Generally, customer relationship marketing is a practice that include all marketing activities which are establishing, developing, and maintaining sustainable relationships with customers. Marketers’ main focus will be on the developing long-term relationships and improving corporate performance through gaining customer’s loyalty and retention. “Using the relationship marketing approach, you customize programs for individual consumer groups and the stage of the process they are going through as opposed to some forms of database marketing where everybody would get virtually the same promotions, with perhaps a change in offer.“ An example would be a customer visiting your website and once he/she has any interaction with the site, such as purchasing items on the web, the site records the information and ask for customer’s feedback for customizing their personal preference to achieve better customer relationship. Still, there are situations where relationship marketing’s effectiveness is limited which are “relatively low value products or services, consumer products, generic commodities, switching costs are low, clients prefer a single transaction to relationships, and no / low customer involvement in production.“ So, these circumstances indicate to certain businesses or products that do not have many opportunities to build relationships with customers. For many people, housing is probably an one time transaction, and they would not be able to establish a long term customer relationship with the real estate agents comparing with other industrial products. However, research shows that there is some pay offs for building customer relationship. ”The benefits of a relationship marketing approach go both ways. Your client views you as a valuable consultant, rather than a cost center. Your potential for increased revenues and a long-lasting relationship is real. There’s payoff for you, too, including reduced marketing expenses measured in both time and money. If you can retain more clients for longer periods, you’ll trim costly space advertising and other marketing costs.” In my opinion, if any business has any opportunity to develop the relationship marketing strategy, it is the way to go because it will attract long-term value customers and eventually increase companies’ growth.
