Whatever your sector of activity , the size of your company, the products or services you offer: relationship marketing remains a profitable investment for everyone in the long run.

Developing personal relationships with your customers will allow you to be more effective in your conquest, in your retention strategy, and to better follow up on your leads.

In this article, we will talk about several aspects around relationship marketing by developing the following points:

• Definition of relationship marketing
• What are the advantages of relational marketing?
• What are the Types of Relationship Marketing?
• What relationship marketing strategies should be put in place to ensure good customer feedback?

I – Definition of relationship marketing:

Relationship marketing aims to develop a quality and lasting relationship between your structure, your products, your brand and your customers and prospects. The goal is to retain them over the long term. This approach, which puts people first, is an effective vector for creating effective word-of-mouth around your brand. This comes in opposition to transactional marketing which is focused exclusively on the product and the act of purchase.

Relationship marketing is a technique that consists of creating a good relationship with your potential customers before soliciting them. You have to take the time to introduce yourself, to make yourself known, to answer their questions instead of centralizing your efforts and your communication solely on the sale of your products.

The famous principle of “Known, Like, Trust” is the basis of relationship marketing because it allows us to understand the evolution of a relationship between a customer and a brand.

Before taking action, a client will go through these 3 steps:

• To know you,
• Loving you (desiring your products,
• Trusting yourself.

This progress is made over time and therefore requires building an advantageous relationship with your customers.

II – What are the advantages of relational marketing?

Some of the benefits of relationship marketing include:

• Standing out from your competitors: stand out and be elected by your customers as the best.
• Finding new customers: ensure good targeting and good prospecting.
• Maintaining quality commercial relations: your sales force must demonstrate honesty by respecting its commitments, but also be available and attentive.
• Improving your customer knowledge: This is all the data and information allowing companies to better know and understand their customers, their requirements, objectives, desires, behaviors. But also the emotional reasons that push them to buy.
• Increasing the personalization of the customer journey: The customer journey is an essential tool to better understand the experience of your customers. Indeed, by exchanging with them or by analyzing each interaction they have at each stage of their journey, you gather effective data.

III – What are the Types of Relationship Marketing?

Each type can be viewed as a standalone form of customer interaction. Here are the 5 levels of relationship marketing:

• Basic marketing: This type is aggregated with a traditional approach to marketing. Basic marketing does not involve deep communication between a structure and its customers. More precisely, its objective is to attract a potential customer and move them down the sales funnel to complete the act of purchase.
• Reactive marketing: this degree of relational marketing contains the interaction after the purchase. A brand reaches out to its customers to ask for feedback, opinions, recommendations.
• Responsible marketing: is an integral part of a company’s sustainable development strategy. It supposes a deeper interaction between the company and its customer. At this point, the company reaches out to customers to remind them of their purchase and explain why their feedback is so important.
• Proactive marketing: This is the act of presenting an offer or trying to bring about a particular action by deepening the contact with the customer. Not only does the company usually communicate with customers, but it also improves its products and services based on what they have learned from their customers.
• Partnership Marketing: This type of relationship marketing involves the strongest bond between a business and its customer. Here, we can call on a third party to meet a very specific customer need. Another way to do this is to engage the customer themselves in the growth and refinement of the product.

IV – What relationship marketing strategies should be put in place to ensure good customer feedback?

• Understand and segment your customers

We are in the era of tailor-made, ultra-individualization and communication. It is essential to target your prospects as appropriately as possible so that they are absolutely interested in what you are offering them. Your database is an essential resource for the evolution of your activity. Do not neglect it. Segment your data, bring together matching profiles and personalize your addresses. Make ultra-targeted advertising campaigns based on your prospect’s age, family, geographic or salary situation to arouse their curiosity in a relevant way.

• Personalize your communication with e-mailings

One of the fundamentals of relationship marketing is knowing who you are talking to, in order to place a relevant and personalized conversation for each issuer. Thanks to the preliminary analysis of your customer data, you will be able to personalize your communication. For example, by using tailor-made emailing, your prospects will feel valued. This positive feeling will make your customers trust you. In other words, this communication contributes to the loyalty of your customers.

