Difference between relationship marketing and customer relationship management

“I want to implement CRM,” your sales manager says to you via email. “Do some research on what this would look like for our company.” Sounds like a straightforward project? Not quite. First, clarification is in order.

The acronym “CRM” is shared by customer relationship marketing and customer relationship management. Though the two terms are quite different, they complement each other and can be applied to sales and marketing processes.

What is relationship marketing

Customer relationship marketing is supported by customer relationship management. Think of customer relationship marketing as a strategy and customer relationship management as an action. The latter can be used to carry out the former.

To understand these concepts better, let’s break down the definition of each, their stages, and examples of each one.

According to Techopedia, customer relationship marketing is “a business process in which client relationships, customer loyalty, and brand value are built through marketing strategies and activities.”

The takeaway? Relationship marketing is a long-term strategy focused on the customer relationship, not on a single transaction. It focuses on ensuring customer satisfaction for the long-hual rather than simply for a quick sale.

Levels of relationship marketing

Relationship marketing can be divided into four stages:

• Establish the initial relationship. This stage is also called “exploratory,” better known as the first step in the customer acquisition process. It includes initial activities and conversations to determine if a customer and company are a good fit for each other’s needs. Consider it the first impression whether that’s on social media or at an event.
• Get to know each other. The “basic” stage takes the customer relationship a step further. A company attempts to prove to potential customers that they understand their needs, sharing helpful resources and communicating the value of their product/service perhaps via an email marketing campaign or other inbound marketing efforts.
• Develop a deeper relationship. A potential customer shouldn’t stay in the “basic” stage too long. Multiple departments need to become involved in this, the “collaborated” stage, and work together to nurture the customer relationship.
• Become committed partners. The “interconnected” stage means that your company has forged a connection with your customer that’s hard to break. Departments are working together to create a seamless experience. Customers completely trust your company and are incentivized to stick around for the long-term.

Relationship marketing examples

An excellent example of successful relationship marketing is PrescribeWellness.

According to Human Marketing, the B2B company (which works with thousands of local pharmacies across the U.S.) created “a separate site showing their solutions to expand their services, reach more patients, improve adherence and loyalty, and streamline operations.” The site is easy to navigate and aesthetically pleasing for customers.

The PrescribeWellness website is specially designed to generate new leads as it shows that the company cares about customer needs, which strengthens the customer relationship and builds an overall better customer experience.

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Levels of customer relationship management

On the flip side, customer relationship management is managing potential and current customer relationships through collecting and analyzing customer data. It’s powered by the customer relationship management software.

The four stages of customer relationship management are

• Collect data. Insert contact and business information into a CRM.
• Analyze data. Automatically pull into insightful reports about customers.
• Develop customer strategies. Use the data to create things like personalized campaigns.
• Act on strategies. Make the customer’s life better based on what you know about them.

Examples of customer relationship management

Zendesk Sell is an example of a CRM tool. Contact information for potential and current customers is easily added into the platform. Sell then automatically pulls this information into helpful reports such as Deal Sources to see which deal sources bring your company the most business.

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For example, in the chart above, the website is proving to be a reliable deal source. Your sales team could use this information to work with marketing on further improving lead generation capabilities on your website. In other words, the info provided by your CRM tool could give you insights to revamp your site — similar to PrescribeWellness’ customer relationship marketing strategy of overhauling their website.

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