More thoughts on marketing as building relationships

If you ask the average business owner how they would approach growing their business, they would tell you that they would do some advertising to get in some new customers. Fair enough answer, right?

Well, yes and no.

It probably would bring in some new customers and grow the business to some degree. But, here's the bad news. This is the probably the hardest, slowest and most expensive way to build any business.

According to US marketing guru Jay Abraham, there are only three ways to grow a business. The first is to increase the number of customers, the other two ways are to increase the average order value, and increase the average order frequency.

Relationship marketing helps you to work on the last two ways, upping the value of orders overall, and making sales more frequently. To do this you need to look to your existing customers. It's well known that selling to existing customers is a minimum of five times less costly than obtaining new customers. So not only will you lower marketing costs significantly, you will be constantly reinforcing your credibility and authority in your chosen target market.

In my book, a cardinal sin in marketing is to ignore your existing customers. If you obtain a new customer, but fail to build any kind of relationship with them, you risk losing that customer, and the investment of time and money you have made to acquire that new customer.

Unfortunately, I see this fundamental mistake being made by companies large and small on a regular basis. Let me give you an example. One of my less exciting hobbies is tapestry work. As a fan of mail order shopping, I found a tapestry supplier listed in a magazine and placed an order online from their website. I was very pleased with the goods, and I would have been happy to become a regular customer. But (and you can guess what's coming), I didn't keep hold of their contact details anywhere, and more importantly, I didn't receive any further contact from them. They not only lost that next potential sale, they lost a customer and they'll probably have to spend the same amount of money again to find another customer to replace me!

So no matter what business you are in, taking steps to build relationships with your customers - future, current and past - will always pay dividends in terms of increased sales.