• Giving customers a voice on social networks

Relationship marketing is based on exchange and dialogue. What’s the best place to chat if not social media? We spend an average of 2 hours a day on social networks. Take advantage of these moments to communicate directly with your customers! Likewise, allow them to get in touch with you directly. They must feel privileged, give them advantages and let them give you their opinions, while interacting with their reactions.

• Create a personalized and optimized sales funnel

The sales funnel represents the path traveled by your customer between the moment he comes into contact with your company and the purchase of your various products. Depending on the relationship that a prospect or client maintains with you, he is positioned at a different level of your sales funnel. Your objective will be to make the journey faster and more profitable for you.

• Provide impeccable customer service

Customer service plays a central role in the implementation of relationship marketing. One of the most effective relationship marketing strategies is to provide perfect customer service. To make this effective, you need employees who are available, responsive, and affordable over a wide range of hours and from different channels. The main thing is to facilitate interaction with customers in such a way as to actively respond to their requests.

The attention paid to consumer complaints will directly impact customer feedback, brand image and reputation. In addition, it should not be forgotten that good management promotes word-of-mouth around your brand.

If you want to know more, contact us. We will be happy to discuss your needs, goals, and the obstacles that prevent you from achieving them.

Operational marketing is a determining factor for the success of a company or a project. It encompasses the various means of action used to achieve the company’s objectives. These objectives are set during the development of the marketing strategy.

The elements resulting from operational marketing have an effect on the short and medium term. It is therefore necessary to monitor and evaluate them, to adapt to the trends of your market.

In this article, we will cover several aspects related to operational marketing, answering the following questions:

• What is the difference between strategic marketing and operational marketing?
• What do we mean by the 4Ps?
• How to evaluate its operational marketing?

I – What is the difference between strategic marketing and operational marketing?

Strategic marketing and operational marketing are not antonymous terms. On the contrary, the first cannot exist without the second, and vice versa. They are both part of the company’s overall marketing strategy. However, there are some differences that should draw your attention.

On the one hand, strategic marketing focuses on the long term. It relates to company commitments, for a period that varies between 3 and 5 years. Its decisions therefore have a direct impact on the operation and future of the company. Operational marketing decisions are focused on the short term.

On the other hand, strategic marketing gives us the general objectives that accompany the development of the company in the future. While operational marketing finds actions to take to achieve these general or strategic objectives. For example, using television commercials to increase sales or improve brand awareness.

It can therefore be said that these two notions are complementary. The strategic plan outlines the objectives and commits the company to the long term. So that operational marketing intervenes to put in place, in the short term, the actions that will lead to these objectives.

II – What do we mean by 4P’s (Marketing Mix)?

Operational marketing is segmented into four major areas. These axes are called in marketing vocabulary, the 4Ps.

Product: It is a question of taking into account, all the characteristics of the product to put in place a strategy. For example: the design, the packaging, the materials used, the colors…

Price: This is to determine the price according to your positioning, the nature of your competitors, the market offers, or the means of payment offered. Be careful, an error in this axis will have serious future consequences on your operational marketing actions.

Place: This is to determine the distribution policy of the product. You can market a product in supermarkets, wholesale and retail, or by using your website for e-commerce.

Promotion: This is to study all the elements related to the successful promotion of the product. We choose the advertising messages and works of art to broadcast, as well as the channels to use. For example, to promote an online training session, you can produce a 30-second informative video and post it on Linkedin. A bad choice of promotion

III – How to evaluate its operational marketing?

The choice of an advertising action, and its implementation mobilizes the financial and human resources of a company. It goes without saying that these operational marketing actions must be evaluated to know their effectiveness. Through this assessment, you can quickly identify weak points and suggest areas for improvement. In addition, by carrying out regular monitoring, you will adapt more quickly to new market trends.

Evaluation involves choosing a set of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to track. These KPIs allow you to know the overall performance level of the operational marketing actions you have taken.

a) Monitoring the financial profitability of the campaign:

If you want to keep an eye on the financial profitability of your operational marketing actions, you can use indicators such as:

• ROI:  Return on investment, which indicates whether all the advertising costs incurred are generating a positive financial return for the company.

