How to Build a Customer Relationship

Customer relationships are crucial for building a business. By consistently going above and beyond to impress your customers and cater to their needs, you can ensure their loyalty and advocacy for your brand.

Customer relationships begin long before the first sale. Every brand interaction you have with your customers serves as a positive or negative reinforcement, so it’s important to nurture each new prospect with superior customer service and personalized messaging that’s relevant to their unique needs and preferences.

Using best-in-class marketing automation technology will help you foster your customer relationships through every interaction, and enable you to develop personalized nurture streams that help you drive engagement and brand loyalty at every point in the customer lifecycle.

Here are some examples of ways to establish strong customer relationships in your digital marketing efforts.

The Welcome Sequence

When a customer opts-in to your mailing list, this is the perfect time to demonstrate your brand values and learn more about them so that you can continue to build the relationship from there. A welcome series builds the foundation of your relationship with each customer, and gives you the chance to educate them about what your brand stands for.

Rather than sending a single email, it can be helpful to use a cross-channel marketing platform, like Iterable, to send a series of welcome messages across all of the marketing channels your customers use, including email, SMS, and push notifications. Brands that send out a welcome series see 17% more revenue than brands who send a single welcome email.

Your initial welcome email should represent your brand voice clearly, and may include a special promotion for signing up. Make sure to include links to relevant content on your site that they may want to look at, such as an “about us” section and your product pages. If the customer doesn’t click on the welcome promotional offer, you can follow up with an SMS message or a push notification encouraging them to click through and take advantage of the offer.

Your welcome sequence can also include follow-up messages focused on what makes your brand unique, and ask customers to provide more information. By encouraging them to fill out a survey, you can get a better idea of their preferences and needs, so you can customize the content they’ll receive in the future.

Additional messages may serve to educate the customer on how to use your product or service, such as a video with tips for customizing their subscription or a tutorial on how to navigate your website or app.

Your welcome sequence can be customized based on the type of customer and their needs, as well as their responses to each message in the sequence. If a customer fails to open a message on one channel, you can send a follow-up on another channel to maximize their chances of engagement.

Your Customer Loyalty Program

One of the best ways to build a customer relationship is to demonstrate that you recognize their value and commitment to your brand by providing perks and rewards within a customer loyalty program.

You can designate loyalty points for specific actions, such as making a purchase, reviewing a product, sharing a deal with a friend, or other initiatives that your brand decides on.

Keep customers motivated to keep earning more points by sending them status updates via all of your marketing channels, and send push notifications and SMS messages for limited time opportunities to score extra points. They should be able to redeem their points for valuable items and discounts, ensuring that they continue building a relationship with your brand over time.

Personalized Promotional Offers

Personalization is another way to ensure that your customers feel like you care about them and value their unique interests. By using a cross-channel marketing solution, like Iterable, that integrates all of your customer data in one centralized location, you’ll be able to develop highly personalized messaging sequences that are customized based on your customers’ interests and online activity, including real-time triggered messages in response to brand interactions.

This means, for example, if a customer browses your website and clicks on a product page for a bike helmet, you can send a follow up messaging sequence across all of your marketing channels including a link to that helmet and others like it, potentially even including a discount offer.

By aligning your messaging and product recommendations with your customers’ interests and purchase history, you can continue to show that you understand their needs, and help them build more trust in your brand.

Re-engagement or Winback Campaigns

Some of your customers may begin to lose interest in your brand or consider alternatives over time, so it’s important to put practices in place to maintain the customer relationship on an ongoing basis. In order to re-engage these customers and help them regain interest in your brand, you’ll need to set up re-engagement or winback sequences based on specified metrics, such as length of time since opening an email or clicking on a link.

These re-engagement sequences might include special, high-value offers that are only available for a limited time, using urgency to prompt action. They can be customized based on the customer’s past browsing or purchase history, encouraging them to stock up on items they’ve previously purchased or similar products they may enjoy.

Re-engagement can also be used in response to certain actions, such as an abandoned shopping cart. If a customer abandons a cart, it can trigger an immediate “forgot something?” sequence, incorporating email and other channels including SMS and in-app notifications, to encourage them to return to the cart and complete the purchase.

To build strong customer relationships, you need to make the most of technology that analyzes your data to develop personalized workflows that appeal to each individual user. By providing your customers with content and messaging that meets their unique needs, you’ll prove the value of your brand and develop a long-lasting relationship.