What should you continually work towards in online marketing? Look at improving your relationship marketing skills on an ongoing basis. This will serve you well, help you sell more products, and could help you gain free advertising as well.
You may be good at relationships but you can never truly master the art of relationships because to master it means you don’t have to keep working at it. It’s an ongoing process!
The existence and building of relationships will make a hugely positive impact on your online success. Relationships result in referrals, free traffic, and overall respect. And if people respect you, they’ll trust what you say and may buy some of what you recommend.
Your online reputation is important in the world of web-based marketing and the best way to develop a good reputation is to establish the type of presence that results in relationships. In a business that’s known for a degree of disloyalty, because customers don’t really get to know their suppliers, those who have perfected their relationship marketing skills will find that they have a lot of repeat business, referrals and loyalty.
Improving Your Relationships With Customers And Prospects
It’s important to get the prospect to become a customer and the customer to keep paying attention so that they’ll be a repeat customer. By being helpful and providing value on a regular basis, you’re more likely to have that happen.
A lot of internet marketers are painted with the same brush as the epitome of a used car salesman. People are often waiting to be pitched and many expect to be spammed. Surprise and delight your customers and you’ll develop respect and a relationship.
Four Ways To Do That Include…
• Writing valuable content. Give something to them. Some marketers share enough to make people drool in the hopes that they’ll buy. This may work but those who actually give away something for free tend to develop even better results. Become an authority and be helpful and your customers will remember this.
• Be active. Relationships won’t be built and maintained if your customer gets a chance to forget you. Regularly communicate through your blog, your newsletter, on social media sites, and via autoresponders.
• Be the one to teach them something new. If you’re almost always the one to tell them about a new development or new information, you’ll earn respect and people will pay attention. Be sure to keep your finger on the pulse of your industry so that you can do that.
• Be authentic. Do more than ‘toot your own horn’. People develop relationships with people, not with egos.
As you can see, building your relationship marketing skills can serve your online business very well in many ways, you never know, you may even make some life-long friends from doing so!
Have a most outstanding day.
Sean RasmussenAussie Internet Marketing
www.AussieSEO.com 2010
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
That’s absolutely correct Sean.
It is much harder for a person to trust you when you are on the end of another computer!
Building their trust with your valuable content and giving away free gifts is one sure way to do this.
Hi Sean,
I think improving your relationship marketing skills is a must given we all need customers. It’s harder to communicate with your customers online as you’re relying predominantly on the written word.
They never get to see your caring and concerned looks about their problems or your happy smiling face when you’re talking about how good your product is. You have to show your customers who you are by everything you do online.
Thanks for the great tips to improve your relationship marketing.
Jazz Salinger´s last blog ..Learn and Earn – It’s a Marathon Not a Sprint
Hi Sean
A great article and the most important area to focus on because without customers there will be no business.
Jazz raises a very important point here about it being harder to communicate with people when online. This is so true as there is no eye to eye contact, no getting into rapport, or being able to read facial gestures or body language. Communication can be misconstrued if one is not vigilant.
Therefore, we have to be absolutely clear with how we deliver our messages to our customers, and be in a positive and respectful state of mind when communicating. (I am reminded of the ‘Nestles’ incident where sarcasm was evident in the conversation from the company rep to the customer.)
The pointers you have given us on how to build and maintain a positive and productive relationship with our customers would be good to have printed off and stuck on the wall above our computers so we remember never to offend and to always care for the customer.
Thankyou .
Blessings,
Elly
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