• CPP: Cost Per Purchase, it allows you to determine the total cost you have to spend on a channel to close a sale. This is a very important indicator if the operational marketing put in place serves a global strategy that aims to develop online sales.
• Cost per Lead: This indicator allows the company to know how much money will be spent to fill out a contact form (Name and surname, Address, Telephone number, Email, etc.) Tracking this cost allows the company to have a precise idea of ​​the budget to commit to building up a database of potential customers.
• The average basket: This KPI is calculated by dividing the total revenue by the total number of orders. By following it regularly, you can better understand the evolution of your company’s turnover, and compare it to the average of your sector. This comparison allows you to situate your performance in relation to your competitors. Thus, you will be able to quickly assess the impact of your operational marketing actions on the evaluation of your income.

b) Monitoring of campaign performance:

If you are more performance and relevance oriented, you can use performance indicators to evaluate your operational marketing such as:

• The conversion rate: allows you to know the percentage of people who made a purchase after seeing one of your advertisements.
• Bounce rate: Measures the percentage of people who entered your website and left immediately afterwards. A low bounce rate is a guarantee of good performance.
• CTR: Click through rate , it measures the proportion of people who saw your advertisement and clicked on it. It goes without saying that a high CTR means that the operational marketing actions implemented are effective and relevant.

What you need to remember :

• The strategic and operational parts of marketing are complementary.
• Strategic marketing takes a long-term view, while operational marketing takes a short-term view.
• It is divided into 4 axes, called the 4Ps.
• Operational marketing is assessed through financial profitability and performance indicators.

The development of your operational marketing is therefore essential for the success of your strategic objectives. If you need support, do not hesitate to consult our articles on our blog. You can also contact the teams of our PERFUNIT agency. We will be happy to discuss your needs.

Winning new customers and retaining them are major concerns and real challenges for companies of all sizes. Attracting more and more customers is essential to increase your sales, increase your turnover and develop your business over the long term.

To do this, you must put in place a successful customer acquisition strategy, which combines both marketing and sales actions, and which encompasses all stages of the conversion funnel from lead generation to customer loyalty.

Throughout this article, and based on the following plan, you will gradually discover tips and techniques for planning and implementing a successful customer acquisition strategy.

1. What is customer acquisition in e-commerce?
2. The stages of customer acquisition
3. How to develop an effective customer acquisition strategy and how to increase online sales?

What is customer acquisition in e-commerce ?

Customers have endless choices to spend their time and money on.With an option surcharge, customers can be extremely selective and brands need to prioritize customer acquisition and retention.

Customer acquisition is the process of finding potential customers and then getting them to buy your products or services. Customer acquisition in e-commerce must be both measurable and repeatable.

The stages of customer acquisition :

Customer acquisition happens in stages. These stages can be visualized in the form of a funnel, which details the different phases a potential customer might go through. 

In general it consists of six stages: 

• Top of the funnel – Leads

1. Awareness: This is the first time a lead learns or engages with a brand, often through educational SEO content.

2. Interest: The lead decides whether or not they are interested in the brand and what it has to offer. Landing pages, infographics, videos, and social media content can help turn prospects into leads.

• Middle of the funnel – Prospects

3. Review: The prospect decides that a product or service might be useful, but wants to know if the brand is trustworthy – for example, is the brand a helpful expert. Blog posts and videos, case studies, and e-books help build that trust. Brands can encourage prospects to sign up for email newsletters and other valuable content.

4. Intent: The prospect must be convinced that buying the brand – instead of a competitor – is a wise decision. Product-specific information such as white papers, webinars, and FAQs work well at this stage.

5. Rating: The brand proves it has the best product or service through reviews, customer testimonials, demos, and case studies

• Bottom of the funnel – Customers

6. Purchase: The customer is ready to buy, and special offers like free trials, freebies, or discounts can seal the deal.

How to develop an effective customer acquisition strategy ?

• Define your goals

When launching any project or campaign, you must set the objectives that will define all the steps to be taken and that will contribute to its success.precisely these objectives must make sense and be based on the purpose of the company.One of the best known and most used methods in business is the SMART method.

