What's Hot Today In Relationship Marketing
Jack McSweeney & Mike Mabey

Paradigm Shift
Relationship Marketing has emerged as the new paradigm of business and marketing strategy. Powerful forces including Globalization, Total Quality Management, the breakneck pace of Technological Change and the rising Power of the Customer have combined to fundamentally change the rules for business success. Businesses are focusing on retaining and satisfying customers and working with customers to anticipate needs and customize products. This focus has stimulated marketers to investigate the best ways to form and manage customer relationships. The result is Relationship Marketing (RM). RM is the process of building and managing collaborative customer and other value chain relationships to increase customer value, retention and profit.

Relationship Marketing is Bottom Line Driven
One of the most reliable indicators of long term sustainable profit is the retention of satisfied customers. It is estimated that it costs anywhere from 5 to 15 times as much to acquire a new customer as it costs to keep a current one. As a result, improving retention rates by even a few percentage points can have a huge impact on the bottom line. Many leading companies are now redirecting a substantial part of their marketing resources from customer acquisition to customer retention. Instead of focusing on increasing share of the market, companies are seeking to increase their share of each customer's lifetime profitability through the use of RM strategies.

Keys to the successful implementation of RM include: Identifying customers for RM strategies; Collecting and using customer information; Understanding individual customer profitability; Measuring the value of relationships and RM programs; Organizing and motivating the organization for RM; Marketing as a mindset vs. a function; and Enhancing and Terminating relationships.

If you would like to know more about Relationship Marketing strategy and implementation, please call or e-mail Dick Wight at 770-455-6994 (rwight@energymarketsolutions) or Jack McSweeney at 404-327-9100 (Jack.McSweeney@crmgroup.com).