate strong brand loyalty don’t generally need to worry about competitors as much as others.

With this in mind, the ability to build and maintain relationships with customers isn’t more important than other marketing tactics – it’s the foundation of successful marketing, regardless of tactic.

All Marketing Tactics Impact Customer Relationships

Marketing strategies are often discussed in isolation. For instance, your marketing team might discuss topics like:

• What calls to action are most effective?
• How does viral marketing gain significant ground?
• What kind of guarantee should I promise?
• How often should blogs and videos be published?
• How often should I email leads to maintain a good relationship?
• Is relationship building more effective than content marketing?

These are all important conversations, but be cautious of analyzing the effectiveness of isolated strategies. Keep your eye on the big picture: all marketing tactics have a collective effect on your customer relationships. The answer to the above questions should always include the addendum, “how do we implement this tactic in a way that builds or maintains the customer’s trust?”

Relationship Building Begins With Trust

A strong customer relationship is built on a foundation of trust. Trust can be gained or lost through marketing efforts. For example, email marketing is considered a relationship building strategy, but statistics reveal the way it’s implemented can produce opposite results. Fifty percent of consumers are annoyed by the frequency of emails they get from brands, and 27% are annoyed with emails that are too long or poorly written. This data suggests the success of email marketing depends on how well it strengthens the customer relationship. If it doesn’t support the relationship, it’s not an effective marketing strategy.

Perhaps the barrier to easy success with email marketing is the lack of in-person engagement. When reading an email, recipients can’t see your facial expressions, look into your eyes, or observe your body language. The absence of those elements makes non-visual marketing methods more of a challenge to implement successfully. That’s why video marketing has become huge in the last decade, with the support of free video hosting platforms like YouTube and Vimeo.

Video Marketing is the Ultimate Relationship Building Tool For Everyone

Forbes.com calls video marketing “the future of content marketing,” asserting that video is projected to claim over 80% of all internet traffic by 2019. According to HubSpot, video content boosts email marketing click-through rates by up to 300%. Providing visitors with video content increases conversions and customer satisfaction more than any other type of content because it’s engaging; it’s the next best thing to live interaction.

Multiple studies show video marketing is being used by a majority of B2B and B2C businesses. While Aberdeen Group says 41% of marketers use video, Animoto says it’s 55%, and Wyzowl says it’s 63%. The Content Marketing Institute and Social Media Examiner both say the figure is 60%. Those are great figures, but how do we know video marketing is being consumed?

According to HubSpot’s research, 45% of internet users watch an hour of video (or more) each day. Google says 50% of people between the ages of 18-34 would stop what they’re doing to watch a new video uploaded by a favorite YouTuber.

Video marketing is discussed as a marketing tactic, but it’s actually a relationship building tool.

Although a prominent marketing strategy, it’s not just marketers who can tell you video supports strong relationships. Professionals in the educational system have been using video for decades to deliver online courses and personal feedback to students. Online learning platforms like Masterclass and Udemy are prime examples of this principle in action.

Instructors know they need to build trust and credibility with their students and use video to do it. “Video feedback removes lots of barriers; it can be more personal,” says Martin Mehl, a communication studies professor at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. His study showed the effects of how the use of video tools impacts the watcher in tremendous ways. “The traditional format (pen to paper) permits only non-verbal communication. It misses the components that [make] up the key ingredients in building meaningful trust relationships.” Those key ingredients include body language and facial expressions. Video has a significant influence on relationships because it closely mimics a live, personal interaction. That’s why successful sales letters are written in a conversational tone as if the writer is speaking directly to the reader.

Why Building Trust is More Important Than Generating Impulse Sales

It’s easy to blast your email list and get people to buy a ten-dollar gadget with a “money back guarantee,” but without a trusting relationship, you’ll have to exert that same effort each time you want to generate sales. Eventually, people will unsubscribe, and you’ll have to start generating more leads. That’s exhausting.

Customers Feel Disappointed When They Realize They’re Just a Dollar Sign

Customers feel appreciated when they know you care about their experience and tailor your marketing efforts to suit their needs. They feel disappointed when they realize they’re just another sale to you. Unfortunately, implementing marketing tactics often results in the latter.

For instance, say your lead magnet generates thousands of signups but turns out to be a dud, resulting in massive unsubscribes. You didn’t plan it that way, but your lead magnet just didn’t live up to the hype. The experience will leave those consumers feeling disappointed and lied to. On the other hand, a lead magnet that provides unquestionable value tells the customer they can trust your brand to deliver on promises.

Trust Can Be Broken Accidentally

Sometimes trust is broken accidentally due to lack of planning. For example, advertising to an unsegmented list can result in an unintentional dip in trust. For example, say you have 20,000 subscribers and you’re running a new promotion. If some of your subscribers recently purchased the same deal at full price, they’re going to be upset. In this scenario, the broken trust could have been prevented by properly segmenting your list, so you don’t offer special promotions for products and services to people who just paid full price.

Another way trust can be accidentally broken is by not targeting the right audience. Say your special offer generates significant interest, but the terms of the offer dilute the appeal: customers can’t get the deal unless they sign up for your 6-month program at $500/month. If your offer is fantastic, and these terms aren’t disclosed with the initial offer, people will feel tricked.

Presenting the terms transparently with the initial offer will only work when your leads are targeted, potential long-term clients. Sending untargeted leads to a wonderful offer they can’t have will damage your customer relationships.

Relationships Make The Dollars Go Round

The data is clear: if you want to increase sales, you need long-term customers. Long-term customers are generated by building trust through strong relationships.

If sales are your goal, it’s useful to view marketing tactics as an opportunity to build relationships. Marketing strategies should be strategically implemented in a way that builds, strengthens, or confirms customer trust. Do it right and you’ll get a steady stream of word of mouth advertising, free promotion, and more sales.