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[Guide] Customer Relationship Marketing: How to multiply profits
Relationship marketing can multiply conversions while increasing AOV. It separates your brand from the pack, and makes you the obvious choice when your customer considers where to buy.
While the concept of customer relationship marketing isn't new, the advent of direct response social ads have shifted many eCommerce store's attention to acquisition.
The truth is, acquisition must be rooted in retention. The guide explores how to do that through relationship marketing.
Customer Relationship Marketing Strategies: Getting permission tactics
Customer relationshps depend on communication.
The first step in a successful customer relationship program is getting permission to communicate off-site with prospects.
These tactics aim to get establish a channel. Ideally, it is a channel they check often and you own (ie, not having to pay Facebook anytime you want to reach them).
Relationship Marketing Example 1: Welcome Pop-ups
Email remains the most reliable communication channel. (To see why, see our article on eCommerce email marketing statistics).
The challenge is how to get permission to email customers.
eCommerce pop-ups have proven to be an incredibly effective strategy for obtaining permision to communicate with clients, and thus, are vital for relationship marketing.
Interestingly, pop-ups can be used for more than just initializing a relationship. In fact, they ought to be used anytime a customer comes to your store to communicate a relevant message. Below are a few quick tips on how to incorporate pop-ups into your relationship markeitng strateg.
Create Personal Popups with Ease:
Easily identify profitable segments and present relevant offers though advanced popups. Discover if Barilliance is the right personalization solution for you here.
Relationship Marketing Example 2: Browse Abandonment Tactics
If your initial welcome pop-up fails, you should still intercept customers as they leave your site.
The truth is, most visitors will leave your site before adding items to their cart. You need to re-engage these visitors, bring them back, and establish an actual relationship between your brand and them.
This relationship marketing strategy is called browse abandonment.
We covered browse abandonment solutions in-depth here. However, below is a quick excerpt of the various options you have.
In fact, you can use another pop-up to try and obtain permission to email clients later. Alternatively, you can use retargeting technology to present more contextualized social, chat, or search ads.
Relationship Marketing Example 3: eCommerce Remarketing
Sometimes, welcome and browse abandonment pop-ups fail.
However, the reality is the visitor still showed interest in your category and brand by visiting your site. You can, and should, pursue a relationship with them via other channels.
While the exact channel is very brand specific, you want to think about where your audience invests their time. The best way to see LTV data is through a cohort analysis. We detailed how eCommerce stores can benefit from cohort analysis in-depth here.
With top of funnel campaigns becoming more and more expensive, creating targeted lists is becoming a necessary competency for any successful eCommerce brand.
Create better look alike audiences: Barilliance's Retention product provides a complete 360 view of your customers, allowing you to easliy create advanced custom and look alike audiences for remarketing. Request a demo here.
Relationship Marketing Strategies: Building relationship tactics
Once you've gained permission to engage with prospects, the next step is to build on the relationship.
There are a lot of various terms for this - nurture sequences, welcome series, education based marketing, etc.
However the basic idea is to make your brand known and mean something.
Relationship Marketing Example 4: Activation/Welcome Series
A welcome series is a sequence of messages designed to educate and motivate new prospects or customers.
Traditionally, welcome series are delivered via email. However, now welcome messages can be sent via chat, SMS, or even social.
Still, we've found email to continue to be an effective channel to build relationships with customers.
One of our favorite example sequences comes from Instacart. We explored how they used a welcome series to retain first time customers in depth here.
At this point in the customer journey, Instacart knows the customer has opted into the platform but hasn't yet purchased anything.
What follows is a series of emails built to activate a first purchase. The first email eliminates the biggest reasons for cart abandonment: namely expensive shipping and delivery charges.
But Instacart doesn't stop there. Their welcome series extends over 9 emails long, each prompting the customer to act. Finally, they begin layering on other concrete incentives like the $5.00 coupon offer below.
If you'd like to see more of this welcome series click here.
Next Steps...
There are many more possible tactics to extend customer relationships.
However, this primer provides the necessary building blocks to begin building your prospect list and a basic blueprint to transform prospects into customers.
For a sneak peak on how to drive repeat purchases and increase aov, check out
And, if you'd like to discover how Barilliance can help you succesfully use customer relationship marketing, request a demo here.
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