Relational Marketing

The relational marketing aims to create and animate a " relation" between a mark and its target market. The target market can correspond as well to the customers established as with the potential customers (prospective customers).

The " term; marketing relationnel" comes from English " relationship marketing" and also corresponds to the translation of " nurture marketing" but it does not seize very well the nuance between the two. In particular, the idea of " cultiver" a fish pond of prospective customers which will become possibly customers really does not arise in the French translation, which carries to believe that relational marketing is reserved for the customers established already well.

This nuance is important because a program of relational marketing centered on the customers will take a form quite different from a program seeking to convince of the prospective customers to become customers.

In the first case, the company offers to its customer S of the advantages aiming at encouraging their fidelity (invitations, information in preview or exclusiveness, councils, etc) as well as promotional offers conceived on models of inciting sales (produced/services of gram higher) or cross sales (produced/complementary services).

When it is twinned with a segmentation of the customers, a program of relational marketing makes it possible to concentrate the efforts of marketing on the " meilleurs" customers, i.e. on those which contribute more to the Turnover of the company. The major idea which underlies this approach lies in the law of Pareto or theory of the 20/80 which stipulates that in any marketing activity, 20% of the customers (" meilleurs") contribute to 80% of the turnover. The activities of marketing targeting the customers generally result in a much better return on investment (KING) that those seeking to recruit new prospective customers which the value is not assured.

In the second case, the company seeks to maintain with the prospective customer a certain level of communication until the moment when the prospective customer will be ready to buy. That can take the form of information (articles, whitepapers, case studies, webinaires, etc) or of the promotional offers of test of the product/service (example: version of test of a software during 30 days). The idea being to remain with the spirit of the prospective customer until the moment of the purchase.

The development of a program of relational marketing is often done - but not always - by the means of a program of marketing, using in turn the mass mailing, the telemarketing, the emails, and the various techniques of marketing on Internet (blog, RSS, etc)

The technological advancements (database, management solutions of the relationships to customers (CRM), interactivity, etc) largely contributed to the advent of the relational marketing which wants to be before a whole marketing centered the needs of the target public.

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