• Get to know your targets and their behavior

The most important step to start is to know your prospects. What are their needs and expectations? How do they find out about a product? What are their consumption patterns? Start by analyzing the buying behaviors and habits of your potential customers. This way, you will know where and how to communicate to reach them and what to offer them to win them over.

• Optimize your website for SEO

Natural referencing is all the practices and optimizations aimed at making your website appear in search engines and gaining visibility through good positioning.This is an essential step that allows you to sustain your activity on the web and ensure quality traffic.it also allows you to improve your ranking in search results by following the emerging research trends of your target.

• Invest in a paid referencing campaign.

Considered an effective way to get listed on the first page of Google and other search engines is to invest in a paid search campaign. Admittedly, this can represent a certain budget for your company. But this way, you get targeted traffic to your website faster, you reach your audience more easily, and you can convert potential buyers into customers faster.

• Develop partnerships

It will be too beneficial for the company to partner with brands that offer products or services that complement yours.

For a successful partnership, you must choose your partner carefully and ensure that the benefits are mutual. In this way, not only do you reach new customers through your partner’s clientele, but you also benefit from their notoriety, and vice versa.

• Offer unique and original content

Content marketing is an essential approach for any company wishing to stand out from the competition and increase its turnover.Creating quality content is about finding the right balance between useful content for your audience and optimized content to meet the criteria of a good SEO.

• Be present on social networks

Being present on social networks for a company has become a necessity and not a choice. several reasons require it: to monitor, manage, heal and improve its e-reputation. It is an excellent lever for communication and development of a customer base. 

• Develop Collaborations with influencers

By adapting the famous principle of word-of-mouth to digital, influence marketing is proving to be a particularly effective strategy, in order to improve the visibility of a brand, to reach an ever wider audience and to acquire new prospects.

On the other hand, it is necessary to detect the right influencer whose profile is in perfect harmony with your brand and with which your customers and prospects will be able to identify.

Acquiring and retaining customers is essential to the success of a business. To implement a successful customer acquisition strategy, you must take into account the needs and expectations of your prospects in order to attract them more easily, and above all to retain them.

If you want to develop a relevant customer acquisition strategy and you are looking for a high-performance team that will help you achieve your goals, do not hesitate to contact us.

More than obvious, marketing is experiencing more and more evolution. We have reached a stage where we wonder what is the next step after

Any successful company regularly seeks to stand out from the competition, create added value, and improve over the long term while reducing costs.

You will gradually discover through this article the basic notions of Growth Hacking and how to successfully integrate it.

1. The appearance of growth hacking.
2. What is Growth Hacking?
3. The objectives of growth hacking.
4. How Growth Hacking Works: The AARRR Matrix.
5. The tools to use for a successful growth hacking strategy. 

The appearance of growth hacking:

Growth Hacking, as a concept, was born in the early 2010s in the United States. More precisely: in Silicon Valley. The coiner of the term “Growth Hacking” is Sean Ellis. At the time, Sean Ellis was working at Dropbox, but already had other professional projects in mind. In short, he wanted to leave Dropbox. So Sean Ellis had to look for someone to take over his job. Problem: he didn’t know how to title and define his position. His job was to grow the user base of Dropbox. The term “marketing” was not suitable, because it was completely insufficient to describe what he was doing. Eventually, he settled on “Growth Hacker”. 

What is Growth Hacking?

Growth Hacking is a set of techniques, or rather a state of mind, a methodology, whose objective is the rapid growth, by all means, of a service or a product.

In other words, growth hacking consists of promoting the growth of a product or service in a rapid manner and at lower cost using unconventional methods, hence the term “hacking”. It is a process paced by one and same objective: growth.

The objectives of growth hacking:

The objective of growth hacking is to boost a business. generate rapid (or even exponential) growth in a company’s turnover, if possible at a lower cost and sometimes at all costs. Beyond the turnover, this method also seeks to increase the notoriety of a brand or a company.

Basically The ultimate goal is to acquire traffic, generate conversions and therefore revenue, by optimizing the famous “conversion tunnel”. For this, growth hackers use “hacks”, create experiments and present the results constantly in order to adjust their strategy. The challenge is to succeed in rapidly automating the most effective growth levers by using “test and learn”.

