What is Relationship Marketing: 5 Ways to Create Lifelong Customers
In this day and age of hot trends that dissipate just as quickly as they come, the backbone of marketing tends to be forgotten about: relationships. In every social media strategy, you’re trying to post the things that will build a better relationship with your target audience. When running paid ads, you’re picking and choosing who you want to display the ad to so that you can nurture those relationships. But when you strip away whatever conduit you try to mask it in, relationship marketing will bring so much more reward when implemented as the real, raw thing.
We’ve been able to successfully sell our services over the years mostly thanks to relationship marketing, and we can’t wait to share with you 5 ways to create lifelong customers and clients.
1. Create a Referral Engine
When you’re able to credit the majority, if not all, of your leads and clients to word-of-mouth relationships and referrals, you’ll never have to worry about where the next client will come from. These are the strongest relationships you can nurture, and the clients that are brought in from these referrals will go on to bring you even more high-quality leads once their project has wrapped.
PARTNER WITH YOUR COMPETITION
Find someone who has really similar ideal clients to you and become partners rather than competitors. The opportunity to trade business with someone who has a very similar offering is absolutely incredible! This way, you’ll begin to build your own referral engine, where you’re starting to get paid to say no to leads. Utilize these strategic connections to create relationships. This takes time and strategy, but it can accelerate the process of going from being desperate for every client, to being too busy to take on new leads. (Not to mention you’ll have a more helpful way of turning down clients.) Don’t spill it all in one meeting, but always be kind, genuine and real in your relationships.
NETWORK WITH PROVIDERS WHO HAVE SIMILAR SERVICES
Another thing totally worth finding is network opportunities with people who offer related services but aren’t direct competitors. There’s an industry standard within the wedding space that enables service providers to get connected to other businesses within the industry. For example, many wedding planners have connections and specific referral deals or discounts with vendors in their area. The trading of leads in this space enables people to get work.
Being a networking leader in your industry allows you to create a kickass experience for your clients, and it takes the pressure off of you to be an expert at everything! Some of this is going to take some intentional outreach and finding folks as though you want to hire them, but it’s so important to start to have these conversations.
We recently had an Incubator client use the technique of just starting local. Where are your rooted connections? Start with your deepest roots and the easiest “yes” first because it domino effects into way more yeses. Do this even if it means going back to your hometown– find the connections you already have, and allow that to build the confidence you need to take it further.
2. Create an Email Welcome Sequence
Contrary to our current feelings about the marketing climate, email is one avenue that we’ll never give up. We’re seeing so many people taking breaks from social media and finding appreciation in the brands they’re hearing from in their inbox. Aside from literally sending them a postcard in the mail or shooting them a text, email is one of the most intimate forms of communication that we have with our audience.
HOW TO FRAME YOUR WELCOME SEQUENCE
A welcome sequence to warm new subscribers up to become potential clients is a bit different than a sequence for selling a digital product or course. Especially when you’re focused on relationship building, your welcome sequence should take the opportunity to introduce yourself to the reader. Treat them as if they’re a potential client because they are!
Your welcome sequence doesn’t have to be super lengthy either. Simply aim for the goal of ensuring they have a clear understanding of who you are, what you do, and how that will provide them X results. Feel free to let your personality shine through and throw in a couple of fun facts in your introduction. Walk through what the process of working with you is like, and ensure they know what they need to do first to get started whether that’s booking a discovery call or filling out your lead capture form.
3. Be Intentional in Your Discovery Calls
After all, this is all about building relationships, so you want to make sure you aren’t just hopping on discovery calls without a plan of what info you need to know about them while still keeping it all conversational. Even if the working relationship doesn’t go anywhere for now, you already know so many things about each other and have built the beginnings of a relationship that can take you far as long as you continue to nurture it afterwards.
WHAT TO SAY DURING DISCOVERY CALLS
An important thing to remember is that discovery calls are not meant to be sales calls– they’re truly for discovering what it is that the person actually needs with the end goal of getting them to book the next meeting. Ask genuine questions, but you don’t need to mention yet how you can help unless they ask. Allow them to speak freely about what holes they need filled and listen, so you can be actively figuring out what head space they’re in and what needs to happen in order to get them to the point of being ready to dive in with you. Once you’ve learned more about them and their needs, then you can give a brief explanation of what you do and your services, and hopefully get them to book the next call right away.
4. Check-in Regularly
This may seem obvious, but a lot of service providers aren’t carving out the time to make sure they’re checking in with connectors, past clients, current clients, or potential clients that were a “not right now.” You have a relationship with all of these people already to some extent, and if you aren’t continuing to nurture that and putting yourself top of mind every once in a while, those relationships will die off.
If you need to set a reminder on your phone to check in with connectors and potential clients, definitely do that! A trick we like to use when we have a “not yet” potential client is to go ahead and write the check-in email while all of the information about them and what we want to say is still fresh in our minds. Gmail allows you to schedule emails to send in the future, so we simply schedule it to send at a later date when we want to check in with them.
For past and current clients, your check-ins can be automated which we’ll dive into next as we discuss your client experience!
5. Focus on Your Client Experience
There are two sides to every service-based business: Your deliverables and your client experience. The experience should get the same kind of attention that the deliverables do because that is what’s going to impact them the most. Clients should have a great time working with you, and the deliverables should be the cherry on top! We have a few holy grail client experience tips that are sure to leave a lasting impression.
AUTOMATE YOUR PROCESSES
If you can set the time aside to set up automations for your processes, you’ll save a whole lot of time in the future while making the experience smooth and seamless for your clients. For instance, using Dubsado Workflows you can automate a “Thanks for inquiring” email that sends out immediately once someone submits your lead capture form letting them know when they can expect to hear back from you.
In our onboarding process for clients, we like to send out an Onboarding Guide (which is technically a Dubsado questionnaire form without the questions). With workflows, we have it triggered to send out automatically with their welcome email as soon as a client signs their contract and pays. Their client portal is also activated and using smart fields in the welcome email, their login info and link are auto-fielded in.
In your workflows, you can set emails to send as far out into the future as you’d like making checking in with clients much simpler. If you’d like to send a check-in email 3 months or 6 months after the project has wrapped, for example, that’s totally doable. Here’s another blog post we wrote that dives more into automating with Dubsado.
OVER-COMMUNICATE WITH CLIENTS
Communication is such an important piece of the client experience that it’s totally acceptable to over-communicate. You’d rather a client tell you to stop emailing them so much than for them to think you’re uninvolved in their project or, worse, that you ghosted them. Become a mind reader of sorts and be able to anticipate what they may ask so you can go ahead and answer it. Never leave them wondering what to expect, what’s going to happen next, when they’ll hear from you next, etc.
SURPRISE & DELIGHT
This is the secret weapon in our back pocket of strengthening relationships with clients. You can surprise and delight by sending a birthday card or other congratulatory or seasonal card in the mail. Over-delivering where you can is another surefire way to accomplish surprise and delight. If you said you’d send something over to a client on Friday, aim to send it on Wednesday instead. If you’re working on something like a website, logo, or photography, send a sneak peek to build excitement. The opportunities will present themselves for you to surprise and delight your clients as long as you look for them!
