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Building Customer Relations Through Marketing

As a B2C enterprise, playing nice with your customers is the ultimate example of succeeding in the long game. While it might favor your company to prioritize short-term profits over customer satisfaction, the latter is the only metric that will help your outfit see consistent growth.

Customer relationships are founded on treating the customer as “royalty.” In the event of a dispute, it’s usually best to lean on the side of the customer. After all, providing a small refund would save your company some bad press and potentially increase the chances of that particular customer doing business with you again.

At Actito, we focus on helping marketing operators, CMOs, and professionals in similar fields deliver strategies that prioritize improved customer relations.

Let’s take a quick look at some proven methods for increasing customer satisfaction through marketing.

Principles-Customer-Relation

Understanding your customers

When it comes to increasing rapport with your customers, making an effort to understand them is the order of the day. By this, we aren’t just talking about knowing key demographics and the most-visited page on your website. Of course, knowing the average age of your customers will help you form marketing strategies that communicate in a way they’ll respond to. However, your investigations should run deeper than that.

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Track their movements on your website

Discover which call-to-action they click on most frequently or which pages create a higher bounce rate. Take the time to sit and watch some heatmaps or recordings of user activity on your site. This will help you to better understand what customers expect when they use the site.

Create frequent surveys

Issue surveys to your customers at different stages in their journey with your brand. Find out what they’re thinking when they sign up, during their experience, and, most importantly, if they stop interacting with your company.

Interact via social media or face to face

Any time spent talking to your customers is extremely valuable. Consider hosting Q&A sessions on social media, or even meeting a group of customers for an in-person chat. As a marketer, learning how your customers talk and what they think of your brand is knowledge that you can put directly into advertising and brand copywriting.

Apple is a key case study of a company that saw its growth skyrocket after making a conscious effort to gauge what its customers wanted. Co-founder Steve Jobs was famed for his ability to create products that Apple customers desired “before they knew they wanted them.” 

Jobs’ ability was not created out of thin air. He made efforts to deeply understand customers in the mobile computing sector and design products that customers would respond to. 

Apple also discovered that their customers would likely feel more fiercely loyal to the brand if they could have a tactile experience with their products. This helps to explain why grandiose, brick-and-mortar Apple stores have popped up all over the world.

Marketing solutions for better customer relations

As a marketer, you should focus on what you can do to show more empathy to your customers. Nothing turns a customer off more than receiving generic marketing messages that could have been sent to a database of thousands.

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Personalization

One way to counter the generic marketing trap is through personalization. Communication like emails and SMS messages can usually be personalized to your customers’ experiences.

Personalization goes deeper than including your customer’s name in communications. Consider monitoring their birthday or anniversary of their first purchase with your company. Sending tailored offers is one way to stand out from the crowd of marketing messages your customer will receive from different brands.

Knowledge sharing

As a company, your marketing efforts to increase customer relations will only go as far as your employees take them. Ensure that you focus on sharing knowledge with customer service representatives and all other departments of your company. If everyone is on the same page with how to approach customers, your rapport with those customers will strengthen.

Buyer personas

Something else your company can do is to develop customer personas. Based on detailed research of your customers, you can create fictional buyer personas that represent the key demographics, behaviors, daily struggles, and goals of your customers.

Consider a customer persona to be an example of your ideal customer. There are many people like this that make up your customer base, so you need to learn how to speak to them and what kinds of marketing they best respond to. 

The fastest way to build customer relations

Do you want to get ahead in the game of personalization, buyer personas, and improving your relationship with your customers? Actito helps brands to easily enhance customer relations by providing a platform for marketers to build and nurture customer relationships. Map your customer journeys and create personal messages that will help to keep your brand front of mind.

About the author

véronique-buhler-actito

Véronique Buhler

Head of Corporate Marketing

Veronique has been fortunate enough to live and breathe marketing technology for 15 years on both sides of the English Channel. Her lifestyle is heavily influenced by English culture, music is certainly no exception. You can find her trying out new recipes, taking part in an art workshop, or exploring the fascinating world we live in.

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