How Growth Hacking Works: The AARRR Matrix

The AARRR technique is an essential growth hacking tool that aims to improve your purchase funnel.

The AARRR matrix is ​​the abbreviation of five major elements of the user lifecycle: Acquisition → Conversion (Activation) → Engagement (Retention) → Revenue → Referral

Each step must be treated and measured independently to improve your conversion rate as much as possible.

• Acquisition:

This first step aims to introduce your site or your brand to new leads. In this case, you are called upon to take care of your natural and paid referencing techniques as well as your inbound marketing strategy.

The next objective is to focus your acquisition efforts on the most appropriate channels and/or improve those that are not achieving the expected results.

There are two types of locations where to source potential leads.

Paid Channels: Includes advertising, sponsorship, and affiliate marketing.

Unpaid Channels: Unpaid channels contain content marketing, search engine optimization…

The two channels are complementary. 

• Conversion or activation:

Convincing your visitors to make a purchase, in order to transform them into customers, for this you must invest in a modern landing page design rich in high value-added content, thus encouraging them to leave their contact details, to subscribe to your newsletters.

The goal at this point is to prevent them from stopping using your product or service after the conversion.

• Commitment or Loyalty:

retain them, ensure that visitors regularly use your service or buy your products again.

• Recommendation:

Consists of transforming your customers into ambassadors. Knowing that a significant % of satisfied consumers are willing to recommend X product or company. On the other hand, a prospect arriving following a recommendation has a greater chance of converting.

Perfunit suggests that you opt for the following strategies:

• Set up a referral program: earn gifts or discounts for the customers you refer
• Use influencer marketing: If influencers or public figures recommend you, consumers will be enticed to do the same.
• Send reminders in the form of emails after the act of purchase that encourages them to talk about you on their social networks (and to subscribe to you on the networks).
• Share your customers’ content daily on your social networks: they will be encouraged to create more.

• Income:

A question that occupies all business leaders: how can you increase your income?

Don’t worry Perfunit has the answer:

If the first 4 indicators of the AARR matrix are well optimized, your income will absolutely increase. However, there is a technique to improving your earnings: increasing the amount of profit you earn from a consumer over their lifetime as your customer. While reducing the budget spent to acquire a new customer. This includes the cost of anything necessary to get your client to convert.

The tools to use for a successful growth hacking strategy:

The growth hacking strategy can start with the implementation of a few simple actions: 

• Collect the email addresses of visitors to offer them content and optimize acquisition;
• Dissect statistics via Google analytics to better understand your audience and adapt your strategy;
• Produce quality content adapted to the interest of its target audience;
• Analyze its performance continuously and via the different variants of its content (in particular via the A/B testing method);
• Encourage media buying to expand its audience…

To succeed in the previous actions, the company is called upon to use and develop several tools like : 

First keep abreast of what is being said about the company, competitors, the industry and what may impact it.

Analytics:  allow you to quantify the effects of making a change to your strategy, and that’s invaluable to the process of improving and optimizing online marketing campaigns. The biggest benefit of utilizing proper analytics is being able to identify strengths and weaknesses

Scraping :the practice of gathering data online automatically

Search engine optimization:a set of techniques that allow robots to index a web page in search engines so that it appears in the best possible position when a user makes a request.

Search Engine Advertising:literally means search engine advertising in French. It designates a paid referencing method for websites.

Social Media Marketing and Management: the activity of taking into account and using the influence potential of social media to promote marketing activity, the commercial development of a company and the employer brand. It is the operational implementation of a social media strategy.

Social Media Ads:includes all activities related to the distribution of advertising content on social media sites

Cold Mailing:This technique consists of sending a prospecting email to a prospect with whom you have never had physical or virtual contact before.

Automatisation:means total or partial execution of technical tasks by machines operating without human intervention.

Sales Funnel:the different stages that your potential customer goes through between the moment he discovers your brand and the moment he buys.

Design Thinking:Design Thinking is an innovative methodology that allows ideas and projects to be transformed into real actions and tangible prototypes.

Do you then want to go further and launch your first actions in growth hacking? The Pefunit team has made its knowledge available to you in order to develop an efficient strategy that is above all adapted to your objectives. Do not hesitate to contact us.