Relationship Marketing: Types & Real Examples 2023

Businesses are not just sales, but above all they are loyalty, since it is between 5 and 25 times more expensive to get a new customer than to keep the one you already have happy.

Relationship Marketing is just about that, to improve our relationship with the customer, increase customer retention, lower the Churn Rate of our business as much as possible and even apply strategies so that the happy customer brings us more customers.

Both B2C and B2B companies use relationship marketing to increase customer loyalty, which means that they are more permissive with the mistakes you make.

A truly happy customer connected to the brand represents 51% more revenue than a disconnected customer. For the success of a company, it is essential to work on relational marketing and build everything around customer happiness.

What is relationship marketing?

Relationship marketing is the set of strategies used to maintain customer satisfaction and make the duration of the customer-company relationship very durable and satisfactory.

The main objectives are to retain, build customer loyalty, and in the best of cases, turn them into a brand ambassador. El relational marketing is a recent model born with the rise of recurring payment models such as subscriptions and memberships. However, in this article we will see dozens of examples so you can apply it to your business.

In addition, relationship marketing also applies to the Pareto Law, meaning that 20% of your current customers will impact 80% of your business's future turnover. If you don't worry about the satisfaction of your current customer, you won't have any future business to worry about.

Key Benefits of Relationship Marketing

There are many advantages of applying Relationship Marketing that arise from focusing on the relationship and the impact on the customer relationship. Here are the main benefits:

Recurrence: A happy customer hires the service/buys the product frequently while an unsatisfied customer will do it once or a few times.
Referrals: A happy customer will speak for the good of their experience with your brand, will recommend the product/service and, as a result, will bring you many more customers.
Membership: The customer can develop a sense of belonging to the brand to the point of showing it as a lifestyle. This naturalness and exhibition is free marketing that will give you your satisfied customer.
Positive reviews: What do we do before eating at a restaurant? Exactly, check the reviews. In fact, we are demanding with Google's score out of 5. To take care of the customer is to take care of the reviews.

As you can see, relationship marketing is about building a feeling, unity and a community of fans of our brand. Relationship marketing does not seek direct sales but rather a strategic plan for long-term customer growth and billing.

Types of Relationship Marketing

Times have changed and marketing is evolving. Depending on our relationship with the customer, and the customer's commitment to our brand, we will have to use some levels of relationship marketing or others. Let's look at the types:

Basic Marketing

This is traditional marketing where the company focuses on carrying out campaigns to attract customers. This marketing focuses on showing what and how good the product/service is. This marketing only seeks sales, that is, there is no post-sales communication to work on the relationship with the customer. They are usually achieved with advertisements, promotions and immediate sales strategy.

Reactive Marketing

This type of marketing goes beyond the basics, that is, it not only sells the product/service but also asks customers for feedback. Whether it's a review, a tweet, a conversation, or a suggestion for features, you can tell that the company has opened a communication channel with the customer.

There is an effort to talk to the customer, understand their tastes and concerns, and let them know that we are there for everything they need.

Responsible Marketing

In this case, we seek to solve customer problems and build a relationship of trust seeking win-win. This includes giving gifts to the customer, giving them promotions on important dates for them, creating a referral program where they can benefit, etc.

Responsible marketing is very effective for cross-selling and up-selling because we will have so much customer information that we can customize their experience to the maximum and offer them all those products that we think they need.

Proactive Marketing

This strategy consists of creating a certain recurrence in terms of communication with the customer. That is, we are not going to talk to him on special occasions such as events or shopping moments. What we will do is let you know that you are important to us, and try to be in your top of mind for as long as possible.

Most brands use social networks and especially email marketing to maintain a line of contact with customers on a recurring basis, to entertain them, offer them discounts, tell them news and make them part of the journey.

Partnership Marketing

This complex marketing usually occurs when two companies team up to share audiences or business development advantages and thus increase sales. These win-win cases are usually carried out with collaborations, affiliates, referrals or royalties.

Let's look at a couple of examples:

Hostinger pays commissions to Romuald Fons for announcing his hosting to Romuald's entire audience who consider him an authority on SEO. Through these collaborations and the creation of Landings, Hostinger wins customers and Romuald takes a percentage of sales.
Google Partner Program. Google gives marketing agencies the Premier Partner badge once they achieve certain milestones. By partnering with Google, agencies can be more persuasive and increase the sales of their clients, thus bringing more billing volume to Google Ads.

As you can see, partnership marketing is about using the resources of several companies to generate more business based on a win-win philosophy.

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Examples of Relationship Marketing in the Real World

Let's see real cases of important companies that apply relationship marketing:

Example 1: Starbucks Rewards

Starbucks has a loyalty program called Starbucks Rewards. This program allows users to earn points every time they make a purchase at Startbucks, these points can be redeemed for drinks, food or gifts.

Starbucks program members get exclusive discounts, access to personalized content and events that are notified through email marketing campaigns.

Example 2: Trade Republic

Trade Republic is a platform for investing in stocks, cryptocurrencies and other stock assets. Its strategy consists of influencer marketing as well as referral marketing.

On the one hand, they sponsor YouTube channels of financial industry influencers who teach the platform to their audience, and members of this audience benefit from gifts such as free actions:

Trade Republic win customers, users get free shares and the YouTuber earns money through sponsorship. In other words, another way of conquering and humanizing the relationship with customers seeking win-win.

In addition, TR has a referral system in which it gives 10€ to its customers in exchange for referring other friends to download the app.

Example 3: Waalaxy Ambassadors

Waalaxy is a messaging automation software both on LinkedIn and via email.

Waalaxy allows its users to get more customers in a simpler way. But not only that, they want to build community, so they have an ambassador system where they give up to 50% for each monthly sale to their ambassadors. And in fact, they use it to be more competitive with respect to other brands:

Yet another example where the company sacrifices present benefits to maintain a long-term relationship where it is the customer himself who generates business for the company.

Example 4: Holded

Holded is the accounting and finance software focused on startups and SMEs. However, they present themselves as a sexy brand that cares about customer needs. Not only do they achieve this with their Customer Success team, but they also offer 50€ to their clients for each referral that hires them.

So you can see that relationship marketing can also be used in companies with a B2B model, especially in software companies where the CAC is easy to calculate.

Example 5: Waynabox

Waynabox is a surprise travel company:

However, they have been able to take advantage of the “surprise” concept to personalize and work on the relationship with their client. They have achieved this thanks to email marketing and the gift strategy.

On the one hand, Waynabox allows you to give surprise trips to friends, couple or family, which creates a very nice and close relationship with customers, and is very useful for special occasions such as summer, anniversaries, Valentine's Day or Christmas:

On the other hand, they use email marketing to send surprise content to inform their community about gifts, promotions, news, price reductions and new destinations:

Once again, another B2C company that works on relationship marketing perfectly.

Why is Relationship Marketing so important?

Relationship marketing focuses on building from within. Most companies look outside how to sell more, what marketing campaigns to do, what products to launch but... They forget the most important thing, they forget that the audience is an asset.

Relationship Marketing is about:

Make customers happy and thus increase recurrence and therefore the average ticket, and the LTV associated with each customer.
Take advantage of the figure of customers to make them give visibility to the brand.
Offer win-win referral plans to provide value to the customer while reaching new customers and increasing your billing.
Use the audiences of other entities (companies, YouTubers, etc.) to collaborate and build an advantageous situation for both parties.

How do I apply Relationship Marketing in my company?

First of all, you'll have to start taking advantage of that audience you're building and establish strategies to increase your database. On the other hand, you'll need to plan actions to start interacting with your customer.

We recommend starting with the simplest things, such as email marketing and the referral program. However, if you want to ensure the success of the strategy, you can contact us to be your strategic ally and help you realize the benefits of your database.

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